There is a sequence in E.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar and walks drunkenly down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by an unseen assailant, who beats him to a bloody mess. The attack is shown reflected in the eye of a cat, who watches the action before turning away to toy with a dying mouse. It is such an extravagant piece of camera-work, stepping way beyond the usual stark theatricals of the Weimar Expressionists towards something quite new, that it threatens to rip the film almost completely away from its own narrative. [...]

[...] He picked on L. She blushed. She was usually quiet in class. But after some prompting she went on to talk more than I'd ever heard her talk before. Her voice was scratchy and thin, and her sentences would periodically drift into uncertain noises, rather than come to a deliberate end. But her ideas were quite original, and I could have listened to her for much longer. To her, Monday was dark blue, Tuesday was yellow, Wednesday orange, Thursday brown, Friday green, Said black, and Sunday white. An animated discussion ensued, as members of the class volunteers: their own thoughts. One kid disagreed completely with L's version. I put my hand up to say that I agreed with L that Tuesdays were yellow. (While I remember her spectrum well, I don't remember the rest of mine, perhaps because I wasn't as taken with the premise as she; perhaps because I was more taken with her than the premise. I do remember that none of my days were black or white, and that Saturday was, and remains, Ferrari red.) I glanced over. L wasn't looking but Vicki was grinning at me. We agree on Tuesday, I thought. After that, I examined our behaviour more closely than usual on Tuesdays, looking for examples of extra rapport. One Tuesday in cal March, L swung her bag onto her shoulder and it lightly hit my arm. Sorry, she said, and looked at me very briefly. My fault, I said. I began to imagine that our first kiss would be on a Tuesday, but then I realised that any focus on this idea removed six days from the calendar of potential.