The Golem (1920)

The Golem is one of the classics of German expressionist horror. Released the same year as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it's neither as famous nor as great as that genre-defining landmark, but it's still an interesting film with a striking visual style. Directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, and shot by the always fantastic Karl Freund, The Golem has a moody gothic style and some rudimentary but nonetheless creepy special effects. The film's sets aren't as stylized or twisted as the famously angular designs for Caligari, but this tale of a Jewish rabbi creating a monstrous servant made of clay takes place in a Polish ghetto the design of which is balanced neatly between realism and expressionism. The sets seem more solid and historically grounded than in Caligari, but there are still unmotivated, spiky shadows stretched across the walls and angular design flourishes everywhere. In one of the most compelling flourishes, the centerpiece of the rabbi's home is a twisting spiral staircase that looks oddly like the fleshy folds of a human ear.

The story, derived from Jewish mysticism, is familiar: a venerable rabbi (Albert Steinrück) conjures a Golem (Wegener), a man shaped out of clay who comes to life to serve as a stoical servant and protector of the ghetto. Obviously, any pre-World War II German film dealing with Jewish religion and ethnicity is going to be automatically interesting for reasons having little to do with the film, and this one is especially fascinating in its contradictions. It is ostensibly a story that portrays the mistreatment of Jews sympathetically, though the film's message is ultimately more tangled than that. Towards the beginning of the film, the Jews in the ghetto receive a chilling edict from the emperor that orders them to evacuate, that they are being kicked out of their homes, a reflection of the pogroms and abuses endured by the Jewish people in Europe even before the Nazis came to power. This is a reflection of the historical roots of Nazism in deeply engrained anti-Semitism, and yet the film itself doesn't avoid these stereotypes and prejudices, either.

Notably, the emperor's edict lists among the Jews' crimes participating in "the black arts," and indeed the film itself passes that stereotype along rather than denying it. True, the story of the Golem is rooted in Jewish mysticism, but the film presents the Jewish elders as a cross between wizards and mad scientists, participating in the dark arts and summoning demons to do their bidding. In one of the creepiest scenes, the rabbi performs a ritual — later echoed by F.W. Murnau in Faust — to summon a demon, who appears as a disembodied head floating in the darkness, smoke pouring from his gaping maw. The Jewish temple is rendered as a place of mysticism where the worshippers ritually bow and sway while the rabbi, dramatically posed in front of a row of gleaming candles, exhorts them from above. The film's presentation of Judaism is unavoidably tangled in myth, empathizing with the ghettoization and punishment of Jews while also revelling in familiar stereotypes and libels about demon worship and dark magic.


That contradictory subtext aside, the film is mostly compelling but tonally imbalanced. The true creepy horror moments are few, and for most of the film the Golem is less a threatening monster than a curiously practical servant who's used to fetch groceries and fetch wood, scenes that are played for deadpan humor as much as anything. There's also a wan subplot with the rabbi's daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova) being wooed by the non-Jewish knight Florian (Lothar Müthel), a romance that's surprising in its sexual frankness — Florian places his hand on Miriam's breast and at one point wakes up by her bedside, both of them half-dressed — but otherwise serves simply to set up an expected tragic conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the most memorable scenes are those in which the film's expressionist horror gets free rein. Wegener's lumbering Golem was an obvious visual reference point for James Whale's Frankenstein, with his bulky, awkward form and the sentimental emotionality lurking beneath the monster's horrific visage. For a man made of clay, Wegener's Golem is very expressive, even hammy, always glancing around with an ironically arched eyebrow, gritting his teeth and widening his eyes to convey anger, his mouth horribly twisted into a hybrid of a grimace and a grin. He's undone, ultimately, by his sentimentality: like Frankenstein's monster after him, he's capable of love and warm feelings, and when he's moved by the sight of a little girl, she's able to innocently, playfully remove the amulet that gives him life.

The Golem, with its plodding pace and contradictory ideas about its Jewish subject, hasn't dated as well as some of its more famous contemporaries from the German silent era. But it's still a fascinating, visually striking film that, like Caligari, was a major influence on the horror films that would follow it.

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box was director Georg Wilhelm Pabst's first collaboration with actress Louise Brooks, who the director had discovered in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port. As in that film, Brooks is a template for the femme fatale, a seductress who leads men into temptation and self-destruction while, strangely enough, retaining her own almost childlike innocence. Her character in Pabst's film, Lulu, was Brooks' most enduring and iconic creation, the part for which she will always be remembered. Pabst's film is built around her, and it succeeds almost entirely because Pabst is so adept at highlighting and channeling the actress' magnetic charm, her absolutely unparalleled ability to light up a screen with the sheer beauty and poignancy of her face.

Brooks' charisma is so vital to the film because Lulu could have been a very unappealing character if embodied by a less iconic actress. Lulu is a prostitute and aspiring dancer, a frivolous and cheery woman who's totally unconcerned with morals. When her latest wealthy lover, Dr. Schön (Fritz Kortner), tells her at the beginning of the film that he's getting married to someone else, she shrugs and tells him that's no reason not to kiss her. Lulu's all about pleasure, and about living in the moment: when she's with a man, her casual intimacy and ready smiles convey the impression that he's the only man in the world, but she's able to easily skip from one man to the next, turning that radiant charm on each in turn, without any compunctions about her amoral behavior. The film's opening scenes quickly convey what this woman is about, as she cheerfully parts with one of her clients, acting tender and accommodating with him until the moment that her beloved old "patron" Schigolch (Carl Goetz) shows up, at which point the client is forgotten as Lulu pours her affection onto her former pimp instead. And then, when Schön arrives, Lulu just tucks Schigolch in a corner and devotes herself to the doctor. The whole sequence is like seeing a microcosm of Lulu's serial bed-hopping, her whole life condensed into a few minutes.

Schön is a respectable upper-class man who knows all too well that his affair with Lulu is tainting his reputation, but he can't quite manage to disengage himself; even when he finally breaks off his affair with Lulu to marry a woman of his own class, he remains involved with Lulu's life, managing the variety show that marks Lulu's debut as a dancer. Schön repeatedly says that his affair with Lulu will lead to his death, driving home the foreshadowing of his end, and the knowledge of it weighs heavy on him, making him a lugubrious counterpoint to the sprightly and carefree Lulu.

Indeed, Lulu can seem downright cold-hearted in her selfishness. After the film's central tragedy, Lulu returns to the house Schön had kept for her, and far from seeming distraught by what had happened, she's delighted to be reunited with her clothes and possessions, happily rifling through her closet and posing in front of a mirror. While she ignores the meaning of this place and what had happened here, Pabst keeps highlighting the tragedy by calling attention to a striking sculpture of a woman twisted into a pose of suffering and prayer, a piece of art that had hovered portentously in the background of the earlier scenes of tragic violence. The woman, with her short hair echoing Lulu's distinctive bob-cut, seems like a foreboding sign of what's in store for the film's heroine, though Lulu, despite being a victim as often as an instigator, rarely seems to suffer, not truly — most of the time, she uses her tears and her tantrums as a tool, a way to sway men to her cause.


Despite that calculating streak, Lulu never seems really evil, just self-absorbed, and at times genuinely unaware of the volcanic effect that she can have on men. When she's placed on trial halfway through the film, the prosecuting lawyer compares her to Pandora, beautiful and irresistible but possessing a box full of evil that she somewhat haplessly unleashes upon the world. It's an apt comparison, because Lulu doesn't fully understand what she's doing to those around her, in part because she's not thinking about them — she only cares about her own comfort and happiness. Because she laughs it off every time she's caught in an indiscretion, she expects everyone else to be similarly accommodating.

And yet there's also an undercurrent of deeper emotion within Lulu, whose childlike emphasis on constant pleasure seems to stem from a fear of what might have happened if she stopped having fun for a moment. There's a definite desperation to Lulu's constant pleasure-seeking, which is explained several times in terms of her difficult childhood. Her most poignant scene is probably her trial, in which Pabst and Brooks cleverly suggest everything about Lulu's mental state through her manipulations of the thin veil she wears. Lulu feels the eyes of the crowd on her and instinctively pulls her veil down over her face, hiding from them, for once unhappy to be the center of attention. Mere moments later, though, she stands and holds the veil away from her face to deliver an impassioned plea for her innocence, and then, in a remarkable shot, she lets the veil fall back over her face as she sits down, the veil fluttering around her face as she gracefully descends. This simple moment is utterly poetic and beautiful, abstractly suggesting the effect of this situation on Lulu. Pabst also locates a strangely melancholy, even almost romantic, vibe in the film's closing scenes, when Lulu encounters the sinister but handsome Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) prowling the London streets. Lulu's appeal is so enticing that she even, for a time at least, calms the bloodlust of the notorious killer, and these scenes are infused with an unsettling tenderness, as though there's a deep and surprising connection between the notorious killer and the sweet, smiling prostitute who now seems sadder than ever behind her smile.

Pandora's Box is justifiably known as the defining role of Brooks' career. Pabst and Brooks would follow up this success with the equally great Diary of a Lost Girl, in which Brooks would play a more purely innocent suffering woman rather than the complicated mix of naïveté and conniving that she embodies here. Brooks' Lulu is a woman in trouble, a troubled woman, or maybe just trouble, but there's no question that she's utterly mesmerizing to watch, and Pabst perfectly captures her luminous qualities. The film's melodramatic narrative, which puts Lulu through a series of increasingly demeaning tragedies, is balanced by the combination of realism and stylized glamour in Pabst's aesthetic, making this one of the great collaborations between a director and an actress.

The Finances of the Grand Duke

Though The Finances of the Grand Duke was F.W. Murnau's second straight literary adaptation in collaboration with screenwriter Thea von Harbou, it is a very different film from its moody, poetically melancholy predecessor, Phantom. It's a peculiar film for Murnau, a rapidly paced comic adventure that packs an epic serial's worth of action, disguises and revelations into a short, breezy comic thriller. The plot is chaotic and confused, obviously greatly condensed from Frank Heller's source novel, and most of its chapters begin with a lengthy title card introducing the new characters being added to a large and ever-growing cast of conspirators, counter-conspirators, dukes and princesses in disguise, financial speculators, revolutionaries and tricksters.

The plot concerns the impoverished and debt-plagued kingdom of Abacco and its cavalier Grand Duke (Harry Liedtke), who goes on the run with his financial minister Don Paqueno (Adolphe Engers) in order to avoid his debtors and possibly arrange a marriage to the far richer Princess Olga of Russia (Mady Christians). These royal plots are surrounded by a baffling array of shenanigans with various players trying to get control of Abacco or make money off the confusion that reigns in the struggling kingdom. The action is frantic, the film's humor arising mostly from the sheer overwhelming profusion of interlocking plots and strange occurrences, like one conspirator who's distracted at a key moment by a pair of animal impersonators. They're not the only characters in the film who engage in masquerade and disguise, as Olga is on the run from her notoriously cruel brother, falling in with the name-shifting Philipp Collins (Alfred Abel), a smirking spy, forger and con man who comically disguises her with drawn-on facial hair and sunglasses.

The film's madcap pace and slightly goofy pile-up of intrigues makes it very entertaining, but it's also a typically stylish film from Murnau, with his usual meticulous mise en scène. Murnau, together with cinematographer Karl Freund, shot much of the film in natural locations, with occasional expressionist two-dimensional sets mixed in, and the gorgeous seascapes, rocky vistas and Mediterranean locales add to the film's sense of globe-trotting adventure. There are numerous striking shots: images of sailing ships isolated in endless expanses of water, rocky coastlines with picturesque old ruins crumbling into the cliffs, underground grottoes where unscrupulous schemers discover mineral lodes and plan to exploit them.


There are also some very compelling, shadowy urban images that create a mood of late-night scheming and diplomatic espionage. When Collins meets Olga for the first time, rescuing the mysterious woman from her pursuers, Murnau cuts away several times to atmospheric images of the foggy, shadowy city. Fog rolls across the frame, obscuring the streetlights that cut through the darkness, as pedestrians stroll through the smoke across a bridge. The naturalistic cityscapes and sunny shorelines are contrasted against scattered moments of expressionist stylization, like a scene where Olga and Collins conspire against a backdrop of jagged, painted houses silhouetted on the set behind their car. In other scenes, cars cut through the night, speeding through the crowded city in a frantic chase, and a train sits waiting to depart, unleashing rolling clouds of steam before chugging slowly forward out of the station, nearly filling the frame with its black bulk.

At times, Murnau's imagery is playfully striking, as when a story about a "saucy little woman" is followed by a jaunty closeup of the woman in question, turning her head to smile at the camera, before her face fades into an image of the circus big top where she works. The film is fast and frenzied, packed with this kind of visual panache, making it a very pleasurable experience, uncharacteristic of Murnau in its story and tone but not in its style.

Die Puppe

Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppe is a delightfully kinky and absurd silent fantasia, a charming artifact of the master director's tenure in the German film industry before his emigration to Hollywood. Fast-paced and funny, it's a brilliant farce, a madcap and surreal confection that's a pleasure from start to finish. It's a celebration of artificiality and theatricality that opens with Lubitsch himself introducing the film by setting up a cardboard diorama, suggesting that he's about to act out a kind of cinematic puppet show.

Indeed, that's an appropriate reference point for a film that consistently deals with the slipping boundaries between the real and the artificial. This story of a girl mistaken for a doll takes place against a backdrop of blatantly cardboard sets, these flimsy-looking surroundings adding to the atmosphere of a strange fantasy, a children's puppet show with an adult theme. Lancelot (Hermann Thimig) is a fey and painfully shy young man who happens to be the only heir of his uncle, a wealthy baron (Max Kronert) who wants Lancelot to get married so that their line will carry on. The problem is that Lancelot is terrified of women, as evidenced by the comic chase sequence that results when a crowd of forty women come looking for the heir, pursuing him in their fever for such a prestigious marriage. Lancelot manages to escape to a monastery where he hides out, until his uncle puts out a newspaper ad promising a big dowry for Lancelot if he returns and gets married.

The greedy, corrupt monks concoct a clever and ridiculous plan: Lancelot will pretend to marry a life-like doll, get the money, and bring it back to the monastery. The only problem is that the doll, a perfect likeness of the dollmaker's daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda), is broken and replaced by the real girl, who pretends to be a doll while Lancelot carts her off for the fake wedding. What ensues is an utterly lunatic farce packed with naughty gags and innuendos. Oswalda delivers a delightful performance as the girl playing a doll, her face agilely contorting into gleeful grins and eye-rolling expressions of disdain whenever her hapless new husband isn't looking. She's clearly enjoying her ruse, and the wedding scene especially is packed with charming moments, as whenever Lancelot's back is turned, Ossi — who as a doll isn't getting any food or drink — grabs glasses of champagne to swig and gobbles down any food on the plates he leaves unattended.


There's also plenty of sexual subtext here. Lancelot's fear of women is absurd and caricatured, as he runs in terror from the hordes of women who desire him. He's so skittish that he even flinches away from the chorus line of dolls who dance and pose for him in the dollmaker's shop; when the dolls kick up their legs, he buries his head in his arms, crying that it's too risque. He's assiduously proper to the point of repression, and it's only with what he thinks is a fake woman — and a better-behaved one than those bold dancers — that he can get used to the idea of spending time with a woman. Lubitsch plays up the naughty subtext of this "doll" seducing and toying with the man: he starts to undress her and she resists, miming that she can dress herself, and later he undresses in front of her, using her extended arms as a coat rack, much to her annoyance. For Lancelot, marriage makes him quake in terror, and he enters into it in the most unromantic fashion. He buys his wife — with the understanding that he'll be paid back and then some for marrying her, making marriage a transaction twice over.

Lubitsch surrounds this sexual farce with a toy box aesthetic that enforces the essential unreality of the whole affair. A paper moon hangs in the sky at night, its frown turning to a grin when it sees the doll kiss the man. Lancelot rides his bride to their wedding in a carriage drawn, hilariously, by some of the most unconvincing fake horses ever imagined, obviously consisting of a pair of men inside a costume, with their legs sticking out of the cloth. As the coach driver prepares to depart, he notices that one of these "horses" has lost its tail, and without fuss he stoops down, picks it up, and reattaches it. It's a wonderful little moment that would break the film's fourth wall if there were really any to break in the first place, and it's also a sign of the lightness and playfulness of Lubitsch's approach. He lets all of the film's seams show, especially in its elaborate painted sets — every bit as stylized and expressionist as the next year's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, albeit in a very different way.

Die Puppe suggests just how early in Lubitsch's career the director's brilliant comedic sensibility was developed. Clever, witty, and sophisticated, this is pure Lubitsch, a delightfully fluffy and fun comedy with a bit of a wicked edge to its sugary aesthetic.

Tartuffe

F.W. Murnau followed the daring, innovative masterpiece The Last Laugh with a much more modest, smaller-scale, but still interesting feature, his clever adaptation of Molière's Tartuffe. Murnau increases the distance from Molière's satire by making the actual Tartuffe story a film within the film, surrounded by a framing story that mirrors the one in the Molière tale. In this framing story, a young man (André Mattoni) is disinherited by his grandfather (Hermann Picha) because the old man disapproves of his grandson's choice of profession: a film actor. The old man is under the influence of a nasty housekeeper (Rosa Valetti), who's literally and metaphorically poisoning the old man and convincing him to change his will to make her the beneficiary rather than the grandson. It's a story that neatly mirrors Tartuffe, so the grandson, to convince his grandfather of the housekeeper's manipulation, disguises himself as a traveling projectionist and shows them both a film of Tartuffe.

This is the film within the film, in which Emil Jannings plays the titular con man, a religious preacher who convinces the wealthy Orgon (Werner Krauss) to shun material goods, even pushing away the affections of his wife (Lil Dagover) and eventually writing Tartuffe into his will. The choice to position this adaptation in this fashion, as a film within the film, is interesting because Tartuffe is all about exposing hypocrites, and for Murnau, whose films were almost always firmly grounded in moral messages, a primary vehicle for exposing hypocrisy and evil was of course the cinema. It's telling that the hero grandson of the framing story earns disapproval for pursuing a career in film acting, and yet it's through film that he exposes the evil of the housekeeper, delivering a fable that helps open the old man's eyes to the similar situation going on in his own film. Murnau opens and closes the film with text titles that implicitly direct the audience to similarly look for hypocrisy in their own experiences, thus extending the film's reach to a further layer.

Jannings, as always, delivers a stunning performance as the sinister Tartuffe, doing maybe too good of a job at evoking the false priest's slack-faced, dour malice, because he's such a horrible, vile creation that it's hard to believe that anyone could fall under his influence. He's continually scowling, his face always crooked: one eye bulging and another slitted, one corner of his mouth drooping below the other. His very face reflects his unbalanced, crooked nature, a hideous mask of menace, always frowning with disapproval and judgment, even as he secretly indulges in his own lusty appetites. This leads Orgon's wife Elmire to attempt a clever plan to seduce the manipulator, exposing him as a fraud by revealing his base, fleshy appetites. In one scene between them, Tartuffe disingenuously scolds Elmire while thrusting the edge of a bible against her cleavage, the holy book's proximity to the woman's ample breast enforcing the hypocrisy of this supposed holy man who denies the pleasure of others while illicitly thirsting for his own pleasure.


Murnau infuses these scenes with a strange eroticism, because eroticism is very much what's at stake in this story: when Orgon first returns home under the influence of Tartuffe, he won't even kiss his wife, who's obviously used to much more sensual and affectionate welcomes. And it's eroticism that eventually wins this game, as Elmire bares her shoulders and her cleavage for the monstrous Tartuffe, throwing her head back and caressing herself to break through his hypocritical façade of chaste religious devotion. Murnau shoots from a high angle, looking down on the woman as she reluctantly stretches and bares her skin to entice Tartuffe into betraying his denial of worldly pleasures.

Although this film is far simpler and more direct than Murnau's more elaborate expressionist masterpieces like The Last Laugh or Faust, it's still very visually expressive and evocative. Murnau's visual inventiveness is revealed in small but telling touches. Elmire, grieving over her husband's wayward devotion to the trickster Tartuffe, stares at a portrait of Orgon in a locket and cries over him, the tears falling on the picture and distorting it, creating a warped vision of Orgon that looks more like the melty-faced Tartuffe himself. Later, that prophecy seems to come true in the scene where Orgon spies on Tartuffe with Elmire, and the con man catches on to the trap by glimpsing Orgon's distorted, elongated face reflected in a coffee pot, staring out from between the curtains behind Tartuffe.

The film sticks to a few minimalist, claustrophobic sets, and Murnau fills them with dense shadows, the house encased in darkness because the spartan Tartuffe despises luxuries like lights. This provides an opportunity for striking shots like the one where the family's maid creeps up the stairs holding a candle, her profile extended onto the wall in front of her. Though Tartuffe is never as visually sumptuous or restlessly inventive as Murnau's best work, these kinds of striking images make it still an interesting, low-key film. It's also notable as Murnau's tribute to his chosen medium, positioning the Molière tale in a framework that confirms the cinema's power to explore morality and affect viewers' minds and hearts.

Diary of a Lost Girl

Diary of a Lost Girl, the second of Georg Wilhelm Pabst's productive collaborations with Louise Brooks, is a potent and gorgeously stylized depiction of an innocent young woman's destruction at the hands of the not-so-innocent. Brooks plays Thymian, a beautiful and sheltered pharmacist's daughter whose dawning realization about the cruel ways of the world coincides with the loss of the security of her family. The opening of the film enacts a lurid symbolic struggle between innocence and sin, naïveté and knowledge. Brooks' Thymian, dressed all in white on the occasion of her confirmation, her eyes wide beneath the iconic ridge of her dark bangs, looks around her with a complete lack of guile, sweetly accepting presents from family and friends, glowing with courtesy and grace.

She seems entirely unaware of all the sexually charged glances being exchanged all around her: the exaggerated leer of her father's assistant Meinert (Fritz Rasp) who all but licks his lips and bulges his eyes like a cartoon wolf when he looks at her; her father's (Josef Rovensky) sexual liaisons with one maid after another; her aunt's (Vera Pawlowa) grim knowledge of these constant affairs; the knowing glances and raised eyebrows of the party guests when they see the new maid Meta (Franziska Kinz), who brazenly stares at her employer with an invitingly wicked smile that openly suggests that the cycle is going to start again. Everyone but Thymian seems to know exactly what's going on, but she is blissfully unaware of the sexual drama surrounding her.

In her pure white confirmation dress, a band of flowers wrapped around her head, she's a vision of innocence so pure and unstained that the mere realization that sin and sexual predation exist in her household produces a fainting spell, confining her to bed as though she's taken ill. She sees the corpse of her beloved maid — who'd committed suicide after being abandoned by Thymian's father — then runs up the stairs in a daze, sees her father with his arm already around the new maid, both of them staring at the camera in a frozen pose, a sly smile on the face of the new maid in contrast to the serene blankness of the dead girl downstairs, and in one fluid motion Thymian swoons to the floor, overcome by the taint of impurity infiltrating her home.


This is only the beginning of Thymian's suffering, as Meinert takes advantage of her vulnerability and rapes her. Pabst freezes the frame at the moment when the creepy druggist lowers Thymian's limp form into bed, and then immediately cuts to a baby carriage being taken out of Thymian's room, months later, carrying the fruit of that forceful union. Thymian's family casts her out, and she's sent to a reformatory, which she soon escapes with her friend Erika (Edith Meinhard), only to fall into a life of prostitution. The man she believes is going to save her, the disgraced and disinherited Count Osdorff (André Roanne), is actually a lazy and pathetic outcast who settles easily into a life of comfort at the brothel with Thymian and Erika. Pabst, though, doesn't portray the brothel as an entirely unpleasant life; the girls have fun and like each other, and Thymian certainly seems happier and better off there than she was under the care of the strict Christian moralists at the reformatory.

The reformatory is run by a stern mistress (Valeska Gert) whose usually stony face betrays an expression of ecstatic joy when whipping the girls through a frenzied gymnastics routine, and a bald-headed, looming movie monster giant (Andrews Engelmann) who first pops comically into the frame by standing up in front of a sign listing the many things that are "verboten" in this dismal place. This cartoonish giant delights in punishing the girls, grabbing them with a clawed hand at the scruff of their neck as though picking up a disobedient puppy, and his leering sadism is both creepy and hysterical — particularly when he runs a confiscated tube of lipstick across his own mouth, grinning impishly, then uses it to write a reminder to punish the girl he'd taken it from, a note signed with a heart to indicate his sadistic love of punishment.

Lesbian eroticism is another obvious subtext here, especially in the reformatory, where most of the girls have clipped, close-cropped boyish haircuts, and Erika introduces herself to Thymian by surreptitiously touching the new girl's leg with her foot and winking at her, echoing Meinert's leering winks. At bedtime, as Pabst pans down the line of girls getting ready for bed, two girls sit in the same bunk, giggling, and fall back into bed together. The scene where the matron tries to seize Thymian's diary is also loaded with suggestive intimacy, with the stern woman grabbing at Erika's bare legs, looking up at the two girls sitting in the top bunk, grasping at them with clawed hands. Later, when Thymian visits Erika at the brothel where she's staying, Pabst emphasizes the brothel's madame putting an intimate hand on the bare back of one of her girls — the gesture is repeated when the madame pushes Thymian together with a male client to dance — and then has Erika kneel before Thymian, taking off her shoes and undressing her, unbuttoning her demure reformatory blouse with its high collar to expose a V of flesh at her neck.


The film is steeped in this kind of sexual suggestiveness. Thymian's downfall has everything to do with sex and money, and sex and money come to be linked in very intimate ways for her. After her first night at the brothel, after she's spent the night with a man — swooning in his arms so that her limp form very much recalls her unconsciousness during Meinert's exploitation of her — the madame hands her an envelope of cash and makes it clear that it's from the man. Only then does the very naïve Thymian realize what's happened, and she recoils from the cash, which Pabst nevertheless emphasizes in a closeup. Much later, when her father dies and she receives an inheritance from Meinert for buying out the pharmacy, the camera glances from the pile of cash to Meinert's smug, cartoonishly grinning face, making it seem as though this too is a transaction, a belated payment for that long ago night when he'd taken her to bed.

It's not all grim tragedy here, though, and there's some limited comedy relief along the way. Among the humorous scenes is a very strange sequence where a goofy guy with a billy-goat beard (a possible anti-Semitic caricature) comes to see Thymian for "dance lessons," and she leads him in a bizarre calisthenic workout inspired by her reformatory exercise drills, while holding a drum protectively/suggestively over her crotch and beating it with a mallet in the way the reformatory mistress had done. The sexual symbolism is especially naked here, but those undercurrents are everywhere in this film.

The plot unravels a bit towards the end with a predictable tonal shift towards an optimistic, redemptive conclusion, seemingly foisted upon Pabst by censors eager to end on a positive note after all this barely coded sex. Even here, though, Pabst's emotional poetry shines through. The film is never less than beautiful, its style fluid and expressionist while also remaining grounded in social realism. And Brooks is just magnificent, with a beautiful and vibrant face that was perfectly suited to the silent cinema. When she smiles, the screen glows, and when she's suffering her eyes seem to contain unimaginable depths of feeling, often assisted by Pabst's very sympathetic photography of her, as in the stunning shot where she stares out a rain-streaked window, the raindrops on the glass standing in for her tears.

The Blue Angel

Marlene Dietrich's performance as the burlesque singer Lola Lola is one of the most iconic screen incarnations of the dangerous woman who lures a man to his destruction. This role in The Blue Angel was Dietrich's breakthrough; director Josef von Sternberg discovered her here and would make her his muse in many subsequent films. She radiates sex as the singer who wins the heart of the stuffy, sexless Professor Rath (Emil Jannings), an aging bachelor whose sheltered existence makes him especially susceptible to Lola's womanly charms. Rath initially only goes to the club the Blue Angel because he's outraged to learn that his students have been going there at night, but he keeps returning because of Lola.

The professor's fascination with the singer is charming and almost childlike; he becomes flustered and foolish in her presence, very unlike the stern disciplinarian he is with his students. This was an early venture in sound filmmaking for everyone involved, and it shows in the broad, physical performances, especially Jannings' turn as the professor. He blushes — it's obvious even in black-and-white — and sputters, his eloquence totally gone. Sternberg stages numerous deliciously naughty scenes that play up the professor's total helplessness before the spectacle of Lola. She drops her cigarette case and he goes scurrying under the table, fumbling around to recover the spilled cigarettes, but getting distracted by her long stockinged legs splayed out next to his head. "Send me a postcard," she says, her voice dripping with insinuation. Later, Rath gets drunk and wakes up in Lola's bed, clutching a doll, which he examines quizzically, like a child with a new toy. That's how he is with Lola in general, as though he's discovering women and sex for the first time, which of course he is.


The film then relentlessly, pitilessly follows Rath's downfall, his sad descent from respected professor to pathetic clown. Rath's boyish pursuit of a notorious woman like Lola causes him to lose the respect of his students and his colleagues, and he's soon drummed out of the college. In the scene where he loses his job, he sits at the front of the class, toying with a flower that Lola had given him, surrounded by mocking chalk drawings that his students had drawn on the blackboards behind him. The camera tracks back, leaving him isolated there, receding into the distance, and Sternberg repeats this unforgettable, simple but effective shot at the very end of the film. Rath then marries Lola and joins the traveling revue run by the magician Kiepert (Kurt Gerron). When Rath discovers, on his wedding night, a pile of risque pictures of his new wife, he demands that she stop selling these souvenirs. Her deadpan response is telling, and chilling, as she tells him they better hold onto them in case he's ever poor. Sure enough, Sternberg immediately cuts to a shot of Rath, some time later, shuffling through the postcards, waiting for Lola's performance to end so he can walk around from table to table, selling them to the club patrons.

The film reaches a heartbreaking, absolutely shattering climax when the revue returns, after five years away, to the Blue Angel in Rath's hometown, the first time he's been back since his disgrace. In the meantime, his relationship with Lola has deteriorated, and the childlike bliss he once felt with her has long since vanished, along with his dignity. The man who once virulently defended her virtue, calling Kiepert "a pimp" for convincing Lola to drink with club patrons, now finds himself in the same position, living off of her beauty and seductiveness, living off of her appeal to other men. Worse, Kiepert sells the Blue Angel show on Rath's name, knowing that his former friends and students and neighbors will flock to the club in order to see the disgraced old man perform as a clown alongside his sexy, provocative wife. This is the final assault on Rath's dignity, though he's perhaps even more shaken up by Lola's blatant infidelity, her flaunting of her new dalliance with a strongman who's also performing at the club.

Rath's stage act is harrowing to watch: he stumbles onstage in a daze, pulled along by Kiepert, standing utterly still, his posture slumped and his face frozen, while the magician performs his tricks and gets laughs by smashing eggs on Rath's head. The show, it's clear, is only successful to the extent that it humiliates the professor: that's what everyone is there to see, and they laugh uproariously at anything at Rath's expense, while remaining silent for Kiepert's magic tricks. At a key moment, Rath is supposed to crow like a chicken while Kiepert makes eggs appear from thin air in front of the professor's face, but Rath stays silent until he sees Lola, backstage, kissing and embracing another man. Kiepert pulls him back onstage, telling him to crow, and he does, letting out an anguished, horrifying sound, a sob of fury and despair ripped from his very soul. He cries like a chicken, for the delight of the audience, but it's a heartrending sound, a sound of such raw emotion that it provides all the justification that could ever be needed for the switch from silents to talkies.


Dietrich's songs are also unforgettable, and another big reason why this was one of the very first major sound pictures. Her dry, deep delivery makes her ribald songs seem offhanded, as though she's so blasé about her own sexiness that she can simply drawl out these naughty come-on tunes. She stalks about the stage as she sings, not wiggling or dancing; there's something almost mannish and unfeminine about her stage manner, but only because she knows damn well that she doesn't have to oversell. She just has to stand there, stretching those long legs, singing those songs, and the men will helplessly fall all over her. That's why her signature song includes the oft-repeated phrase, "I can't help it," because she really can't. There's just something naturally seductive about her, a force of nature that's beyond her power to control. She really does have some feelings for Rath, it seems, and she thinks he's sweet and charming when he defends her from the caresses of other men. But everything she liked about him is worn away by the reality of living with her lifestyle, so their relationship is doomed to failure.

The Blue Angel is a tremendous film, a classic that endures for far more reasons than its undeniable historical relevance. It was the film that made Dietrich a star, and that forged the Dietrich/Sternberg partnership that would yield six more collaborations in the next five years. It also helped Sternberg transition from silents to talkies. The Blue Angel occasionally betrays its transitional nature, especially in the way sound from outside is abruptly cut off whenever a door shuts, a device Sternberg makes a bit of a gag out of during the backstage scenes. It's also notable that much of the action, particularly Jannings' comedic bits, plays out without dialogue, getting across the substance of a scene through the actors' body language and facial expressions. It's a film with one foot still in the silent era, and yet its use of sound can also be explosive and powerful, which is a big part of what makes the film so dazzling. It's the best of both worlds, straddling two very different modes of filmmaking, ushering in the new era while reaching back for some choice tricks from the old. The Blue Angel has it all: it's sexy, funny, gorgeously shot, and above all, deeply tragic.

M (1931)

Fritz Lang's M was the director's first sound film, and the penultimate film he made in Germany before emigrating to the USA, fleeing the encroaching takeover of the Nazi party. It is, even today, a strikingly modern film, tackling a very sensitive subject from a surprising angle. Lang's classic tells the story of the search for a child killer who's terrorizing a German city, eluding capture while kidnapping and murdering children that he meets on the streets, luring them with candy and toys. And yet the film is not concerned with the mystery of these killings — the murderer is identified very early on as Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) — nor is it a thriller focusing on the fear of the victims, which is the conventional approach to films about psychopathic serial killers. Instead, Lang focuses on the paranoia and other effects that these killings have on the city, as well as the killer's own feelings of terror and confusion.

Indeed, Lang accomplishes the miraculous feat of making the killer an almost sympathetic figure in some ways, a figure to be pitied as much as despised or feared. Beckert is portrayed by Lorre as a weak, pathetic, fearful man overcome by compulsions and desires that he can't control. He's pathetic and vile, but his actions are portrayed unambiguously as the product of a mental disfigurement that he is hopeless to resist, and that apparently a stay in a mental hospital could not cure. The film does a remarkable job of portraying Beckert's crimes as a sickness, very different from the usual sort of crime, a product of a diseased mind that, as Beckert exclaims at the film's climax, "really can't help it." He is a desperate man, writing letters to the police and the newspapers that all but beg for them to catch him and stop him, and Lorre's bug-eyed, sweaty performance is incredibly powerful. After one of his crimes, Lang inserts a shot of Beckert looking in the mirror, pulling down the corners of his mouth with his extended middle fingers, stretching his face into a scowl of misery. Later, echoing this shot, he is innocently window-shopping and happens to catch a reflection of a little girl standing behind him; his face becomes deformed, his idle chores forgotten, and he begins whistling "The Hall of the Mountain King," the signature tune that stands for his compulsions.

That song is virtually the only music in the film, which has no proper score and only uses whatever scant music appears within the diegesis. Towards the beginning of the film, Beckert's whistling precedes his first visual appearance, as he approaches a young girl, whistling, his shadow cast onto a poster announcing a reward for the killer's capture. It's a sinister image, and the whole scene is chilling for the suggestive way that it chronicles Beckert's predation without any overt violence. The girl's death is signaled with an evocative pair of shots: her ball rolling out of the bushes in a remote, overgrown area, followed by a shot of the smiling, human-shaped balloon that Beckert had bought for her, now drifting freely, getting tangled up in power lines. Meanwhile, at home the girl's mother fruitlessly calls out for her, expecting her home from school, and Lang cuts from the mother at the window, yelling the girl's name, to a series of static, empty, eerily silent shots of the apartment building's staircase and basement, devoid of life or movement. Lang elegantly uses such minimalist aural and visual symbols to tell his story, often replacing images of people talking with images of their shadows reflected on walls.


Lang is also concerned with depicting the killer's effect on the city. People are riled up and paranoid, and they begin responding with suspicion and violence at the least provocation: innocent men are accosted by mobs on the streets, friends accuse one another, anonymous letters point fingers at various random men, whose houses are searched and ransacked for clues by the police. The criminal underworld is also stirred up, as the police conduct raids of red light districts and bars, trying to uncover anyone the least bit suspicious, working on the assumption that the killer must be a shady character in general. These raids cause the criminal gangs, eager to catch the killer and end this intensified police activity, to start pursuing the killer themselves, aided by a network of beggars keeping an eye out for any sign of the murderer.

The general atmosphere of suspicion and persecution suggests a social and political response to this crime that is, in fact, disconnected from its origin. The cops raid bars without discrimination, arresting anyone whose papers are not in order, an eerie premonition of the ways in which the Nazis would shortly begin treating citizens. Lang was at this time growing increasingly concerned about the Nazis' ascent to power, even as his own wife Thea von Harbou, who co-wrote M with him, joined the party, alienating her from the partly Jewish Lang. Thus the film depicts a multifaceted nightmare where fear waits in every direction: a mother's fear for her child's safety, a criminal's fear of being apprehended, but also the more general fear of the innocent being sucked into the vicious whirlwind of a society riven by hysteria, as in the scenes where innocent men suffer in various ways for Beckert's crimes.


What's most interesting about M is the degree to which Lang lets all these different currents run together without emphasizing one over the other. Lang cuts between different segments of society — at one point blending together a meeting of the police and a meeting of some gangster bosses to ironically point out the similarities between cops and crooks — and different characters, never building a real solid central presence. Lorre's Beckert comes closest to fulfilling that role, though he's almost entirely absent for the first half of the film, only occasionally appearing as a reminder of the one man who's generating all the chaos in the city. Much of the film's second half, though, seems to stick closest to Beckert's perspective, particularly in the harrowing sequences where the killer is pursued through the streets by beggars, eventually cornered in the attic of a building, where the criminals track him down. The beggars even mark him with an "M" drawn in chalk on his jacket — another striking bit of Nazi foreshadowing — and the scene where he discovers this mark in a mirror recalls all the earlier mirror shots involving Beckert. Lang, interestingly, has crafted a suspense sequence in which nobody could possibly be rooting for Beckert to get away, and yet his terror, his increasing desperation, is nevertheless potently communicated by Lorre's performance and the shadowy, expressionistic mise en scène. Further enhancing the tense atmosphere is the fact that Lang shot many scenes entirely silent, only occasionally piercing the hush with bursts of clamoring police sirens or the shouts of the killer's pursuers.

M is many things: a powerful depiction of violent malaise, a searing critique of the death penalty and vigilante justice, a psychological study of fear and guilt, a vision of societal violence and fear that serves as a prelude to the rise of the Nazi Party. It remains such an affecting film in large measure because of how deftly Lang weaves together all these ideas, destabilizing audience expectations at every turn. Even today, so long after it was made, the bravery and modernity of Lang's ideas and his cinematic approach to this material is bracing and impressive.

Phantom

Though F.W. Murnau immediately followed his iconic vampire tale Nosferatu with a film called Phantom, there is nothing supernatural about this dreamlike examination of desire and obsession. It's the story of Lorenz Lubota (Alfred Abel), a mild-mannered and honest city clerk who's lost in the "dream world" of books, a shy and quiet man who lives with his mother and siblings and says that, for him, books give him experiences that he could never have in his actual staid life. Lorenz is a boringly decent man, closed off from the world and from sensual experience; when he's not in his room reading, he's at his dull job, where he always shows up late because he's such a dreamer, or in the bookstore, where the owner's daughter Marie (Lil Dagover) shyly loves him from a distance without ever expressing her feelings for him. It's a routine and quiet life, abstracted and restrained, with Lorenz's biggest thrills coming from literature, his greatest ambitions contained in the poems that he secretly writes.

This all changes one day when he's run down in the street by a woman driving a carriage. She stops and stands over him, and as he comes to, he's hypnotized and enthralled by the sight of her face, and he becomes obsessed with her. It's sudden and utterly illogical, an abrupt break in the linear path of this man's solitary, predictable existence. In that moment, he loses all sense of perspective, and everything else in his life melts away into insignificance; all he can do from this point on is frantically pursue this woman, about whom he knows nothing beyond a brief glimpse of her face. He eventually finds out that she is Veronika (Lya de Putti), the daughter of a wealthy family, unattainable to a lowly and pathetic clerk. As he desperately chases her, he's fended off by her servants and her parents, and he begins making one terrible decision after another, totally losing control of himself and forsaking the morality that had once defined his life. He is now solely "a poet... a man with no luck... who chases a shadow... a phantom!"

It's a stock melodramatic narrative that Murnau treats as melancholy poetry. The melodrama is especially recognizable in the way that Lorenz's descent into madness and misery parallels his sister Melanie's (Aud Egede Nissen) similar path into decadence and sin, in her case motivated simply by boredom with a gray, workaday lower-class life — she didn't need Lorenz's excuse of a sudden, consciousness-erasing obsession to leave behind the safety of home for taverns and trashy hotels. The film is somewhat slow and plodding at times, its minimal incidents stretched out between long periods of sensuous stasis. In some ways, though, this quality only adds to the dreamlike, hypnotized nature of Lorenz's experiences.


The film's best moments are Lorenz's periodic departures into daydreaming fantasy, signaled by shots that go slowly out of focus until the world is rendered as vaguely defined shapes and indistinct blurs, gradually losing tangibility so that dreamlike images of impossible love can take form, bright and brilliant, briefly seeming as real as the physical world, if not even more so. These images brilliantly convey Lorenz's disconnection from the world, the way he's sucked into this ephemeral world of dreams, the mere momentary sight of a woman's face destabilizing his world until it seems to be fading away, replaced by reveries and imaginings. He never sees the woman again, but he can't stop thinking about her. He imagines her carriage as a ghostly presence superimposed on the world, always just out of his reach. He imagines her face, surrounded by fog, a phantom, the ghost of a memory. He even finds her doppelganger, a woman (also played by de Putti) who looks just like his beloved but is far more worldly and accessible, as long as he can shower her with borrowed money and expensive goods, squandering his reputation and everything he has for some ephemeral pleasure with this woman who's only an echo of his real desire — although counter-intuitively, this echo is more material and tangible than the ghostly original for whom she's standing in.

Phantom would be just another 1920s melodrama of corruption and redemption if not for Murnau's expressive, poetic aestheticization of Lorenz's logically inexplicable downfall. It's a gorgeous and rigorous film, with Lorenz continually framed by doorways and mirrors, which suggest separation from the world. His sister Melanie, too, is introduced doing her makeup in a cracked mirror, half her face missing as she mugs and purses her lips in the glass, foreshadowing her brokenness. The final few chapters are especially haunting, as Lorenz's world collapses around him, even literally collapsing in a sequence where the buildings of the town seem to tip over on him, the shadows of their spiked spires chasing him along the streets, an effective bit of trick photography that Murnau would then reuse for The Last Laugh.

Despite its formal beauty and dreamy qualities, Phantom isn't one of Murnau's strongest movies. Its appeal is in the way Murnau takes a melodramatic narrative and strips it down to a core of almost surreal, and certainly irrational, emotional breakdown.

Four Alexander Kluge shorts, 1967-1973

Frau Blackburn, Born 1/5/1872, Is Being Filmed is a strange early short from Alexander Kluge, which blurs the line between documentary and fiction so thoroughly and so oddly that it's hard to know what to make of it at all. Ostensibly a straightforward portrait of the elderly title character, the film barely provides any information or context about who she is or why she's being profiled in the first place. Indeed, the woman doesn't have much to say: she speaks about some stiffness in her hands, holding up a crooked finger for the camera to see, but much of the rest of her dialogue is incidental. She putters about her house, showing off her fancy china and making coffee or tea, presumably for the filmmakers, who she addresses frequently, checking to make sure that she's saying what they want her to say. These fourth wall-breaking references to the people behind the camera suggest that much of this material is staged, not at all the naturalistic observation of an old woman in her home, but a concoction of the filmmakers, who are ordering her to pretend to grind coffee and to explain her ailments. "Is that enough?" she asks them at one point, after delivering a rambling monologue.

Then Kluge utterly shatters the artifice with the appearance of a man who, an intertitle informs us, claims to be a former RAF pilot. The very fact that the title is phrased this way, that he says he's a pilot rather than that he is a pilot, already casts doubt on the whole thing. And then Kluge films the man like a moustache-twirling silent movie villain, in leering closeups accompanied by cackling laughter that isn't synced up to the image at all. The man claims to want to buy earrings from the poor Frau Blackburn, but then he addresses the camera to say that actually he's just getting her out of her house so he can rob her. Kluge then shows the aftermath of the robbery, with the old lady reacting with understated alarm at the sight of all her broken china.

It's a puzzling, intentionally obtuse film that mocks the conventions of the documentary, particularly the supposed objectivity of the filmmakers, who in this case simply stand by and let Frau Blackburn get robbed, recording the results, not intervening even when they're directly told about the robbery beforehand. The film's editing is choppy and elliptical, cutting up Frau Blackburn's words into banal phrases, devoid of context, little bits of anecdotes and biography that mean all but nothing by themselves. Baffling, curiously funny, with an elusive effect that's difficult to shake despite its vagueness, this is a typically maddening and provocative early effort from Kluge.


Another nigh-inscrutable short posing as documentary biography, E.A. Winterstein, Fire Extinguisher is an even stranger early work from Alexander Kluge. The film purports to tell the story of the firefighter E.A. Winterstein, but it's difficult to tell exactly what that story is from the collage of non-sequiturs and loose ends that Kluge stitches together here. The film seems to be concerned, principally, with militarism, with recurring images of soldiers drilling in formation, throwing their rifles in the air and catching them again as they march. Other images show a toy war with little mechanical cars, driven by grinning toy animals, being bombed from above as they trace their repetitive circles along the ground. Finally, Kluge collages in leftover material from his debut feature Yesterday Girl, made two years earlier, along with a sustained portrait of that film's star, his sister Alexandra, posing with religious and regal memorabilia.

It's hard to know what any of this has to do with the titular Winterstein — who appears at times in a gladiator uniform, jogging around — and the elliptical voiceover does little to clarify matters. The narration is just as free-associative as the images, jumping from one subject to the next, occasionally hinting at the life of the title subject but only as part of a larger network of allusions to history, entertainment and philosophy. At one point, the narration compares Winterstein to various Hollywood stars, presumably because just like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, this humble fireman appears in a movie. This is another example of Kluge intentionally conflating documentary and fiction, positing them both as part of the same medium, placing the purportedly nonfictional Winterstein in the same lineage as famous actors playing roles.

In this context, everything becomes suspect, all facts become malleable, and the narration says that among the roles that Winterstein will be remembered for is a part as a judge at the Nuremberg Trials. This suggests that even pivotal events of recent history are fodder for fictionalization and uncertainty, that there's a certain element of performance and role-playing in the enactment of history. Including Nuremberg in with a list of Hollywood actors' parts is indicative of Kluge's strategy of blending fiction with reality, tangling them together until it's difficult to tell them apart.


At the very beginning of Alexander Kluge's A Doctor From Halberstadt, the titular doctor, wandering through an airport, pauses in the corner of the frame and points tentatively offscreen, as though asking where he should go next. This kind of upfront acknowledgment of the artificiality of filmmaking, even documentary filmmaking, is by now very familiar from Kluge's work, and yet this half-hour short is, on the whole, one of his more straightforward portrait films. The doctor of the title is Kluge's own father Ernst, who really was a doctor from Halberstadt. Kluge observes his father on a trip to Munich, watching horses at a stable, aimlessly walking the streets, and visiting with his cousin, a judge.

The doctor recounts some horrible incidents he's witnessed in his career — presumably during the Nazi era — mixed in with banal chit-chat, photos from the doctor's childhood and past, and scenes of him trying to entertain himself alone on vacation in Munich. There's a real sense of loneliness in the shots of the doctor walking around Munich with nothing to do and nowhere to go, on a vacation but at a loss about how to enjoy himself in this strange city. The doctor occasionally displays a playful, almost boyish spirit, as in the shot of him skipping lithely over a puddle in the street or the scenes of him peering eagerly over a fence at the horses galloping around a track.

At one point, the doctor is telling a story about why he bought a car, describing a terrible crash he'd had one night on a slippery country road. After a while, the judge chimes in to clarify, saying that the doctor was riding a motorbike at the time, a detail that he obviously realized had been left out of the story and would confuse the film's audience, who would otherwise wonder what the doctor had been driving before he bought his car. This kind of metafictional playfulness crops up periodically during the film, especially in the film's last shot, a closeup of the doctor, who first looks directly at the camera and then off to the side, obviously at the direction of his son. As he looks off to the side, the doctor says, delivering the last lines of the film, "Shall I look over here? What is there to see? Rain, once again." It's the equivalent of "what's my motivation?", an actor wondering why he's doing what he's just been told to do by the director, wondering why this character he's playing, who is in fact himself, would want to look off to the side like this. It's a perfectly whimsical ending to a film that, typically of Kluge, gently teases its surface subject with submerged and difficult-to-access secondary meanings.


All of Alexander Kluge's baffling, idiosyncratic portraiture shorts seem to dance around the subject of World War II without quite touching on it directly, telling anecdotes about the wartime era or referring to it obliquely, but never as the central subject of the film. The subject is implied in every one of these portraits, though, if for no other reason than these people, real or fictional or some combination of the two, must have lived through the war, and Kluge's circumspection invites speculation about what these people might have seen or done during that period. This is especially true of A Woman From the Property-Owning Middle Class, Born 1908. The subject here is a woman, Alice Schneider, who has rebuilt her lavish lifestyle and her fine home after her original, even grander house was bombed during the war.

This film is connected in some inscrutable way with Kluge's earlier short Frau Blackburn, Born 1/5/1872, Is Being Filmed. Like the similarly named earlier film, this one concerns a woman who is displaying her collection of fine china for the documentarians, though Frau Schneider seems much more well-off than Frau Blackburn, and her collection is more expansive. Also reappearing from the earlier film is the sinister man who had robbed Frau Blackburn, and Kluge once again focuses on a closeup of the man's eyes and bushy black eyebrows. Here, though, this man seems more kindly than creepy, chatting amiably with Frau Schneider and offering her an interest-free loan rather than buying her china from her; he even helps her put away the expensive pieces, which she'd laid out on the floor in hopes of making a sale.

The film seems to rely on its intertextual connection to the earlier Kluge work for some of its meaning, juxtaposing the experience of this woman of means (her status is explicitly mentioned in the film's title, after all) against that of the comparatively average Frau Blackburn, who gets taken advantage of by the same man who is so solicitous with the richer woman. There's perhaps also a coded implication here about who made it through the war okay, ready to rebuild and reacquire, and who struggled along with very little in the aftermath of the war.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the classics of the German Expressionist style, a defining work of the era. A story of madness and murder, it's sometimes cited as the first true horror movie ever made, and in any event it undoubtedly provided a powerful template for much of the horror to come. Caligari (Werner Krauss) is a carnival showman with a macabre and sensational show in which the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) tells fortunes, correctly predicting death for anyone who dares to seek his advice — which of course begs the question of how Caligari ever gets any repeat business, but such logical questions are outside the purview of a movie that's simply about a widespread and seemingly contagious insanity. Just how contagious is foreshadowed in the opening, in which Francis (Friedrich Feher), telling the story of Caligari to a companion, observes a woman in white (Lil Dagover) go sleepwalking past in a daze, staring straight ahead and taking no notice of the two men. "That's my fiancée," Francis says, in a darkly humorous suggestion that this story's insanity might be catching, spreading from the mad doctor and his zombie-like killer assistant to those they come in contact with.

Cesare is a terrifying prototype for the movie monster to come, dressed all in black, tall and sleek with a heavily made up face and a gruesome smile rimmed with lipstick, his eyes hidden by deep pools of black. He lurches and plods through his actions with a dreamy slowness, killing in his sleep, a walking nightmare. In one key moment, Cesare advances on the sleeping woman, with her inert form in the foreground, stretched out amidst the fluffy white finery of her bedsheets, while the black-clad sleepwalker advances step by plodding step in the background. His progress is deliberately slow and inexorable, gradually moving towards the moment when the creepy killer, prefiguring countless movie boogeymen to come, raises his knife to stab his latest victim and finds that, inexplicably, he is unable to go through with it — as with so many of his descendants, the man within the monster has suddenly been awakened by the sight of helpless female beauty.

Cesare isn't the only one in the film who seems to be moving in his sleep. The whole film has a soporific quality that infuses it with the quality of a dream, and many of the other performances — particularly Dagover as the damsel in distress — have the same drowning-in-molasses quality, a deliberate slowness to every gesture. It's as though Cesare is simply an exaggerated caricature of the other characters in the film, who are in truth as deeply asleep as he is and only pretending otherwise. This is just one of the film's many perverse touches; its strangeness lies much deeper than the macabre surface of the narrative, which makes it all the more unsettling.


The first of Cesare's nighttime crimes is seemingly motivated by Caligari's petty desire for revenge, but there's no rationale for the rest of the pair's actions, and indeed the second murder — killing a man who Cesare had just publicly predicted would die by morning — could only serve to draw suspicion to their act. These crimes are inherently irrational, feeding into and arising from a world that seems to have gone mad at some fundamental level. Within the narrative, it's Caligari who's gone mad — or Francis, if the tacked-on twist ending is to be believed — but the madness seems not to emanate from any one person. The madness is rooted in the world itself, in the twisted design of the buildings and streets in which this drama plays out, in the beautifully baroque distortions that reveal the warped ugliness underneath the appearance of order and normality that we think of as reality. This film presents a world that looks as perverse and frightening as it feels to the people living in it — which must have been a very resonant truth to the people of Germany in the fragmented, despairing time between the two World Wars.

The film's buildings are inescapably mad, leaning over, all odd angles, seemingly on the verge of collapse. This is like no architecture ever seen, it's an architecture of the mind, as flimsy as a thought, the shadows painted on in jagged shapes that have no relation to any light source or object that could conceivably conspire to cast such a shadow. Everything has become unmoored, the foundations of reality itself twisted until the world resembles a nightmare, with everyone strolling around as if nothing's wrong while the buildings all around them totter and lean ominously, and the shadows stretch out, disconnected from physicality, potentially hiding all sorts of horrors. At the flashback climax of the film, Caligari staggers around the town, seeing the famous words "you must become Caligari" floating in the air everywhere around him, drawn in the tree limbs or graffitied on the walls of the buildings, evaporating as soon as he gets too close. The world is literally egging him on to madness here, but even when it's not so blatant about it, the design of everything from the buildings to the spiky dangling plants to the seemingly unstable streets whispers and screams madness; there is no way to exist within such a destabilized and distorted world and remain sane.

The Last Laugh

The Last Laugh was a crucial landmark in the history of the cinema. F.W. Murnau's 1924 classic was a dazzling technical feat that signaled several significant leaps forward in the early cinema: not only was it a work of pure visual artistry, with no dialogue intertitles, but Murnau and his crew (a prestigious group including cameraman Karl Freund and assistance from Edgar G. Ulmer) invented the first dolly shots in film and the first uses of subjective camerawork. Murnau freed the previously static camera from its moorings, and the results were stunning. The film's expressive, potent style movingly renders the story of a hotel porter (Emil Jannings) who is demoted for being too old and out of shape to properly do his job anymore. This is an unrecoverable blow for him, because everything he is, his entire sense of self-worth and identity, seems to be tied up in his job. In the film's opening scenes, he struts around the hotel, with bellboys scurrying to assist him in his work, and he obviously takes great pride in his puffed-up image, with his ornate, militaristic uniform. He waddles from the hotel to the curb, guiding guests in or out, summoning cabs, carrying bags, his girth straining proudly against the stiff front of his uniform with its rows of shiny buttons.

At home, he is equally proud, and when he enters the courtyard where he lives, everyone jumps to attention as though greeting a visiting dignitary, the men doffing their caps while he salutes. He walks stiffly, in obvious pain, his huge gut thrust out in front of him, exhausted from a hard day of work but still happy with his self-image, his view of himself as someone important. Even if it takes a tremendous effort to keep his back straight after each day, he endures the discomfort for the sake of the pleasure he gets from feeling so important and respected. When he's demoted from this proud position, his grand uniform rudely stripped from him, it shatters his world so badly that he can never recover, his job was so integral to his feelings of self-worth and happiness. The world is literally bent out of shape: leaving work after finding out about this change, the porter feels as though the hotel itself is going to crush him, in an extraordinary effects shot where the building seems to warp downwards towards the old man.

Later, drunk at a wedding, the porter sways and staggers, and the camera sways with him, tracing jittery arcs around the room from the old man's point of view, as his gaze drunkenly skips around the room. This subjective perspective aligns the audience with the old porter's attempt to erase his feelings of failure and abjection in revelry. This then fades into a dream sequence in which everything is hazy and distorted as though in a funhouse mirror, while the porter fantasizes about being restored to his old job and displaying a feat of tremendous strength, easily hefting a bulky trunk above his head with one hand. It's a fantasy of power and control, an assertion of the masculine virility that he now feels he's so completely lacking. This is a depiction of a society in which those who are past their peak are cast aside without further care, their will to live drained by the cruelty of the world's disregard. Even the porter's own family, when they learn of his new lowered status, quite literally recoil from him in horror, as though they're seeing a monster. It's almost comically exaggerated, but it makes the point: if a man's self-image is so thoroughly dependent on such shallow signifiers, on shiny uniforms and hollow prestige, then it is very easy indeed to tear him down and destroy him.


There's also a class component to this story, in that the porter's pride in his job and his uniform only causes him to be content in his relative poverty. He returns home to a decrepit, cramped tenement apartment and struts around as though he's an important and wealthy man, but actually he's a servant with a nice costume and an inflated sense of his position, which distracts him from his actual class status. Jannings' performance is remarkable, communicating all this complex emotion and social angst through his body language and his expressive eyes, about the only part of his face that's visible behind his ornate facial hair. When the porter learns of his fall from grace, he tries to keep up appearances by stealing back his old uniform, but it proves to be not enough. Whereas he used to return home with his chest puffed out, walking with a regal manner, his confidence is shaken now, and he skulks into the courtyard, hunched over, anxiously looking around as though he wants to simply disappear into the shadows. He has to remind himself to stand up straight and try to project confidence, but as he walks towards his apartment, his slouch returns, slowly but surely, and soon he's scurrying home past the laughter and disapproval of the neighbors who were once so awed by his seeming dignity.

The film has no textual titles except brief ones at the beginning and before the tacked-on, studio-mandated epilogue. Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer convey everything entirely through visuals, through performances. The complete lack of dialogue text is very refreshing, preventing the film from getting bogged down in endless reading breaks between images. Even in the one scene where Murnau uses text within the mise en scène, this text isn't simply a static paragraph. The porter learns of his demotion to restroom attendant through a letter, and Murnau displays this letter onscreen. But when the porter gets to the part that is for him the key phrase — the humiliating line that attributes this change to his "age and frailty" — the camera tracks along the words, following his eye as he takes in this disheartening phrase. The image then begins to blur, as if with tears, confirming that this is the first subjective shot in the film — and the first subjective shot in the then-short history of moving pictures! Even with the novelty long since faded, shots like this are incredibly affecting and bracing, as are the graceful tracking shots that zero in on the porter's distraught face at key moments.

The film proper ends with a haunting, stark shot of the porter slumped over in the restroom, totally broken and resigned to his fate. Murnau and Mayer wanted to end the film with the protagonist's sad death, completing their theme of a man crushed by his society's limiting ideas of a man's worth. The studio wanted a happier resolution, though, and Murnau and Mayer technically fulfill that mandate with a cynical, absurd epilogue that's practically dripping with sarcasm. It's even preceded by a title that explicitly identifies this ending as a deus ex machina, an intervention of the filmmakers with no relation to reality. In this ending, the porter is saved from his fate by an unlikely inheritance from a wealthy stranger, and he celebrates his good luck lavishly while doling out gifts to other unfortunate souls. The whole thing plays out as a ridiculous fantasy where it's entirely obvious that the director and writer have nothing but contempt for this addition to their art, and this tone winds up undermining the happy ending that the producers had wanted. In its very unreality, this epilogue simply reinforces the theme, since only an openly unrealistic miracle can save this sad man from what otherwise seemed an unavoidable and dismal fate.

Faust

F.W. Murnau's Faust was his final German film before the director emigrated to the USA for his all-too-brief career in Hollywood. This grand, extravagant epic, based on Goethe's version of the German legend about a man making a deal with the devil, represented Murnau's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink apotheosis of the German Expressionist silent style. It's a technical marvel, with dazzling effects that must have been utterly cutting edge at the time and today still have tremendous charm and power. This is especially true of the film's opening section, in which the devil makes a wager with an archangel over the soul of Faust (Gösta Ekman), a good man who the devil, in an echo of the Biblical story of Job, promises he can corrupt. Faust is a man of great faith and wisdom, old and wise and well-respected in his community. But he is nevertheless corrupted by the devil's representative Mephisto (Emil Jannings, in a scenery-devouring role), first by appealing to his very best instincts, his desire to help people, then by tempting him with power, then with increasingly base and material temptations.

The film's opening section provides Murnau with the opportunity to unleash a barrage of visual effects, showing the devil towering over a scale-model town, stretching his black wings to blot out the sun, kicking up clouds of dust that spread the plague. Sinister skeletal riders soar through the sky, and the devil's face appears floating in the clouds, taunting the people of the town. Faust, faced with this plague, appeals to both science and God, but both fail him; he can do nothing to cure the disease, and in a fit of desperation, after burning both his religious and his scholarly books, he decides to summon a demonic force to his aid instead. He goes to the crossroads, that mythic site of hellish bargaining, and as he conducts the ritual, Murnau draws a glowing ring of fire around him, fiery circles hovering hazily in the air around Faust, as the demon Mephisto magically materializes by his side.

Mephisto appears first as a ratty, stooped beggar with sinisterly glowing eyes, haunting the terrified Faust, who already regrets summoning this creepy creature, and later as a courtly, vampiric figure in black robes and a jaunty cap with a feather sticking out of it. In either guise, he's a mischievous trickster guiding Faust into the bargain that will doom him. Faust believes at first that he's only doing this to help people, but he's soon seduced by sensual and sexual pleasures, by the lure of power and greed and lust. The film calms down a little stylistically after this initial flurry of baroque visual overload, and when Mephisto transforms Faust into a young man — in order to pursue first a libertine duchess (Hanna Ralph) and then the virginal young Gretchen (Camilla Horn) — the film settles down into a much more understated melodrama, albeit one that takes place amidst the deformed architecture and spiky shadows of the elaborately designed sets.


Faust's romance with Gretchen is what ultimately saves him — the film ends with an angel defeating the devil, citing the power of love, liebe, and the word appears surrounded with a glistening halo of light — but Murnau is somewhat irreverent in his depiction of this tragic romance. Part of it is that Jannings' Mephisto is just so much more appealing and fun to watch than the smooth-faced, feminine young Faust, who's very much cast in the mold of the usual bland silent-era heroes despite his deal with the devil.

Mephisto is the choice part here — although Gretchen's leering giant of a brother (William Dieterle) somewhat unintentionally gives Mephisto a run for his money as the creepiest character in the film. Mephisto is an incarnation of the devil as an avatar of fun, dancing around in the shadows making mischief, mugging wildly for the camera in his agony at the sight of a cross, stalking around with his rapier sticking out the back of his robes like a stiff tail. The film, despite its ultimate message of love and spiritual uplift, has some pretty perverse and provocative ideas about good and evil, confirming the impression that the latter have all the fun.

In one early scene, the plague inspires an apocalyptic preacher who urges the people to repent and pray, the cross he holds looming large within the frame. But this somber, morbid religious assembly is interrupted by a parade of revelers who take the opposite approach, laughing at death and celebrating feverishly since life is so short. There's no question which approach Murnau makes seem more appealing, as the partying villagers briefly stop beneath the preacher, the camera angled down to leer at the women with their cleavage spilling out of their tops, laughing and drinking, their sensuality splayed out beneath the preacher with his cross. To cap off this scene, the devil strikes down the preacher, suggesting that goodness and piety are no guarantees in a world where Hell has as much influence as Heaven.


Mephisto is the most visible embodiment of this sensibility. Jannings, an actor who knew very well how to play big without sacrificing subtlety, rips into the part but never comes across as hammy, instead just communicating this sinister devil's delight in his evil deeds, his pop-eyed intensity and insanity. His best showcase is Mephisto's playful flirtation with Gretchen's matronly alchemist aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert), which serves as a parodic counterpoint to the love scenes between Gretchen and Faust. Gretchen plays the "he loves me, he loves me not" game with a flower she picks, and Mephisto repeats the gesture with eye-rolling mockery using a mushroom, sticking shards of it in his mouth as he pulls them off the crown.

Murnau cuts back and forth between these two romances throughout this scene, employing the comic, ribald interplay of the demon and the alchemist as a tonic for the conventionally romantic pursuit of Gretchen by Faust. Mephisto is both randier than the human — putting a necklace on the old woman, he cups her breasts in his hands, then recoils as though disappointed in what he'd felt — and much funnier, as he responds to his paramour's attempts to kiss him by pushing her cap over her face and running away. The whole sequence ends, not with Faust proposing to Gretchen, but with Marthe lovingly taking a piece of mushroom and stuffing it into her shirt as a souvenir, while Mephisto, fleeing the scene, turns back towards the camera, and spits out a mouthful of chewed-up mushroom bits, blowing a raspberry at all this romance and sentimentality.

Though Jannings is the film's most powerful presence and easily steals every scene he's in, Murnau masterfully shifts the film's focus and its sympathies to Gretchen for the increasingly poignant final act, in which the young girl suffers greatly for her involvement with the corrupt Faust. Horn delivers a sweet, pure performance, radiating light and decency, and Murnau draws visual parallels between the girl and both the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc in the film's final stretch. The image of Gretchen in the snow, a shawl wrapped around her head, the tears on her cheeks frozen into delicate white crystalline patterns, is breathtaking and heartbreaking, a tragically beautiful evocation of the Virgin with child. The film, like many of the Faust legends upon which it's based, Goethe's included, pulls back from the darkness at the very last second. But this momentary redemption, as affecting as it is, is in many ways overpowered by Murnau's far more vivid presentation of suffering, corruption, shadow and fog, and the sheer grinning, mischievous fun that is the evil in the world.