Das
Cabinett des Dr. Caligari
The legendary
film is now seen with its tintings, at something like
its original length, and with an admirable score (1996) related to works of the
New Vienna School in its early days (the original music is presumably lost, or
there would be no need).
The closest thing
to the pathology represented by the “flashback” that is the main
body of the film would be Kafka’s short story “The Judgment”
(“Das Urteil”), in which a young
man is condemned by his father for good actions that have unconscious
motivations. The fantastic drama of Wiene’s film describes essentially
the same situation in stark terms, desire for the girl means extinction of the
friend, this is projected as a fairground display of controlled somnambulism
that horrified Kracauer notably in the resolution
(said to have been offered by Lang but part and parcel of the main action).
The day and night
tintings add a cohesive depth to the famous compositions
for a level of finish quite in keeping with the extraordinary artistic effort
of the set designs and the great modulation of acting. A cardinal film not
widely appreciated perhaps but certainly by Hitchcock in Spellbound.
Genuine
The Tale of a Vampire
The subtitle is
elsewhere given as “die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses”,
under any name a benchmark of the cinema as purely oneiric and literally a
dream.
Comparisons can
be drawn to Lubitsch’s Die Augen der Mumie
Ma, Lang’s The Woman in the Window
and Fellini’s La Città delle donne, this is the dream of the artist Percy, the
story of the girl in the painting... a priestess, a slave, a temptress inciting
to murder...
The most
beautiful sets in all the cinema. Marotta’s
score for the Rohauer condensation bears a happy
resemblance to Kaz’ for The
Monitors (dir. Jack Shea).
Tom Milne (Time Out) had no use for it,
“reduced to grisly travesty.”
Crime
and Punishment
“The
Overman”, who murders and robs a pawnbroker to
“benefit humanity,” and for this Wiene has the Moscow Art Theatre
Players, an incomparable troupe at the dreaming point of contact with his
expressive sets, a springboard for Sternberg.
Two murders, a
witness, the pawnbroker’s sister, two women.
The
double, Marmeladov, the despair of his wife and
children.
“No one in
the world can be as unhappy as you—with this load on your
conscience—”
The startling
resemblance of Khmara as Raskolnikov
to Falconetti is among the wonders of the silent era,
certainly Dreyer had it in mind.
One of the greatest
masterworks in all cinema.
The
Hands of Orlac
A
stupendous masterpiece on a highly recondite theme.
The congruent
hands reappear in Godard’s Détective.
Dr. Merkwürdigliebe was born with Veidt’s performance,
and though the New York Times reviewer
objected (“goes a bit far”), James Dean would appear to have
studied it closely.
Wiene,
a past master of cinematic time and space, here even more expressionistic in
realistic settings, notably the dynamism of the train wreck.
Variety
considered the matter from another perspective equally familiar, Wiene’s
film was “absurd” but saved by the star’s “masterly
characterization,” the key phrase here is “hopelessly
complicated”, a view rather dimly shared by Time Out.
Leonard Maltin,
“genuinely spooky”.
Jonathan
Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader),
“legendary... reportedly this first version is the best of the
lot.”
Der Rosenkavalier
Wiene’s
dramatic film of the opera, for which Strauss arranged a continuous orchestral
score.
An
especially fortunate film.
Russell represents
a performance of it in Dance of the Seven
Veils.
Location
filming, a kinship to Lubitsch.
Quite another matter, the Marschall’s army and
all, with the composer tapering his notes as often as not to the period,
echoing at the trumpet alarm a bit of Beethoven’s well-known military
march.
And so you have
something of a precursor to Kubrick’s Barry
Lyndon in the way of comedy, as when the little black page brings in a
black cat on a cushion to the Marschallin, and in the
way of style to Reed’s The Third
Man, the Viennese film par excellence,
as when the page walks in on the Marschallin’s
anticipation of grief and silently backsteps out.
“Children
and soldiers half-price” for the play, “don’t begrudge us, if
you will, your kind applause, life’s stupider than this at times,
everyone knows.”
The Marschall
ordains a fancy dress gartenfest à la Watteau. Thus, “eine Dame erwartet Sie im Pavillon
der Diana...” the composer’s most
magical effects begin there, where the richness of harmony suggests Klimt...
the grand spectacle with a ballet brings a most surprising quotient of period
music.
The ending of
Wiene’s film, for all the authenticity and majesty that went before, is
presently lost but has been reconstructed from stills and trailer bits, with of
course the score.
Shakespeare and
Mozart share the turn of action in the finale, Falstaff and Figaro. “Im Mondlicht nehmen drei Alleen drei glückliche Paare auf...”
Alex Ross,
writing for the New York Times in
1993, was unimpressed, it’s the sort of thing
you could write in your sleep, his review. Nevertheless he ascribes the
innovations of the screenplay to Hofmannsthal, and thus we have a new work, created for the cinema, in
which the pair of court schemers (Valzacchi, Annina) convey Count Octavian’s presence in the Marschallin’s boudoir to the Empress’s high
council and to the Marschall in the field, he goes
great guns and is victorious, returning posthaste he fights a duel and unmasks
Sophie, sought by Baron Ochs for her dowry. The exquisite details make up the sum
of the screenplay, Von Lerchenau pleased Ross but the
acting is sublime throughout, and a good deal of the fun is in unraveling the
theatrical citations.
Forman’s Amadeus remembers the masked ball and
the ballet.