Genuine (1920)

I blogged The Cabinet of Dr Caligari a scary number of years ago. It's a film that has lingered in the memory, both because of its extraordinary Expressionist visual style and the creepy effectiveness of the story. Is this, Robert Wiene's much less famous follow-up from later in the same year, and now a hundred years old, in the same league?

Well... no. That's not to say there isn't much that's visually impressive. Not all the sets are in the Expressionist style here- there seems to have been a compromise arrangement with realism- but there's lots to admire, not to mention a great deal of nightmare fuel. The facial expressions of both Lord Melo and the creepily moustachioed barber are enough by themselves to cause sleepless nights, but the central feature of Melo's house is a rather noticeable skeleton with a clock in its face, reminding us that this is the age of Surrealism. There's also a very strikingly dishevelled block pyramid, like a kind of uneasy proto-Pompidou Centre.

But aside from the visuals, and the strikingly modern, or more likely universal, sexuality of Genuine herself, this isn't much of a story. Essentially, the priestess of some vaguely non-European is bought in a slave market and ends up as the plaything of a modern aristocrat in a generic European country. And she uses her deadly feminine wiles as a vamp, or succubus, or what ou will, to control young and impressionable men. Murder, love triangles and tragedy unfold with a certain inevitability. It's all a bit ho-hum, not to mention the gender and post-colonial questions it raises-mthis is 1920, the height of colonialism although Germany lost its colonies in last year's Treaty of Versailles, and the only Black actor, in a vaguely stereotypical role, is from German Kamerun.

Despite this, though, the visuals are fascinating and it's worth a look. After years of the film being incredinbly hard to see in full, it's now available on YouTube in all its 88 minutes.