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.

From Morn to Midnight (1920)

Time for a silent German expressionist film, I think, and one that's a hundred years old this year. This has all the crooked, alienating, crooked set design that one would expect from the movement that gave us Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Quite rightly, neither the look nor the acting are having any of that realism nonsense.

This is based on a play by Georg Kaiser of which I know nothing except what I've just Googled. Apparently Kaiser eschewed such bourgeois affectations as characterisation and his plays all apply Nietzcgean philosophy. Here, then, we have a middle aged bank cashier who one day, on a whim, nicks a load of money because he wrongly thinks some Italian lady fancies him, abandons his wife and daughter, and aimlessly looks for meaning. It's quite the mid-life crisis, sort of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in the Weimar Republic but with added God being dead, supermen, will to power and whatever Nietzchean subtext there may be.

Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, the last scene is devilishly clever. Just as the cashier seems to find religion, and it all seems to be a morality play, this expectation is subverted as the Salvation Army lot turn out to be just as greedy and corruptible as everyone else. The only person standing by him is the girl (the same actress plays many parts, including hid daughter and the prostitute she pervs over... who promptly ships him to the police, whereupon he gets shot dead. Lovely.

This is an enjoyable, neglected gem, freely available on YouTube. Unfortunately though, there's a very dodgily stereotyped Jewish character early on, and we can hardly excuse this in Weimar Germany of all times and places.