A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #3 - Genuine aka Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses aka Genuine: The Tragedy of a Vampire aka Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire (Germany: Dir Robert Wiene)

Now pretty much everybody has heard of Robert Wiene's movie The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but Genuine is far less well known, which is a great shame. Wiene, a former student of law, had moved into acting and then film production and direction. Genuine was one of five films he directed in 1920; TCoDC's success gave him the opportunity to become more independent and bolder in his choice subject matter.

The German title of the movie translates literally as Genuine, The Tragedy of a Strange House. 

Like TCoDC before it, the film opens with a framing story: we're in the living room of the painter Percy (Harald Paulsen). Two friends arrive; they are concerned that after painting his most recent portrait, which hangs on his wall, covered up - that of the heroine of legend, high priestess Genuine - he has become irritable and half crazy. A visiting dealer offers to buy the painting, but Percy flatly refuses to sell. Left alone, he uncovers the portrait, opens a book and reads the legend of Genuine. She is described as "beautiful and perverse. As priestess of a religion, she fell into esoteric mysteries so that, from her childhood, she had witnessed the most cruel spectacles, to which she would later become an accomplice," although above all else she "loathed acts of cruelty." As Percy sleeps, the figure of Genuine comes to life and steps out of the portrait. The story begins.

We see Genuine, who has been taken captive "in the midst of a war between rival tribes, and wound up in a slave market" where she is purchased by an old eccentric man named Lord Melo (Ernst Gronau). The other slaves on offer are naked and docile, but Melo prefers the wild and savage Genuine, who, he learns, has become barbaric due to her treatment following her capture and her priestess training. Melo takes her home to his house in Ireland and locks her up against her will in a geo-chamber full of fauna from Genuine's homeland; this is the first time we are exposed to the strange, oddly proportioned sets painted by expressionist artist César Klein, a form which made Wiene's previous movie so notable. Melo justifies Genuine's incarceration, telling her that "up there is life and its ugliness." Pleased with his 'purchase', Melo hobbles around his chambers, full of strange, fractured mirrors, odd masks on the walls and a life sized skeleton with a clock face for a head.

Lord Melo lives in seclusion; he's visited at noon every day by his barber Guyard (John Gottowt); his manservant (Louis Brody, a Cameroon born statuesque black actor who had a long career in German films) organises a monthly delivery of provisions to Melo's house. The locals see Melo's isolation as suspicious, and request that the local magistrate question Guyard about what goes on behind closed doors.

The request to interrogate Guyard is authorised and the barber is summoned to attend the magistrate at noon the following day, meaning that he can't make his daily appointment with Melo. Guyard has recently taken on his young nephew Florian (the impressively named Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) as an apprentice, and asks him to step in to attend the next daily visit to Melo.

Melo's grandson Percy requests to visit his grandfather after a long period of absence, which makes Melo unhappy; he clearly is not a man to have his routines interrupted.

Genuine manages to break out of her underground prison via stepladder, and enters Melo's chamber, only to find Florian shaving the now sleeping Lord Melo. She bewitches Florian into slitting Melo's throat with his razor as revenge for her captivity. She implores him to take the ring off the dead Melo's hand, as ownership of it will control the manservant, enraged and seeking to avenge the death of his master. A besotted Florian is asked by Genuine to take his own life, but refuses; Genuine takes the ring from Florian and commands the manservant to "kill him and bring me...the proof!" The manservant fails to kill the now deranged Florian as requested, but covers up his actions by cutting his own arm to provide a cupful of blood that is the proof she requires (while it's not explicitly shown, one account of the plot suggests that Genuine's savagery extends to blood drinking, hence the request for the 'proof').

Melo's grandson Percy arrives at the house and immediately enquires about the circumstances of his grandfather's death. Percy meets Genuine and her strange charms win him over, but Genuine, who appears to be in the process of throwing off her primal urges, returns his love (although a scene of her lasciviously fondling a knife suggests that the savagery hasn't totally deserted her). Percy's friend, level headed Henry, arrives and Percy claims "that woman wants me dead!". Henry plays a trick on Genuine, telling her that Percy has died, which provokes a genuine outpouring of emotion. Genuine fails to work her mystical mojo on Henry; has she finally become human? Henry suggests to Genuine and Percy that he will help them leave the house.

Florian returns to Guyard and, tortured in bed by terrible visions, confesses his murder of Melo. Guyard in turn, who presumably previously remained tight lipped when first asked about Lord Melo's home set up, informs the magistrate of the horrors imparted to him by his son. Guyard summons a mob armed with scythes and stakes (possibly the first example of the angry mob trope that would be deployed in the horror film going forward) storms Melo's house. The still infatuated Florian steals back into Melo's home and confronts Genuine, who tells him she's in love, but not with Florian! And as the mob enter the house, Florian kills Genuine.

The painter Percy awakes; the framing device has returned, and Genuine is back in her frame. Percy moves to stab the painting but his friends restrain him. The art buyer returns with a higher offer for the painting (it is now clear that this character is Lord Melo as the cheque is signed in his name); Percy accepts the revised offer and the painting is sold.

The role of Genuine was played by Fern Andra, originally an acrobat who learned acting under Max Reinhardt; her strange performance in this film, by turns writhing, spider like or coquettish, is a joy to watch. The 'Vampire' of the alternative title refers to a mysterious and exotic woman who seduces and destroys men for the sheer joy of doing so. The extent of Genuine's savagery, which includes blood drinking, is only ever hinted at in the film, but when we first see her she's wearing a strange outfit that looks more like the markings of an animal; these were actually painted directly on to Andra's body, but as her humanising process develops, she starts wearing (relatively) conventional clothes. 

On release Genuine was not universally well received, it appears; the popular view expressed was that, while TCoDC had used expressionism to tell its story, this movie was an exercise in expressionism for its own sake. While performances were praised, Carl Mayer's script was criticised for narrative and psychological incoherence. One reviewer summarised that the substance of the film was to be found in "the magic work of the fantastic" and it's the sense of magic realism in Genuine that makes it genuinely interesting.

Sources for this post include IMDb, Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg's essay 'The Invisible Man behind "Caligari": The Life of Robert Wiene' (Indiana University Press 1993) and 'Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Weine' by Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg (Berghahn Books 1999)

Until recently, Genuine was only available in a shrunk down 43 minute condensation, but you can see a fuller 88 minute tinted version here. 

A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #2 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari aka Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Germany 1920: Dir Robert Wiene)

People with an interest in film will probably automatically know the names of the directors of classic silent fright features: FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925); or Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928), for example.

So the fact that Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, isn't so well known, is perhaps a surprise. Until you look a little deeper. For a long time the definitive critical work on the movie, Siegfried Kracauer's 1947 work 'From Caligari to Hitler,' was damning about Wiene's narrative decision, for commercial reasons, to add a 'frame' to his story of horror and madness, therefore converting it from, as Kracauer sees it, a truly 'revolutionary' movie into a 'conformist' one.

More recently Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg's 1999 book 'Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene' has taken a less polemic approach to the subject. They recognise, in the book's introduction, that Wiene wasn't a genius, but a relatively undistinguished but capable director representative of the type of people making films in Germany after the First World War. The period saw a huge rise in people attending cinemas in the country, and filmmakers responded to this with record numbers of new films, largely aimed at middle or lowbrow crowds, who made up the lion's share of the cinema going population. So it's therefore unsurprising that Wiene, who had worked on at least 43 films pre Caligari, should be targeting markets most likely to want to watch his movies. Admittedly with Caligari he did much more than that, which I'll cover later.

Robert Wiene was born in Poland in 1873. His father, Carl, was an actor, but Robert initially chose a different path, studying law in Vienna and later establishing a practice in Weimar. Early in the twentieth century Wiene moved into theatre management and then, in 1912, he became both film scriptwriter and director. Before Caligari his film choices had included comedies, tragedies and melodramas.
Working to a script by writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer (the former of the pair also critical of Wiene's intervention in the framing element of the film) Caligari fuses a totally expressionistic look and feel with an (almost) straightforward murder story, one of the first films to incorporate the radical new art movement into film set design.

The film opens with Francis (Friedrich Feher) sitting in a garden with a friend, and seeing Jane (Lil Dagover) walk by in an apparent trance; he describes her as his "fiancée." Francis decides to tell his strange story to his friend, depicted as a flashback.  Francis tells of an old man (Werner Krauss, the film's titular doctor) who petitions the town clerk of Holstenwall to set up a sideshow at its annual fair, the focus of which is Cesare (Conrad Veidt) the somnambulist, who sleeps in a wooden box and has been borderline catatonic for all of his 23 years. Although the clerk mocks him, the permit is granted: but later that night the official is stabbed in his bed.

The sleeper awakes! Cesare (Conrad Veidt)

Francis and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who are both vying for the affections of Jane (the character we saw at the beginning of the film) decide to visit Caligari's attraction. Once awakened, Cesare will answer any question put to him, so Alan asks how long he has left to live: a leering Cesare tells him "Till dawn tomorrow!" Accordingly Alan dies before daybreak, again stabbed by an unseen murderer. Shocked at the death of his friend, and with the assistance of Jane's father, Dr. Olsen (Rudolf Lettinger), Francis undertakes to find out the identity of the murderer. Briefly thrown off by a red herring copycat killer (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) who hopes his failed slaying attempt would be ascribed to the mass murderer, our hero discovers that the director of the local asylum, obsessed with the subject of somnambulism and an 18th century mystic called Caligari, has literally become Caligari after Cesare, the perfect subject, was admitted to his hospital.

As the story closes the director is unmasked as a madman and put in a straitjacket. We return to Francis, still narrating the story, only to find that he's an inmate in the same asylum, along with Jane (deluded that she's royalty) and Cesare, who seems to have the mind of a child; the whole story has been made up by the insane Francis.

Repeat viewings of Caligari expose the multiple layers of the story within a story (and with the mystic 'Caligari' section, a story within that too!). One looks for clues to Francis's madness within the body of the plot, chiefly illustrated by the stylised sets whose wonky angles and skewed perspectives suggest a damaged mind (it is surely no coincidence that expressionist art, which the Nazis later derided as 'degenerate,' should have such a close affinity with the dual themes of madness and the grotesque). As the events play out, with the logic and rationalism of Francis' investigations taking place against the bizarre town backdrops, the film never once fails to be unsettling. Caligari's hut, which houses the sleeping Cesare, is illuminated both by artificial light and natural sun rays painted onto the sets: and in one scene the director, obsessed with the mystic Caligari, wanders around town with the words "Du musst Caligari werden " ("You must become Caligari") appearing in the air.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari has been hijacked by many critics over the last hundred years to support a variety of agenda. But viewed as a piece of fantastic cinema it's a perfect melding of art and madness, where the supposedly sanest man in the story turns out to be the craziest.

You can watch The Cabinet of Dr Caligari here.