"Von Morgens bis Mitternacht" (From Morning to Midnight), Karl Heinz Martin (1920)

Com "Von Morgens bis Mitternacht" estamos na presença de um dos filmes mais representativos do Expressionismo Alemão, a par com "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". O filme conta-nos a história dum bancário sombrio que, cansado da sua existência monótona, deixa a sua família e rouba uma quantidade considerável de dinheiro na esperança de começar uma nova vida em Berlim. Aí ele descobre a vertigem da metrópole, os prazeres simples da embriaguez, mas também a solidão e a pobreza. Assustado, assombrado pela morte, procurado pela polícia, ele tenta salvar-se.

Produzido pela pequena empresaIlagi-Film, "Von Morgens bis Mitternacht" é uma adaptação da peça homónima de Georg Kaiser, um dos autores cimeiros do teatro expressionista. Foi filmado no ano de 1920 por uma equipa de actores e técnicos que trabalhavam na cena teatral de Berlim, a que se juntaram não-profissionais, tais como o escritor Max Herrmann.

Essa independência em relação às regras da indústria do cinema e da natureza experimental do produto afugentou o público, ao ponto de ter sido recusada a sua comercilização na Alemanha (aliás, o filme estrearia apenas em 1923 e no Japão, onde curiosamente teve sucesso). Tudo é abstracto, numa estilização extrema de decoração pintadas sobre fundo preto, precursor da experimentação "avant-garde", como se perpectua na sequência magistral do ciclismo filmado num espelho distorcido.


Mais do que outro filme Expressionista, "Von Morgens bis Mitternacht" comunica a emoção e a febre da política artística que apreendeu a Alemanha nesta época de grande agitação. Febril (a época e o filme).

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", John S. Robertson (1920)

Esta é a primeira produção da obra-prima escrita em 1886 por Robert Louis Stevenson. O filme de Robertson foi um êxito absoluto, ancorado na interpretação do "enfant terrible" de Hollywood John Barrymore (avô da actriz Drew Barrymore), dando vida convincentemente a Dr. Jekyll, na sua faceta mais humanista e amável, e a Dr. Hyde na sua faceta mais obscura e malvada, mostrando a degradação da condição humana de um homem.


Os efeitos especiais foram inovadores para a época, mostrando toda a transformação do Dr. Jekyll no seu alterego Hyde, sem cortes, o que resultou num efeito aterrador para o público da época e fascinante para o actual.

Frank Borzage: O Romântico Moderno

While much of the writing on Frank Borzage will invariably argue that he is a neglected filmmaker, his cinema has not significantly lacked important critical commentary. (There is probably more major work on Borzage than there is on a comparable figure like King Vidor.) Among others, Henri Agel, John Belton, Jean-Loup Bourget, Fred Camper, Tom Gunning, Michael Henry, Kent Jones, Ado Kyrou, Robert K. Lightning, Jean Mitry, Marcel Oms, Phil Rosen, Andrew Sarris, Robert Smith, Paul Willemen and, above all, Hervé Dumont have contributed significantly to the literature on Borzage. And yet Borzage’s cinema does remain perpetually unfashionable. What is the problem? Commentators on Borzage have argued that the director’s sensibility is out of step with an emotionally distanced, post-modern culture, one more devoted to the supposed ironies of a Douglas Sirk or the wit and playfulness (amidst violence and melodrama) of an Alfred Hitchcock. By contrast Borzage seems old fashioned, devoted to pious and sentimental love stories. As Kent Jones writes, Borzage’s cinema “never partakes of the crisis of belief at the core of modern experience.” (p. 35) During the 1920s and ’30s, Borzage had been one of the most important directors in Hollywood, twice winning an Academy Award for Best Director: in 1929 for Seventh Heaven (1927) and in 1932 for Bad Girl (1931). But a period of uncertainty began during the 1940s when his output also began to dwindle. After leaving theatrical filmmaking for nine years, he returned for two final films, China Doll (1958) and the biblical epic, The Big Fisherman (1959). By this point Borzage and his films were largely considered relics of an earlier era. He died before he was able to enjoy the kind of rediscovery and canonization of other directors of his generation who managed to outlive him, such as John Ford, Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh.

But part of the problem Borzage has in relation to contemporary reception may also lie with some of the commentary on his work. For all of its importance, the literature on Borzage tends to be somewhat restricted in its methods of interpretation, driven towards uncovering an essence to Borzage. The most persistent argument about Borzage is that he is a romantic transcendentalist, devoted to male/female love above all else—above politics, culture and history, above the limitations of the flesh, the limitations of time and space and even rational thought. Certainly Borzage’s cinema does not lack for moments to back up such claims, as the delirious final sequences of such films as Seventh Heaven, A Farewell to Arms (1932) and Three Comrades (1938) illustrate. But where does this leave a film like Bad Girl? It is a major Borzage work but the world that we see here does not fully conform to this notion of romantic transcendence. On the contrary, the couple in that film remains perpetually and very touchingly earthbound. At the same time, to completely ignore or dismiss the drive towards the transcendent in many of Borzage’s films runs another risk, a form of agnostic denial that does not do full justice to the work. My intention here is not to offer yet another bold central argument that will miraculously explain Borzage. Instead I would like to cite, extend, and synthesize some of the approaches that have already been put forth in the hope that, through this process, a certain range of possibilities for understanding Borzage’s work will be apparent.


If Harold Bloom is correct in his argument that American culture is fundamentally Gnostic in its religious inclinations, emphasizing the experiential aspect to religion above all else and believing that it is possible to enjoy a direct communication with God, then Borzage’s life and work present us with one variation on this American tendency. Borzage was born in Salt Lake City, the home of one of the most American of all religions, Mormonism. Borzage’s family was actually Roman Catholic but they appear to have gotten along well with their Mormon neighbors. Furthermore, Borzage himself was never formally baptized. According to Dumont, Borzage was (like a number of major figures in Hollywood at the time) a Freemason, eventually rising very high within the order of the Ancient and Approved Scottish Rite. As “custodians of holy architecture in the Western World,” (p.406) the Masons, while maintaining certain links to Judeo-Christian ideology, were devoted to politically progressive concepts of tolerance within a broad notion of a universal brotherhood. Consequently, Dumont argues that many of Borzage’s major films should be seen as Masonic texts. On the one hand, then, Borzage is brought up within a family whose religion is strongly tied to pre-Reformation Europe; on the other hand, during his childhood and youth he is surrounded by a religious culture that is not only diametrically opposed to Roman Catholicism but which is American and experiential to its core. What Borzage ultimately adopts as his ‘religion,’ however, is not quite a religion and not quite a philosophy but a set of deistic precepts with strong roots in a post-Enlightenment Europe. At the same time, many of the figures associated with the establishment of American democracy were Freemasons and the American dollar bill contains a crucial Masonic symbol of the pyramid. America, then, embraces certain Masonic elements at its inception while Borzage’s own cinema may be seen as incorporating some of these Masonic tenets.

A Masonic reading of Borzage could clarify certain aspects to his work. And it certainly provides a coherent basis upon which one may be able to discuss the complex question of mysticism which occur in a number of Borzage films, a context that has been conspicuously lacking in much of the literature which continually refers to the spiritual element of Borzage in only the most general terms. However, I would not want to go quite as far as Dumont in reading Borzage’s work in relation to Masonic teachings, particularly Dumont’s method of seeing virtually all of Borzage’s important films as variations on the Masonic Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The prescriptive nature of this kind of analysis can quickly ossify. The evidence that Borzage was a Freemason appears to be irrefutable. But there is no irrefutable evidence that the films themselves are Masonic texts (this would simply be a matter of interpretation) nor that Borzage ever directly attempted to insert Masonic philosophy into his films. Dumont’s research is invaluable. But any reading that is done on the basis of this research needs to be performed with caution, since the Masonic nature of Borzage’s work will invariably be subjected to or shaped by other determining elements.

Instead, let us put aside the Freemasons for a moment and attempt to isolate in the most immediate and spontaneous manner the emotional experience of Borzage’s cinema—what these images feel like and the emotions they give rise to. How might we do so? Certainly one crucial place to begin would be to speak of an erotics of filmmaking. As with a number of directors working in the late 1920s, Borzage fell under the influence of F.W. Murnau. Although Borzage directed some significant films prior to the international awareness of Murnau in the mid-1920s, it is after this that we find in Borzage an increasingly voluptuous response to the properties of light and shadow, to clothing and decor, and to movement. It is a fluid and natural world that Borzage often creates, in which water in various forms, from rivers, oceans, and waterfalls to rain and snow, serve as potent visual metaphors (most notably in his 1928 film The River), but a naturalness most often created, paradoxically, in the studio (another likely Murnau influence). Murnau was shooting Sunrise (1927) at Fox at the same time that Borzage was shooting Seventh Heaven, both directors sharing the same leading lady, Janet Gaynor, who frequently went back and forth between sets. The two films (as well as Borzage’s follow-up, the 1928 Street Angel) have similar visual styles, creating artificial story environments that strongly evoke the world of fairy tale and sentimental romance. But Borzage’s lovers seem at once more sexual and more innocent than Murnau’s, a paradox which stands at the center of much of Borzage’s cinema.

It is this particular erotic sensation one might have in watching the films that has caused Gunning to see in Borzage’s work a very American fascination with the tactile in which we find “an emotional participation in the visualisation of physical and personal devotion.” (p. 17) In place of a more traditional reading of Borzage which stresses the transcendent and spiritual awakening of the characters, Gunning finds a strong drive in Borzage’s male characters towards “recovering a maternal unity” (p. 18) that stands opposed to the renunciation of the mother and identification with the father so common to the psychoanalytic readings of sexual and romantic relations in Hollywood cinema. It is this ‘incest theme’ that Gunning detects running through much of Borzage’s work. This theme does indeed occur in a number of the films although not all of them strictly related to mother love. I’ve Always Loved You (1946) involves several displaced incest elements: Catherine McLeod’s initial lack of sexual interest in William Carter is related to the fact that she thinks of him “like a brother.” When McLeod eventually does agree to marry Carter, Borzage dissolves from a shot of Carter embracing McLeod to Carter embracing his daughter from their eventual marriage, as the film moves ahead several years, two symbolic incestuous relations connected through a single dissolve. Dumont has expressed his impatience with those who detect incest themes in Borzage, finding such an approach too Lacanian. But one might just as easily see the incest theme as yet another manifestation of the close links Borzage’s films have with the folk and fairy tale, in which incest is a frequent motif. It seems to me that what is of interest here is not simply the incest theme as such but how it relates to a larger conception of sexual desire that runs throughout Borzage’s work. What does it mean to love someone else? And what are the boundaries of love itself? In Green Light (1937), Anita Louise describes her mother as someone who “loves everything—books, men, women, dogs…,” a description which links this love to a profoundly religious and Christian impulse but also one that cannot be contained by religion either. We are dealing, then, with a world which is not simply concerned with the formation of the couple but with a world of erotic possibilities, in which desire may conceivably be articulated in various forms and in which the word love itself contains multi-faceted connotations.


Borzage’s lovers so often retain a connection to childhood. Such a connection may be a symptom of the Americanness of these films and their belief in a fundamental innocence which lies at the basis of human behavior and action. It is this inability to create fully adult characters and story situations that Leslie Fiedler famously sees as the central problem male novelists in America have always had, their works dominated by male characters who are continuously in flight from marriage and adult relations with women and often bonding in unconscious homosexual relations with other men: “The ideal American postulates himself as the fatherless man, the eternal son of the mother.” (p. 338) Symbolically presiding over the birth of the American imagination for Fiedler is the figure of Rip Van Winkle, an asexual man who sleeps much of his life away in order to avoid the process of growing up. (p. 26) In Borzage’s Lazybones (1925), with its own displaced incest elements elsewhere discussed by Gunning (p. 19), the Buck Jones protagonist is specifically compared at one point to Rip Van Winkle. But Borzage’s cinema does not present an uncomplicated example of the type of American sensibility that Fiedler isolates. Certainly the basic drives of his male characters are not away from the possibility of sexual relations with women even if, in some cases, they may initially be hesitant towards them. On the contrary, the films repeatedly document the simultaneous drives that both female and male characters have towards the fulfillment of their erotic and romantic desires. If Borzage’s characters seldom completely lose their connection to childhood it may be that by retaining this connection they also retain a connection to a more spontaneous realm of eroticism, unencumbered by the potentially oppressive notion of “adult” heterosexual relations.

The eroticism of Borzage’s work, though, extends to another major element of mise en scène: the actor. This cinema is clearly one of expressive gestural bodies and beautiful faces responding to one another with directness and transparency, the camera transmitting this eroticism to the spectator in an equally direct and transparent manner that seems at once movingly naive and boldly modern. Prior to becoming a film director, Borzage was a successful actor on stage and (beginning in 1912) screen, an early example of what would become a long tradition of major directors who began as actors. Quite often for these actors-turned-filmmakers the primary method of using the camera is not for the seizing and framing of images—the camera as an instrument of power and control—but as a method of elucidating the interaction between the actors and of conveying this to the spectator in the most vivid manner possible, as though placing the spectator within the erotic space of the film. Borzage was known for his ability to create an extremely intimate atmosphere on the set of his films, an intimacy that played itself out primarily through a relationship between the director and his actors in which the actors often felt as though they were enveloped in a nurturing and romantic environment. During the silent period, and in a manner not uncommon for directors at the time, Borzage would often continuously talk to his actors while the camera was rolling, establishing a bond between the voice and presence of the filmmaker, standing just beside or behind the camera, and his camera subjects. (If the love scenes in his sound film A Farewell to Arms so often evoke those of his silent work it may be due to the intimacy also achieved through the voices of Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, so often pitched low and closely miked.) Late in his career, Borzage briefly returned to acting in George Sidney’s fascinating exercise in late Expressionism, Jeanne Eagels (1957). Here Borzage plays a version of himself directing Kim Novak as Eagels on the set of a silent film in precisely this manner. (As a matter of historical record, though, Borzage and Eagels never made a film together.)

Borzage himself sometimes spoke of the importance of directing his actors in such a way that the performances and the emotions of the scene were completed by the spectator: “Make the audience sentimental instead of the player. Make the audience act.” (cited by Dumont, p. 414; originally appeared in Cecilia Auger, “That Sentimental Gentleman from Hollywood, Frank Borzage Tells How”, New York Variety, March 7, 1933). This general approach towards the spectator is one strongly bound up with the silent era in which filmmakers were not simply concerned with creating stunning images but in creating images which seemed to speak directly to the spectator and which set up an implied dialogue between image and viewer. While Dumont (citing William K. Everson) argues that this silent conception of the viewer stands opposed to the practice of a Hitchcock and Hitchcock’s emotional manipulation of the spectator, this is not quite accurate. The Kuleshov effect, so important to Hitchcock, is probably the central textbook example from the silent era which conceives of the spectator as an active rather than passive participant in the unfolding of moving images. But if for Kuleshov and his followers the emotion most often arises in the relation between the individual shots of a montage sequence, in Borzage the emotion most often arises directly within the images themselves. Borzage’s images are at once transparent and slightly veiled, allowing for the spectator to mentally and emotionally fill in what is not fully visible or explicitly acted out. One of Borzage’s major successes as a screen actor was in the film The Wrath of the Gods (Reginald Barker, 1914) in which one of his co-stars was Sessue Hayakawa, with whom he was to co-star on three later occasions. Hayakawa’s performance in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat in1915 was a central one for establishing the importance of understatement in acting for the camera in which acting was based upon restricted gestural and facial expression. When Borzage began to direct, his approach to actors was influenced by this type of understatement which refused to Signify All to the spectator and is a major example of this move towards increasingly naturalistic performance styles. Borzage’s approach is not always consistent, however, and what one often finds is a mixing of styles in which supporting players will often perform in a more exaggerated or melodramatic style all the more to contrast with the subtlety of the leads. At any rate, it is through this approach that we are able to fill in and project onto these images which do not do all of the work for us but instead require a form of completion that was so central to Borzage and to the silent era in general. But how does this quality of understatement specifically get manifested?

In October of 1915, Motion Pictures magazine wrote that as an actor Borzage “has the reputation of having better control of facial expression than any other screen artist before the public today.” That same year he directed his first film, a two-reeler called Pitch O’ Chance, in which he also co-starred as he would continue to do for the next two years while also directing himself. As a director, the face assumes for Borzage (as it does for so many filmmakers) a privileged role, what Sarris has termed Borzage’s “emotional Eldorado.” (p. 140) As already noted, these faces are most often beautiful ones and the camera is as likely to be taken with male beauty as it is with female: Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms as much as Loretta Young in Man’s Castle (1933), Alan Curtis in Mannequin (1938) as much as Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? (1934). Borzage’s tendency in filming the face is one which aims towards an effect of slight immobility, the features not so much in motion and continually connoting thought as they are poised between movement and stasis, between the expression of emotion and the withdrawal of it. The frequent close-ups of Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven and Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? often seem suspended above the direct unfolding of the action, assuming a form of portraiture of infinitesimal movement specific to the cinema. Through the act of looking into these faces, the eyes often assume a central role, becoming the culminating moment in facial contemplation, from the large and sad liquid eyes of ZaSu Pitts in Lazybones to the ravaged beauty of Gail Russell’s equally liquid eyes in Moonrise (1948). At the end of History Is Made at Night (1937), Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur are going down on what they believe to be a sinking ocean liner. As they gaze at one another’s faces, as though attempting to take them in for one final time, Arthur asks Boyer, “Did you always look like this, your eyes?”

It is inevitable, then, that these beautiful and impassive faces of Borzage’s call out to be touched and throughout his body of work we find images in which the face is not simply an object of contemplation for the camera but also one in which the face is literally being touched by others. In Little Man, What Now?, for example, Douglass Montgomery repeatedly touches Margaret Sullavan’s face with his handkerchief, a gesture paralleled and somewhat parodied in the same film by DeWitt C. Jennings performing the same actions to Montgomery’s face. While in History Is Made at Night we find a merging of face and hand as first Boyer and then later Arthur draw a face directly onto their own hands which then assumes the role of a character they name Coco. But the hand in Borzage also assumes its own expressive functions through the subtle and expressive use of gesture. In Lucky Star (1929), the act of Charles Farrell washing Janet Gaynor’s hands for their first lunch together becomes a major step in bringing the two together and in Gaynor’s transformation from child into woman. Lazybones is among the most interesting of Borzage’s films in this regard in which gesture not only serves its immediate emotional function within a sequence but acquires structural meaning over the course of the narrative. In particular, the film draws a strong link between Pitts’s repeated gesture of placing her hand to her mouth at moments of emotional crisis and the same gesture being performed by her illegitimate daughter who is otherwise unaware that Pitts is her real mother.

But in this cinema of the body, Borzage’s concern with the emotional possibilities of the face and the gesturing hand will also manifest itself in a concern with the opposite end of the body. Belton, for example, has drawn attention to the repeated tight close-ups of not only hands but also feet in Moonrise as part of the “psychological intensity” of the images. (p. 112) Both Borzage and Fritz Lang filmed Molnar’s play Liliom, Borzage in 1930, Lang in 1933 and the intensity of male/female relations in the work of both directors has some points of contact. But for Lang, a footprint is invariably related to its status as a clue in a crime scene, something marked for death or capture. Footprints in the mud dominate the opening images of Lang’s 1941 anti-Nazi film, Man Hunt. But in Borzage’s anti-Nazi film of a year earlier, The Mortal Storm, footprints are quickly covered over by the falling snow, the merest trace or memory of the body that once placed them there. Our relationship to the physical in Borzage, to the totality of the body from top to bottom, is almost always in place. The comic nature of DeWitt C. Jennings in Little Man, What Now?, for example, is reinforced through the low-angle shots of his feet, while in History Is Made at Night the gesture of Jean Arthur kicking off her shoes to dance with Boyer barefoot becomes a crucial step in the intensification of their attraction for one another. Just before Janet Gaynor is taken off to prison in Street Angel she has an hour in which to say goodbye to Charles Farrell. A pivotal moment in this sequence occurs when he lies on their bed and she removes his boots, clutching and stroking his feet as she fights back tears while Farrell speaks of a possible male child they’ll have, “a funny boy with big feet” like him. And again Lazybones is central in which we find repeated shots of Buck Jones’s feet perched against a tree, marking his Rip Van Winkle nature even more firmly than his face. There is a well known publicity still from A Farewell to Arms showing Gary Cooper running his finger along the top of a woman’s foot as he looks up into her face, which is out of frame. While the image suggests something of the fetishistic world of Luis Buñuel, its function within A Farewell to Arms itself is not quite of this order. Cooper’s character in the film is an architect by profession (“The most ancient of arts,” he says, an almost Masonic statement) and he discusses the foot here in architectural terms, emphasizing the beauty of a foot’s arch.

We may isolate, then, a certain tension in Borzage’s work between the body as a form of architecture while architecture itself becomes an extension of the body. In much of the literature on Borzage we find the argument being put forth that the reality of space in his cinema exists ultimately in order to be dissolved through the spiritual power of the desires of the romantic couple: “All of Borzage’s objects are abstract non-representational entities of light and dark which are connected not by any spatial mechanics but by the generalised spiritual sense which seems to pervade the whole frame.” (Camper, p. 343.) Without wishing to completely disagree with this reading, I would also want to equally stress the tangibility of this world, the sheer presence of not only the bodies that inhabit these spaces but also the spaces themselves. As has often been noted, throughout Borzage we find the characters driven towards spaces which are marked purely by the force of the protagonists’ desires, most emblematically the top floor apartments of Seventh Heaven and Little Man, What Now? which literally lift the romantic couple above the harsh realities of the world below. But while often rendered in abstract and stylized terms, these spaces in Borzage rarely dissolve by the forces of desire, however much the protagonists may explicitly articulate such a desire. It may be more accurate to write that architecture and decor are, at the height of their expressivity, simultaneously made to the measure of the protagonists’ desires while also existing within their own right. The Shining Hour (1938) has two major works of architecture which stand at the center of the narrative conflicts. The one is the longtime (and luxurious) family home into which New Yorker Joan Crawford enters as the wife of son Melvyn Douglas, initially as a flight from the sterility of her New York existence; and the other is the unfinished new home, close to the family residence, in construction as the eventual refuge for Douglas and Crawford. It is the second of these which, while still not completed, is burned to the ground by Crawford’s hostile sister-in-law, unwilling to accept the working-class Crawford as a member of the family, causing both Douglas and Crawford to finally leave Wisconsin. Architecture, then, may function as the site of oppression as much as a potential refuge. “Born on the second floor, probably died on the fifth. Two lives spent climbing three flights of stairs,” is James Dunn’s hypothetical description of life and death in a tenement in Bad Girl, a line Dunn utters as he and Sally Eilers are standing on the stairs in the lobby of her tenement.

Staircases assume a privileged role throughout Borzage’s work, available to be read in multiple ways. Within Masonic rites, spiritual ascension is often represented through a staircase which “symbolizes the axis of the world uniting Heaven and Earth” (p. 436) with the famous staircase leading to Charles Farrell’s rooftop flat in Seventh Heaven perfectly corresponding to this simultaneous physical and spiritual ascension. The basic sense of movement in so much of Borzage is as vertical as it is horizontal, with spaces often conceived in terms of extreme levels and the characters frequently ascending and descending. Apart from its relationship to the Masonic, one may also see this fascination with levels and verticality as part of the films’ relationship to the world of the fairy tale and sentimental romance, which so often depend upon motifs of falling and ascending, and of transformations and renewal. At the same time, in much of melodrama staircases often function as crucial spaces of transition between levels, architectural symbols of psychological and class conflicts, as the line from Bad Girl quoted above indicates. The crane shots of Joan Crawford ascending and descending the stairs to her family’s New York tenement in Mannequin establish even more clearly than the space of the apartment itself the sense of economic despair that Crawford feels.

Much of the writing on Borzage tends to de-politicize his work, seeing in him a filmmaker whose primary impulse is to avoid the overtly ideological: Borzage as the director “with absolutely no interest in the workings of everyday life” (Jones, p. 33) and who “was only attracted to the universal and the everlasting” (Dumont, p. 404.) One need look no further than Bad Girl, however, with its detailed attention to working class life, its de-glamorized performances, and its engaging use of vernacular dialogue to see how Borzage may often show a great deal of interest in the workings of everyday life. (Lightning, it should be noted, is one recent critic who challenges this de-politicized view of Borzage.) Borzage was of Swiss, German, Italian and Austrian heritage (four nationalities that would assume an important background for the World War I setting of A Farewell to Arms). Throughout his work, as with a number of filmmakers of his generation, one finds a strong desire to document certain aspects of the American immigrant experience in which the relationship between American and European culture is a frequent dynamic: Europe comes to America, America goes to Europe. This may play itself out in the nature of the images themselves. As Dumont’s research has shown, Borzage ultimately decided against shooting Seventh Heaven in Paris but instead constructed a version of it on the Fox lot. What we get in the film is not a documentary-like recreation of that city but an American’s dream of it instead. It is this kind of imaginary European world concocted by Americans that Borzage would also draw upon for the Italy of Street Angel and the Germany of Little Man, What Now?, Three Comrades and The Moral Storm, in the latter three films the fantasy gradually giving way to nightmare as the rise of Nazism intrudes more strongly into each succeeding film.

But the relationship between Europe and America occurs within the narrative content of the films as well. It is to America that Joan Crawford and Clark Gable want to flee in Strange Cargo (1940). Europe literally comes to America in one of the high points of History Is Made at Night as French head waiter Boyer and Italian chef Leo Carrillo transform a faltering New York restaurant, with bad bouillabaisse and even worse service, into a first-rate establishment with a decidedly European flair. Borzage’s first major commercial breakthrough occurred in 1920 with Frances Marion’s adaptation of the Fannie Hurst story of Jewish immigrants, Humoresque, with its still-astonishing early location shots of the Lower East Side. Borzage most often depicts a culture that is fundamentally multi-ethnic and at the center of which are sharply drawn class and economic conflicts. Some of these details are purely comic in nature, as in the Jewish Chinese restaurant in Mannequin, with the waiter Horowitz in Chinese attire serving gefilte fish, Mandarin-style. But in such ostensibly minor films as Stranded (1935) and Big City (1937), the issue of immigration, of America as a space of refuge and of oppression in which notions of work and community are central, is at the very core of what those films are about. Dumont acknowledges the presence of such issues in Borzage’s work, describes them all in some detail (even quoting Borzage’s interest in the matter), and then finally dismisses them all, arguing that “in the end he shows only limited interest in social mechanisms or class struggles.” (p. 410) One wonders here whether it is a certain critical method that is showing “only limited interest” in these issues while a vital part of the films is being half erased.


That Borzage’s characters often express a desire to escape from the problems of the political, the social or the economic is obvious. What the overall positions of the films themselves are in relation to this desire is a subject for debate. “I was thinking of how nice it would be,” says Margaret Sullavan in Three Comrades, “to pick a time to be born. I’d pick a time of reason and quiet.” The notion of transcendence from the material world as articulated through alternate experiences of time is one which turns up in a number of Borzage films. In Three Comrades, for example, we find a strong relationship between how the characters perceive historical time and how they perceive personal time. The protagonists are regulars at a cafe precisely because it has no clock. A frequent customer in the cafe is a veteran of World War I whose only calendar is one shaped by the dates and battles of the war. The love between Sullavan and Robert Taylor forms the ultimate transcendence from the confused political situation of post-war Germany, a relationship in which “it isn’t day, it isn’t night. It’s the age of eternity.” The sheer intensity of physical and romantic attraction attempting to obliterate the restrictions of time and space recurs in Borzage and has clear relations to fairy tale and myth as well to more immediate manifestations in Romanticism and Surrealism. (As is well known, André Breton regarded the resolution of Seventh Heaven as a primary example of l’amour fou.) It is important, however, not to succumb too strongly to the allure of withdrawal from the social that the characters give voice to since it is by no means certain that the films are thoroughly devoted to a simple transcendence through love. Moonrise could not be clearer on this matter. Rex Ingram’s statement, “The worst crime is to resign from the human race,” is one which is borne out by the development of the film. Dane Clark’s initial desire simply to withdraw into the physical intimacy of his relationship with Gail Russell rather than face the consequences of his murder of Lloyd Bridges is eventually shown to be unrealizable. At the end, Clark “comes clean” and admits to the murder of Bridges. But by doing so he and Russell are able to even more firmly express their love for one another, seeing themselves and the world around them with a previously unknown clarity as the film closes on the image of the sun rising. “It’s wonderful to see your face, Dan,” says Russell, “To really see it.” This resolution encapsulates a fundamental aspect to Borzage’s cinema: if one transcends through intense love and physical passion one does so most thoroughly and profoundly by a direct confrontation with the social rather than by a flight from it.

The issues at stake in Borzage’s cinema, far from being old fashioned, could hardly be more urgent. In particular, they repeatedly address the implications of extreme sexual and romantic desires in relation to cultural or political environments that cannot fully account for these desires. In their fusion of the erotic and transcendent, and in their very instability, these desires repeatedly threaten to destabilize the social order. That Borzage’s films are also beautiful pieces of cinema, acts of seduction performed on the viewer, only intensifies the audacity of what Borzage has achieved. Borzage the Old-Fashioned Romantic? How about, for argument’s sake, Borzage the Romantic Modernist?

- Joe McElhaney no site Sense of Cinema

"Humoresque", Frank Borzage (1920)

Depois de um conjunto de westerns rápidos, Frank Borzage começa a construir uma carreira de autor com este "Humoresque", um filme a partir de uma novela de Fannie Hurst passada no judaico Lower East Side de Manhattan. Um filme menor mas que evidencia a marca melodramática e optimista do cinema de Borzage.

"Kohlhiesels Töchter" (Kohlhiesel's Daughters'), Ernst Lubitsch (1920)

"Kohlhiesels Töchter" é uma variação divertida sobre o tema da megera domada; contudo, o verdadeiro "tour de force" de Lubitsch é ter dado o papel das duas irmãs à mesma actriz (Jakob Tiedtke). O jogo duplo é divertido, com um humor constante.

O filme foi um grande sucesso popular, eventualmente o maior da fase alemã de Lubitsch.

"Way Down East", David Wark Griffith (1920)

Este punjente melodrama foi o último grande sucesso de D.W. Griffith e, na verdade o seu maior sucesso comercial desde o épico "The Birth of a Nation", que lhe permitiu manter-se como realizador independente, através dos seus estúdios Mamaroneck, durante vários anos.

Griffith foi criticado por ter adquirido os direitos da peça "Way Down East", considerado um drama datado por que entrincheirado nos ideiais vitorianos do final do séc. XIX. À superfície o filme mostra-nos o fascínio da inocente rapariga do campo, Anna Moore (Lillian Gish), pela grande cidade e que se acaba vítima da mentira sórdida que graça na urbe; a tragédia adensa-se de tal forma que a inocente rapariga torna-se insensível, ao ponto de rejeitar com desdém o amor igualmente inocente de um rapaz do campo, David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess).

Como Griffith apresentou o filme, trata-se de "A Simple Story of Plain People": "Since the beginning of time, Man has been polygamous -- even the saints of Biblical history. But the Son of Man gave a new thought and the world is growing nearer the true Ideal. He gave us One Man for One Woman. Not by our laws -- our statutes are now overburdened by ignored laws -- but with the heart of man, the truth must bloom that his greatest happiness lies in purity and constancy. Today Woman brought up from childhood to expect ONE CONSTANT MATE possibly suffers more than at any other point in the history of mankind. Because not yet has the Man-Animal reached this high standard -- except perhaps in theory".


E acima de tudo há Lillian Gish, que se desdobra desde a comédia chaplinesca, a turpor de emoções de cortar o coração, até sequências de histeria bruta. A cena do baptizado do seu nado morto é intensamente tocante.

"Way Down East" é também o filme em que Gish e Bartlett arriscam a vida pelo Cinema, na famosa cena do resgate de Gish do pedaço de gelo no rio à beira da queda de água. Cinema sem efeitos, onde a vida estava por um fio para se conseguir cenas imemoriais.

Oscar Micheaux

Born 2 January 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, USA. Died 25 March 1951 in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, of heart disease. Brother of producer Swan E. Micheaux. Married actress and producer Alice Burton Russell, 20 March 1926.

Writer, producer and director, Oscar Micheaux is the father of Afro-American cinema. The most prolific Afro-American filmmaker of the silent era, Micheaux produced more than 40 films between 1919 and 1940, and was active as a novelist until his death. Quaintly referred to as the “Cecil B. De Mille of Race Movies,” Micheaux was a controversial figure during his lifetime. Like today’s premier Afro-American director Spike Lee, Micheaux and his films were publicly misunderstood.

The grandson of a slave, and the fifth of 11 children, Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois. He worked at various jobs, a coal miner, a stockyards worker and a Pullman porter, before becoming a homesteader and novelist in Gregory, South Dakota, in the 1910s.

Failing to get his novel, The Homesteader, made into a film through the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Micheaux established his own motion picture and book publishing company while studying the techniques of film production. The Micheaux Film and Book Publishing Corporation, founded 1918 in Chicago, would soon be the most prolific of all black-owned independent film companies. The Homesteader (1919) with Charles D. Lucas, Evelyn Preer and Iris Hall was his first entry in the race-film industry.

A fledging industry known as “race movies,” existed in the United States from 1910 to the end of World War II. Made predominantly by Blacks (especially in the 1920s) for black audiences, these independent films emerged from a direct response to Jim Crow theaters and an exclusionary Hollywood system. They were a part of the Afro-American community’s attempts in countering and providing alternative images to the stereotypes so prevalent in mainstream culture. The William D. Foster Film Company, actor and cofounder Nobel Johnson’s Lincoln Motion Picture, The Richard F. Norman Company of Florida (The Flying Ace, 1926), and the Philadelphia-based Colored Players Film Corp. (The Scar of Shame, 1929) were other important race-film producers. Produced outside the Hollywood system, Micheaux’s race cinema cannot be viewed as commercial entertainment. An appreciation of them must take Afro-American history and the prevailing ideology into context.

Micheaux and other black filmmakers experienced manifold financial, technical and systemic obstacles in producing and distributing their films. He produced his films on low ‘shoestring’ budgets and marketed them himself peddling and reediting a single print from city to city for exhibitors, regional censorship boards and theatre owners. Always in search for new markets, Micheaux traveled to Europe and South America. An enterprising showman, Micheaux used this forte in persuading hesitant Southern theater owners to screen his films in segregated cinemas or at blacks-only “midnight ramble” showings. While on promotional tours, he would procure financial backers for upcoming projects, encourage black businessmen to invest in black theaters and scout for fresh screen talent. Micheaux Productions went bankrupt in 1928, reincorporated in 1930, going into final receivership in 1940.

Like D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, Micheaux also created his own star system/stock company of featured players. Evelyn Preer, a talented dramatic actress with the Lafayette Theatre Players Company, was his first leading lady. She starred in nine Micheaux features and was, in addition, a popular musical comedy and race recording artist. Lawrence Chenault, Lorenzo Tucker (dubbed the “black Rudolph Valentino”), Clarence Brooks, Ethel Moses, Andrew Bishop (a regular villain), Shingzie Howard, Alec Lovejoy, Katherine Noisette, Laura Bowman and his statuesque wife, Alice B. Russell, were other Micheaux regulars. Attractive and assertive personalities, they were detached from the Afro-American menial stereotypes found in Hollywood films. Biographical details about Micheaux players remain obscure.

Micheaux, a maverick and a social activist, did not hesitate in confronting issues that agitated both black and white audiences. His films interrogated the value systems of both communities in a variety of controversial subjects, causing problems with the press and state censors in the process. In essence, Micheaux’s films represented the emergence of a radical black voice in the mass media. Tales of mixed-race relationships or miscegenation was his favorite theme in critiques of ‘passing,’ assimilation and racial betrayal. His second feature, Within Our Gates (1920), was a rebuttal to D.W. Griffith’s Ku Klux Klan propaganda of The Birth of a Nation (1915). Micheaux’s multiple subplots revolve around the travails of heroine Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) and her attempt to raise money from a wealthy Boston patroness to save a Southern black school. Within Our Gates remains a poignant indictment of a Southern lynching and the attempted rape of the mixed race heroine by a white molester who turns out to be her father. Here, Micheaux counters and exposes the trajectory contradictions of Klan vigilantism and White America’s fears of miscegenation. His films reflected his racial ‘uplift’ didacticism and were part of his attempts to raise social consciousness while probing the black community’s values in a realistic, if not always ‘positive’ light.

Body and Soul (1925) featured Paul Robeson in his screen debut. Robeson plays a dual role of a ‘good’ twin brother and a bogus ‘preacher’ who preys on a small community’s religious fervor and then attempts to rape the heroine Julia Theresa Russell (Micheaux’s future sister-in-law). The Afro-American press, sometimes misguided, criticized him for representing corruption in the black clergy (a sensitive area) and ‘exploiting’ black urban life, crime and sexuality in his films. The film ran into trouble with New York censors. The censored and truncated print of Body and Soul, unfortunately, is all that survives of Micheaux’s original intentions.

Forgotten for many years, most of Micheaux’s films were mislaid or destroyed. The Homesteader (1919), The Brute (1920), The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), Birthright (1924), The House Behind the Cedars (1924), The Conjure Woman (1926), The Spider’s Web (1927), The Millionaire (1927), The Wages of Sin (1928) are among his presumed lost silent films. A Daughter of the Congo (1930), a part-talkie, and Easy Street (1930) are also presumed lost. The Library of Congress holds a 16mm reduction print of The Exile (1931), his first full-length sound feature.

Considered lost for decades, Within Our Gates (La Negra) was discovered in Madrid’s Filmoteca Espanol in 1990. The Library of Congress later restored and retranslated its subtitles. Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) discovered in a Belgian archive, and Body and Soul (restored by George Eastman House) are Micheaux’s earliest surviving features.

Only Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925) are available on VHS and DVD home video. His equally rare sound films, Veiled Aristocrats (1932), The Girl from Chicago (1932), Murder in Harlem (1935), God’s Stepchildren (1937), Swing! (1938) and Lying Lips (1939) are currently available.

Difficult to situate in history, it was convenient to ignore race filmmaking as an aesthetic or political practice. Today, Micheaux and his contemporaries (The R.F. Norman Company and The Colored Players Corporation) are experiencing a renaissance of critical study and appreciation. The recent efforts of archivists Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and J. Ronald Green have ensured that their legacy is finally being recognized as a worthy contribution to American cinema.

In 1987, Micheaux was honored with a star on Hollywood Boulevard. He remains a major film stylist and politico.

— por Joseph Worrell no site Silent Era

"Within our Gates", Oscar Micheaux

Oscar Micheaux foi o primeiro afro-americano a realizar longas-metragens comerciais. "Within Our Gates", a sua segunda obra, surge de alguma forma como uma resposta aos ensejos racistas de "The Birth of a Nation" de Griffith.

Neste filme Micheaux coloca no centro do seu melodrama uma mulata cuja família é linjada e está prestes a ser ser violada por um latifundiário sulista. Na realidade, a narrativa principal ocupa-se dos esforços da protagonista, Sylvia, para encontrar financiamento em Boston para a escola onde trabalha. Aparte os amores vários, e uma subtrama de gangsters, o núcleo do filme é o tema racial.

"L'Homme du Large", Marcel L'Herbier (1920)

"L’Homme du large", o primeiro grande filme de Marcel L'Herbier, apresenta um extraordinário e tocante quadro onde se degladiam as forças do bem e do mal que motivam o comportamento humano. Não estamos na presença de um filme de L´Herbier com a escala épica dos que lhe sucederiam, mas trata-se de um filme com uma estrutura narrativa cinematográfica e que, através de técnicas fotográficas inovadoras à época, conseguem agarrar o espectador à história.

"The Sheik", George Melford (1920)

O primeiro grande sucesso de Rudolfo Valentino, dando início a um culto de imagem de dimensão mundial.

Ernst Lubitsch

b. Jan. 29, 1892, Berlin. d. Nov. 30, 1947, Hollywood. The son of a prosperous tailor, he was drawn to the stage while participating in plays staged by his high school, which he quit at 16. To satisfy both his own urge to act and his father's desire that he take over the family business, he began leading a double life, working as a bookkeeper at his father's store by day and appearing in cabarets and music halls by night.

In 1911 he joined Max Reinhardt's famous Deutsches Theater, where he rapidly advanced from bit parts to character leads. To supplement his income, he took a job in 1912 as an apprentice and general-purpose handyman at Berlin's Bioscope film studios. The following year he began appearing in a series of film comedies, emphasizing ethnic Jewish humor, in which he played a character named Meyer. He became very successful as a comedian and soon began writing and directing his own films. Gradually, Lubitsch abandoned acting to concentrate on directing and in 1918 he made his mark as a serious director with Die Augen der Mummie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy), a tragic drama starring Pola Negri. That same year he scored an international box-office hit with Carmen (Gypsy Blood), also starring Negri. But these early achievements could not compare with his great triumph of 1919, Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), a sparkling satire caricaturizing American manners.

For the first time he demonstrated the subtle humor and the virtuoso visual wit that would in time become known as "the Lubitsch Touch". The style was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film. Lubitsch subsequently alternated between escapist comedies and grand-scale historical dramas; he enjoyed great international success with both. His reputation as a grand master of world cinema reached a new peak after the release of his spectacles Madame Du Barry (Passion, 1919) and Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920). In December of 1921, Lubitsch made his first trip to America, to promote his film Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh).

Late the following year he arrived in the US again, this time at the request of Mary Pickford, who wanted him to direct her in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. Upon arrival, he rejected the project and directed her instead in Rosita (1923). While deemed a failure from her point of view, it was enthusiastically received by critics. Lubitsch's next American project, The Marriage Circle (1924), was a resounding triumph and the progenitor of a long succession of commercial and critical hits that made "the Lubitsch Touch'' a household phrase. Lubitsch grasped the American psychology with an amazing accuracy and focused his satire on two main themes -- sex and money. With characteristic laconic wit, he depicted sex as a frivolous pastime, a sophisticated game moneyed people play to occupy their hours of leisure. To be safe, he set his plots against foreign backgrounds -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- or some mythical land, but the implication was clearly American and audiences rarely failed to recognize themselves or their friends, their manners, their foibles, their weaknesses. Lubitch's success in Hollywood was astounding. He directed an uninterrupted string of hits surpassing his previous achievement each time. His influence grew with every production, and his sophisticated comedy style was widely imitated by other directors. But none could duplicate Lubitsch at his best -- his incisive pictorial detail, his perfect timing, the nuances of gesture and facial expression that enabled his performers to reveal in a single brief shot the psychology of the characters they were playing.

His chain of triumphs during the silent period -- Forbidden Paradise, Kiss Me Again, Lady Windermere's Fan, The Student Prince, etc. -- remained unbroken even during the delicate transition to sound. If anything, witty dialogue and appropriate music and songs gave additional grip to the Lubitsch Touch. The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, and The Smiling Lieutenant were hailed by critics as masterpieces of the newly emerging musical genre. To everyone's surprise, Lubitsch's next film was a somber offbeat drama, The Man I Killed (later retitled Broken Lullaby), a fierce antiwar document, but he soon returned to his favorite haunt, the sophisticated comedy. While most of Lubitsch's silent films had been made for Warner Bros., most of his early sound pictures were for Paramount. In 1935 he was appointed that studio's production manager and subsequently produced his own films and supervised the production of films of other directors.

In 1939, Lubitsch scored, at MGM, one of the greatest triumphs of his career with Ninotchka, a scintillating political-sexual romp starring Greta Garbo. In 1942 he caused some controversy with his anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not to Be. The following year he signed a producer-director's contract with 20th Century-Fox, but his work was curtailed by failing health. In late 1944 he had to hand over the direction of A Royal Scandal to Otto Preminger although remaining on the project as the nominal producer. In March of 1947 he was awarded a special Academy Award for his "25-year contribution to motion pictures.'' He died later that year of a heart attack, his sixth. His last film, That Lady in Ermine, was completed by Otto Preminger and released posthumously in 1948. At Lubitsch's funeral, Billy Wilder is said to have pined, "No more Lubitsch,'' William Wyler responded, "Worse than that -- no more Lubitsch films.''

in The Film Encyclopedia de Ephraim Katz.

"Anna Boleyn", Ernst Lubitsch (1920)

Um Lubitsch atípico, porque foge à comédia social, mas histórico com a interpretação de Enmil Jannings como Henrique VIII; actuação dentro do Cinema Mudo que se pode equiparar perfeitamente à de Charles Laughton nesse mesmo papel no Cinema Sonoro.

"The Saphead", Herbert Blaché (1920)

A primeira longa metragem com a participação de Buster Keaton. E simultaneamente o menos cómico de todos os seus papéis no Cinema.

"The Saphead" trata-se do remake do filme de 1915 onde debutou Douglas Fairbanks, denominada "The Lamb" ("The Lamb" passa-se no velho oeste, enquanto que "The Saphead" tem como cenário Wall Street). E foi precisamente Fairbanks que sugeriu Keaton para o papel principal, tendo-o a MGM contratado apenas para aquele filme ... a medo, como se percebe pelo facto da sua fotografia não constar no poster original, apesar de ser a personagem mais recorrente em todo o filme.

"The Last of the Mohicans", Maurice Tourneur e Clarence Brown (1920)

O livro de James Fenimore Cooper tem sido várias vezes glossado no Cinema, desde 1911no filme de Theodore Marston até 1992 no filme de Michael Mann com Daniel Day-Lewis. Esta segunda adaptação foi realizada por Clarence Brown, que substituiu Tourneur depois deste ter ficado ferido com uma queda durante a produção do filme. De facto, as filmagens ocorreram em cenários naturais e selvagens, no lago Big Bear e no vale Yosemite Valley.

Narratives of transgression, from Jewish folktales to German cinema Paul Wegener's Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920) - Um ensaio de Cathy Gelbin

In this astute historical and textual analysis of Paul Wegener's German Expressionist classic, Cathy Gelbin argues that Der Golem "bears out the tension between the ethical particularities of the Jewish Golem tradition and its universalising employment, which now highlights the Jew as a problematic figure."

Between 1913 and 1923, the renowned stage actor Paul Wegener (1874-1948) directed and performed in a number of pioneering films of German art cinema, including Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913), Rübezahls Hochzeit (Rübezahl's Wedding, 1916) and three Golem films.

The first two renditions of the Golem legend, Der Golem (The Golem, 1914) and Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancer, 1917) transferred the story into the present. They are less remembered today. It was Wegener's third version of the material—this time recreating Jewish folk tales in a period setting—that became the highlight of his acting career, and that made its mark on cinema internationally. With its focus on the magical and uncanny, visually translated into the deeply symbolic sets and expressionistic lighting, Wegener's 1920 Golem picture exemplifies the director's conception of film as a medium of art, as well as the thematic and stylistic features of early German cinema at large.


From Jewish Mysticism to German cinema

The term "Golem" first appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Psalm 139:16 it connotes a shapeless mass, perhaps an embryo, while a derivative of the root in Isaiah 49:21 refers to female infertility. Medieval Jewish mystics adopted the term to describe an artificial man created via Cabbalistic ritual.

A Polish-Jewish folk-tale tradition centered around the creation of a Golem arose around 1600 and made its way into German literary Romanticism two hundred years later. Writing in the age of Jewish emancipation, Christian authors such as Achim von Arnim, ETA Hoffmann and others used the Golem to reflect the common perception of Jews as uncanny and corrupt. A second Jewish folk-tale tradition attributing the making of a Golem to the sixteenth-century Rabbi Löw of Prague developed around 1750. This tradition came to dominate the German literary imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and has informed most Golem renditions since.

Many fictional accounts, including Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem (The Golem; first published in 1915), bore hardly any resemblance to either the Cabbalistic or the Jewish folk-tale traditions. Wegener's film follows the folk tales around Löw more closely, though some critics[3] cite Meyrink's famous novel as inspiration for the film.[4] However, it is much more likely the case that Wegener's Der Student von Prag and his first Golem film, both released before the publication of Meyrink's novel, inspired Meyrink's novel. The latter certainly bears some interesting similarities with Wegener's Student von Prag, with Prague providing the scenery for the uncanny doppelgänger motif in both works.

Wegener was aware of the city's Jewish history, recreating its old Jewish cemetary for some of the scenes in his 1913 film. The grave of Rabbi Yehuda ben Betsalel, the historic Rabbi Löw, bears one of the few legible and well-preserved tombstones in this cemetary, and has remained a magnet for visitors throughout the centuries.

Working with other famous actors from Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, such as Albert Steinrück as Rabbi Löw and Ernst Deutsch as his Famulus (servant), Wegener's 1920 film portrays Rabbi Löw's creation of a Golem to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution. During an audience with the Emperor (Otto Gebühr), the Rabbi—trying to appease the Christian ruler—projects images from Jewish tradition onto an imaginary screen.

The disrespect shown by the Emperor and members of his court thwart the Rabbi's magic, causing the images and finally the entire palace to collapse in on itself. Only the Golem, played by Wegener himself, is able to save those present by supporting the falling beams with its giant body. Gratefully, the Emperor repeals his order of expulsion. Upon their return to the ghetto, the Rabbi decides to lay the increasingly disobedient and threatening Golem to rest. A love story between the Rabbi's alluring daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova) and Florian (Lothar Müthel), the Emperor's messenger, develops alongside the creation and ensuing rebellion of the Golem. Knight Florian bribes his way into the ghetto while the Rabbi is at the palace. Back in the ghetto, the Famulus—who is also in love with Miriam—discovers the presence of the stranger, revives the Golem and tells it to seize the intruder.

An orgy of destruction follows. The Golem kills Florian, drags Miriam away and sets the ghetto aflame. Then its steps outside the dark streets into the sunlight, smiling happily for the first time. A blonde girl playfully offers it an apple. Lifted up by the smiling Golem, the curious girl pulls out the amulet, leaving the Golem defunct at last.

An anti-Semitic film?

Earlier critics focused on the film's universal aspects, such as its aesthetic features, or its socio-historical relevance. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, perceived the resentful Golem as reflecting Germans' grudge against their international ostracism after World War I, and as anticipating the rise of the Nazi dictatorship.

The current critical reception of Wegener's Golem, however, oscillates between praise for the largely empathetic and historically accurate portrayal of medieval Jewish life on the one hand and charges of anti-Semitism on the other. For example, while Dietmar Pertsch discusses the film in its visual context, noting that it largely escapes the anti-Semitic iconography of Jewish figures in concurrent European theater and cinema,[6] Paul Cooke considers the film an example of cinematic anti-Semitism.

It is obvious, however, that Wegener's film largely refrains from the denunciatory visual representation of Jewish difference at the time. Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), for instance, highlighted the vampire's profile with its large hooked nose as the unmistakable sign of the racialised Jewish body. Furthermore, money, that powerful signifier of the alleged Jewish dominance over the world, plays practically no role in Wegener's construction of the Jews.

Abstaining from the dominant Shylock tradition of the cruel and money-grubbing Jew, the bribing of the pain-bent and emaciated gatekeeper of the ghetto by the arrogant Knight Florian instead exposes the Christian dominance over Jewish people at the time. In reversing the notion of the Jews' financial hold over the Christian, Der Golem effectively undoes the most dominant anti-Jewish stereotype since the Christian Middle Ages.

While it is true that the Rabbi's wielding of a Pentagramme in the creation scene evokes the negative Christian association of Jews with sorcery, Jewish folktales themselves portray the Golem as a work of magic. Löw's appearance in an embroidered white hat during the animation of the Golem likens the Rabbi to a wonderous magician, indeed a divine creator like the Hebrew deity, rather than the satanic witches present in anti-Semitic discourse. Also tellingly, this is not the pointed infidels' or witches' hat that was historically enforced on medieval Jews and is shown in other scenes together with the discriminatory yellow badge to convey a sense of historical accuracy.

Furthermore, the filmic evocation of Goethe's Faust – that work viewed as the pinnacle of German classical literature – casts Jewish themes as the stuff of high culture. Astaroth, the spirit revealing the secret word that animates the Golem, appears as a Mephistotelian image; and like Faust, Rabbi Löw is assisted by a Famulus. The reversal of the master-servant relationship forged between Faust and Mephisto, and Rabbi Löw and the Golem respectively, further render Löw a Faustian figure.

Wegener's film casts Löw as a symbol of the artist and the unstable implication of his products. The theatrical references of the film, including the performance of accomplished Reinhardt actors and the highly artistic sets, challenged the concurrent dismissal of cinema as a medium of low culture.

The Golem in turn postulates the autonomy of all creation, including the work of art, and warns against its idle uses. Like the Rabbi's moving images, the Golem represents a transgression against the Biblical prohibition to make an image, which necessitates the collapse of both creations in the Jewish Golem tales.

The film bears out the tension between the ethical particularities of the Jewish Golem tradition and its universalising employment, which now highlights the Jew as a problematic figure. According to the anti-Semitic accusation Jews could create only flawed works of art. This charge reverberates in the association of Löw with the challenged medium of film.

In another reversion of traditional anti-Semitic motifs, Löw and his creations signify the positive difference between "authentic" art and its shallow correlatives in the Christian realm. It is the Christian court that epitomises the negatively configured desire for cheap mass entertainment with the jester as its symbol, unable to appreciate the sublimity of Löw's artistic creation.


Crisis of gender

The Golem figure ties together multiple narratives of transgression in the film. The sequential interweaving of the Golem's creation and Miriam's involvement with the Knight suggests a parallelism between the monster and the woman as rebellious children figures of the Rabbi. Itself a transgression against divine decree and of the "natural," the Golem signifies the potential for unlawful "hybrid" creation in Miriam's liason with the Christian.

At the same time, the Golem serves as an ambiguous metaphor for the destructive consequences of untamed male desire and of masculinity as the re-ordering principle. The film's message ultimately is conservative, calling for a reinstatement of the sexual, ethnic-religious and gendered bounds it initially undermines.

Compared to the representation of Löw as an artist, Wegener's gendered images of Jews and Christians fall more along the lines of stereotypical discourses on the Jew. The visual contrasting of gesticulating Jews (appearing as masses of black-clad old men) with young and fair Christians revisits the Christian association of Jews with darkness, and the notion of the Jew as prone to hysteria.

Anti-Jewish stereotypes also mark the portrayal of Miriam as the dark and seductive Jewish woman, while Christian women at the court shy away from the Golem's advances. Even more strongly, the blonde girls at the end of the film signify innocence and virginity, though the apple implies the danger of temptation emanating from all femininity.

Yet the polarity between the images of Jewish and Christian women is blatant. Outside the ghetto walls, the Golem sees a mother and child bringing flowers to a statue of the Virgin Mary and her baby Jesus. Significantly, the name of the Christian Madonna represents the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Miriam.

The Jewish woman thus exemplifies the destructive allure of the female sex unless restrained by Christian chastity, domesticity and maternity. The soulless Golem equally contrasts with the naturalised image of mother and child who are bathed in light and aligned with the Christian world. This construction evokes the claim by Tertullian that "the soul is by nature Christian," an assertion still cited in the Twentieth Century.

Whether intended or not, however, the juxtaposition between the motherless Golem and the Christian Messiah also reopens the question of the latter's unclear paternal origins. The visual association between both figures implicitly parodies the assertion of Christianity as "natural," a term hardly descriptive of the immaculate conception. As Matthew Biro suggests, the cyborg in Weimar art often represents alternative models of masculinity.

Although Biro does not include the Golem in his exploration of figures of technology, the Golem can be classed among the wider theme of the artificial anthropoid that dominated the 1920s German screen. The Golem's monstrous urge for Miriam echoes both the consummated desire of the Christian Knight and the violent frustration of the Famulus which leads to Florian's destruction. In configuring the disintegration of male desire from restraint to enaction and rape, the android represents the crisis of masculinity brought on by the allure of the Jewish woman as the quintessential "New Woman."

Revisiting Miriam's monstrous transgression on her, the Golem finally turns into a tool to reinstate the patriarchal order and its ethnic-religious confines. It is now that the Famulus assures Miriam that he will forgive her and keep the secret of her misdemeanor. The "New Man" thus inadvertently requires a woman whose potential for transgression titillates, but who ultimately is bounded both sexually and ethnically.

The legacy of Der Golem

The imprint of Wegener's Golem can be found in a number of later films with android and monster figures. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) appears as a modernist Christian version of the medieval Jewish theme of the Golem. In Lang's film, the engeneer Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), his name bearing Jewish implications, creates a destructive female cyborg as the alluring doppelgänger of the virtuous and Madonna-like Maria (Brigitte Helm).

This narrative construction seems inspired not only by Wegener's contrasting of Jewish and Christian female figures, but also by Achim von Arnim's 1812 story Isabella von Ägypten, the first German literary text to feature a Golem.[22] Other film monsters influenced by Wegener's Golem, namely its physique and racialised love drama, also reappear in James Whale's Frankenstein (1937), and Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933).

It is less known that Veit Harlan's anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (Jew Süß, 1940) invoked Wegener's Golem film, which older German audiences still would have remembered. Where Wegener's film closes with an image of a Star of David, Harlan's film opens with this image as if to present itself as a sequel.

Again, Rabbi Löw is seen star-gazing, this time a morally corrupt and physically deformed man in contrast to his aestheticised potrayal in Wegener's Golem. To create the impression of factual accuracy, Harlan shot key scenes portraying the alleged infamy of the Jews in Prague's Old-New Synagogue, where the historical Löw officiated and is said to have preserved the remains of his Golem.

Despite its slippage into stereotypes, it would not be fair to charge Wegener's film for its exploitation to justify a state-sanctioned genocide. Rather, it foretells the failure of the Jewish dream of assimilation when, in leaving the ghetto walls, the Golem figure signifies the search for an autonomous Jewish self within the Christian-Jewish constellation. Its tragic destruction anticipates the deadly ending of this Jewish dream between 1933 and 1945.

However, in the Jewish folktale tradition the Golem is also a figure of return, awaiting revival in the days to come. Wegener's Der Golem similiarly enjoys renewed popularity among today's German audiences, while a number of post-war Jewish artists are drawing on the Golem to declare the re-emergence of Jewish life in Germany. Undoubtedly, Wegener made a significant contribution to the enduring popularity of the Golem, both in German culture and internationally.

"Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam" - crítica por PAULO ALCARVA
Realização: Carl Boese, Paul Wegener
Argumento: Henrik Galeen e Paul Wegener
Fotografía: Karl Freund e Guido Seeber
Interpretações: Paul Wegener (Golem), Albert Steinrück (Rabi Löw), Lyda Salmonova (Miriam, filha do Rabi), Ernst Deutsch, Hans Stürm, Max Kronert, Otto Gebühr.

Considerado uma das obras fundamentais do cinema Expressionista Alemão, "Der Golem" é um filme que preserva grande parte de sua força até aos nossos dias, impressionando pela fotografia e pela ousadia dos seus efeitos especiais. Os efeitos da sequência em que Löw evoca as forças sobrenaturais são muito bem trabalhados e criam uma convincente atmosfera de magia. Num outro momento, quando o Rabi conta a história de seu povo na corte do Kaiser, através da magia, abre-se uma janela sobreposta com imagens do Êxodo; este efeito cria um resultado impressionante que ainda hoje (e para sempre) me deixa de boca aberta.

Mas não são apenas os efeitos visuais que impressionam em "Der Golem". O filme possui também um óptimo argumento, com suspense e reveses no desenrolar da acção. O facto da criatura, em determinado momento, não mais obedecer ao seu criador ao tomar consciência da sua existência, é um elemento que enriquece o argumento. O resultado disso é a inevitável tragédia.

"Der Golem" dialoga directamente com "Frankenstein" de Mary Shelley, clássico da literatura inglesa. Os desdobramentos do filme levam a uma reflexão sobre as consequências de se evocar forças sobrenaturais, mas também não deixa de ser uma metáfora dos riscos de se "brincar" a Deus, dando vida a algo inanimado, exactamente como no livro de Shelley. No filme, a referência bíblica fica evidente pelo facto do Golem ser feito de barro.

No final, o mal maior é evitado pela mais improvável das forças. É através da ingenuidade de uma criança que ele será detido. Um desfecho que guarda em si uma notória poesia.

"Der Golem" é um filme que precisa ser resgatado e valorizado, sobretudo no contexto do Cinema Expressionista Alemão, ombreando com os sempre (e bem) citados "Nosferatu", "Dr. Kaligari" e "M".

"Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam", Carl Boese e Paul Wegener

Adaptado por Carl Boese e Paul Wegener de uma lenda do gueto judeu de Praga, "Der Golem" conta-nos a história do rabi Low que, para proteger o seu povo da ameaça de um pogrom, dá vida a uma estátua de barro com a ajuda das forças das trevas. Mas, depois de cumprida a sua missão, o "golem"" é de novo animado para satisfazer a vingança de um apaixonado pela filha do rabi, e destrói tudo à sua volta.

"Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam" trata-se da segunda adaptação deste mito hebreu, depois do filme homónimo de 1915 co-realizado também por Paul Wegener mas, então, na companhia de Henrik Galeen.

"Hamlet", Sven Gade e Heinz Schall

Trata-se de uma livre e subversiva adaptação da iconoclasta peça de Shakespeare, numa prova vigorosa da pujança cultural de uma Alemanha do pós-guerra. Neste "Hamlet" Gertrudes, a rainha dinamarquesa, mascara a sua filha de rapaz, que vive toda a sua vida como príncepe Hamlet (Asta Nielsen no seu auge). Quando o rei é morte pelo seu irmão Cláudio, Hamlet enceta a vingança com Horácio, seu amigo e secreto amor. E quando Hamlet é assassinado nos braços de Horácio, este descobre que o príncipe é uma mulher.

"The Miracle Man", George Loane Tucker (1919)

O grande "blockbuster" de 1919 é hoje um ilustre desconhecido, até porque apenas se conhecem dois fragmentos do filme baseado numa peça do "show-man" George M. Cohan (com estátua em Times Square).