Genuine
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Genuine |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1920 |
| length | (Fragment) 43 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert Wiene |
| script | Carl Mayer |
| production |
Decla-Bioskop AG, Berlin Producer: Erich Pommer Rudolf Meinert |
| camera | Willy Hameister |
| occupation | |
| |
Genuine. The Tragedy of a Strange House is the title of a German feature film by Robert Wiene from 1920. Stylistically, the film can be attributed to Expressionism .
action
Embedded in a brief framework story, the film tells the story of the young Genuine - dreamed of by a painter - who is made a priestess by an oriental sect and drawn into bloodthirsty rituals. During this experience she changed herself into a cruel personality and remained so when she was stolen by slave traders and offered for sale in a market. Her buyer is the voyeuristic old Lord Melo, an eccentric who locks the young woman in a cage-like house surrounded by a high wall and, out of jealousy, does not allow strangers to enter. He only sends the equally solitary old barber Guyard to come to have his shave every day. When Guyard is prevented one day and sends his nephew and apprentice Florian to replace him, the tragedy takes its course. Genuine beguiles the young barber, who cuts the old tyrant's throat with a razor. Genuine uses her regained freedom to quench her thirst for blood and, as a femme fatale , to destroy all available men: as a token of love, she demands suicide of them. She finds her own bloody end when the mob, searching for the mad barber, enters the house and stabs Genuine.
Production history, stylistic devices and reception
Robert Wiene produced Genuine immediately after his masterpiece Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to build on the artistic and commercial success of this film. He hired Carl Mayer again for the script . For the decorations and costumes, Wiene got the expressionist painter, graphic artist and set designer César Klein , a co-founder of the Berlin November group . Together with Walter Reimann , Klein created an extremely lavish decor for Genuine that reused spiral staircase elements from Caligari and invented a snail-shaped garden, similar to the one that appeared a few years later in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis . As a costume designer, Klein painted some of the decorations directly onto the body of the actress Fern Andra . The shooting took place in the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg , today's Studio Babelsberg .
The premiere of the film, which the film inspection agency had placed under youth ban six days earlier, took place on September 2, 1920 in the Berlin Marble House . In the overwhelming press judgments, the film was partially criticized as "over-expressionistic", and it was not a huge success at the box office either. However, Genuine is remarkable in terms of film history in terms of the portrayal of the Afro-German actor Louis Brody , who came from the former German colony of Cameroon and was demonized and eroticized as a representative of a “natural exoticism [...] at the same time”. From then on, Brody had numerous roles in the Weimar Republic, including in the Babelsberg productions Der müde Tod (1921) and Die Boxerbraut (1926).
In her book about the German silent film, The Demonian Screen , Lotte Eisner criticizes above all the craftsmanship superficiality of the rich decorations, which - where they are not downright oppressive to the actors - dissonantically contrasts with the naturalistic play of the actors.
The film, which had a length of 2286 m (approx. 83 min.) At the time of the censorship and of which a large part was lost over the years, was restored by film archives in Munich , Toulouse and Bologna in 1996 and was forced to do so in November 1996 strongly abbreviated version listed again.
In 2019, a version with a running time of 1:29:27 with French titles was posted on Youtube.
criticism
“Since the author of the 'Caligari film', Carl Mayer, and its director Robert Wiene were responsible for this 'Tragedy of a Strange House', it was assumed that the expressionist experiments should continue here. Only the creator of the decorations and costumes, Cesar Klein, has tried his hand at a completely new area in this film, which also has a wide range of painterly richness, but confuses the pure theatrical line through too much restless linework and bizarre arabesques. Even the events, fantastic and cruel, do not have the compelling necessity of the 'Caligari' act. The female vampire of this magical world is Fern Andra. With all the good will to break free from the cliché, she does not manage to make sense of the demonic content of the role. On the other hand, HH v. Twardowsky as an ecstatic youth and Ernst Gronau as the insane owner of the haunted house through his instinct for a stylish effect. After all, the work is noteworthy as a new attempt to save the film from the sphere of everyday life. "
Web links
- Genuine at filmportal.de
- Genuine in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Information about the film (www.filmhistoriker.de)
- Movie poster by Josef Fenneker ( Deutsche Kinemathek )
Individual evidence
- ^ Filmmuseum Potsdam: 1920 ( Memento from November 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) filmmuseum-potsdam.de, accessed on April 20, 2015
- ^ Filmportal.de: "Everything moves in the Weimar Republic" filmportal.de, accessed on April 20, 2015
- ^ Filmportal.de: "Everything moves in the Weimar Republic" filmportal.de, accessed on April 20, 2015
- ^ Criticism at Filmportal.de