Der Student von Prag

I watched Alpha's DVD of this, which was only about forty-one minutes long. I don't know if it was missing scenes, or run at a faster speed, or what, to account for the difference from the running time IMDb has. As with Alpha's DVD of the remake, I didn't particularly care for the musical score they'd added. I think it's possible they also missed some of the intertitles; one of the other users mentions something Balduin says after his reflection is taken that wasn't in the copy I viewed.

A renowned fencer asks a man named Scapinelli to procure him a winning lottery ticket, or a woman with a large dowry. The opening credits indicate Scapinelli is a sorcerer; he isn't used much in this film, and we don't know really anything about him when we first meet him, or what relationship Balduin has with him. In the remake, Balduin doesn't ask for those things, just wishes for a rich woman (not expecting the wish to come true), and Scapinelli promises to deliver.

A rich woman who is riding horses with her fiancé (also her first cousin) falls off her horse into a body of water, and Balduin saves her. In the remake, it's clear that Scapinelli guides her horse to Balduin and then causes the horse to act wildly, until Balduin scoops her off it. Here, it's unclear that Scapinelli had anything to do with it.

There are many scenes here that are reproduced in the sequel. Possibly even some of the same camera shots are copied.

The ending is not as powerful as the ending of the sequel. Still, this was interesting to watch and at the price of Alpha's DVDs, a bargain. Perhaps a better edition will come out sometime in the future.

"The Student of Prague" is an early feature-length horror drama or, rather, it is an "autorenfilm" (i.e. an author's film). It's a piece of a movement of many movements that tried to lend cultural respectability to cinema, or just make a profit, by adapting literature or theatre onto the screen. Fortunately, the story of this book with moving pictures is good. Using Alfred de Musset's poem and a story by Edgar Allen Poe, it centers on a doppelgänger theme.

Unfortunately, the most cinematic this film gets is the double exposure effects to make Paul Wegener appear twice within scenes. Guido Seeber was a special effects wizard for his day, but he's not very good at positioning the camera or moving it. Film scholar Leon Hunt (printed in "Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative"), however, has made an interesting analysis on this film using framing to amplify the doubles theme: characters being split by left/right, near/far and frontal/diagonal framing of characters and shots. Regardless, the film mostly consists of extended long shots from a fixed position, which is noticeably primitive. Worse is the lack of editing; there's very little scene dissection and scenes linger. None of this is unusual for 1913, but there were more advanced pictures in this respect around the same time, including the better parts of "Atlantis" (August Blom, 1913), "Twilight of a Woman's Soul" (Yevgeni Bauer, 1913) and the short films of D.W. Griffith.

An expanded universal film vocabulary by 1926 would allow for a superior remake. Furthermore, the remake has a reason for the Lyduschka character--other than being an occasional troublemaker and spectator surrogate. Here, the obtrusively acted gypsy lurks around, seemingly, with a cloak of invisibility. I know their world is silent to me, but I assume, with their lips moving and such, that their world would not be silent to them, so how can Lyduschka leer over others' shoulders and not be noticed?

Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting early films conceptually. Wegener, who seems to have been the primary mind behind it, in addition to playing the lead, would later play the title role and co-direct "The Golem" in 1920--helping to further inaugurate a dark, supernatural thread in German silent cinema.

(Note: The first version I viewed was about an hour long (surely not quite complete) and was in poor condition, with faces bleached at times and such. I'm not sure who was the distributor. I've also since seen the Alpha DVD, which, at 41 minutes, is missing footage present in the aforementioned print and also has fewer and very different title cards, but is visually not as bad. The repetitive score is best muted, though.)

Director Paul Wegener also stars as Balduin, the student of the title who is short of funds and so agrees to humor the strange offer from Scapinelli (John Gottowt) to sell his reflection for a large amount of gold. Balduin is stunned when, after signing the contract, his reflection steps out of a mirror and follows Scapinelli out the door. Balduin uses his new-found fortune to try and woo the Countess von Schwarzenberg (Grete Berger), but his mirror doppelganger causes much trouble and confusion.

This is fairly primitive stuff, with an immobile camera, stage framing, and zero close-ups or medium shots. There are a number of basic doubling effects used for when Balduin and his evil twin are on screen together that surely wowed audiences of the day. The sets and costumes are fine. I'm not sure this would be of much interest to anyone outside of film historians, though, as it lacks any sense of pacing or even character beyond the most arbitrary.

This film marks the beginning of the Golden Age of Silent Horror movies emanating from Germany, though its style is not yet what would come to be defined "Expressionist". I had watched it many years ago on Italian TV and remember liking it quite a bit though, in retrospect, it suffers in comparison with the superior 1926 remake (not least because that one is more than twice its length!); it's still well worth watching and remains full of interest today, also because it led directly to Paul Wegener's trademark role of The Golem in a famous trilogy, which unfortunately is almost impossible to re-evaluate today since only the third entry in the series seems to have survived! The accompanying synthesizer score on the Alpha DVD was quite unnerving in its relentless repetitiveness which, in hindsight, perfectly suited the doppelganger theme of the movie.

Predating the German Expressionist movement in film (predating even World War I), this is the granddaddy of them all: the very first full-length horror movie. Being the first, we do not demand perfection from it; this film is as raw as William Burroughs's debut novel "Junky" or the first Stooges album, and suitably so. But the viewer will be pleasantly surprised that "The Student of Prague" still packs a punch after more than a century. From Paul Wegener's haunted, compelling performance as Balduin to the imposing backdrop of Prague with its spectral spires, there is much to appreciate in this film...and on its own terms, not just in its perceptible influence on numerous later productions. (Those who have seen "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", however, will note the visual debt that film's title villain owes to Scapinelli, the leering, top-hatted sorcerer portrayed by John Gottowt in "The Student of Prague".) A must-see for all students of film history.