Mandragore

I've just seen the world theatrical premier of the Munich Filmmuseum's restoration of this classic, presented by University of Chicago's Documentary Film Group in cooperation with Chicago's Goethe Institute and Lufthansa. Live piano accompaniment was provided by the excellent Aljoshe Zimmerman with an introduction by Stefan Drößler, director of the Filmmuseum. Zimmerman composed the score for the Filmmuseum and additionally accompanied "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" (also restored and presented as a double feature). The restoration was pieced together largely from surviving reels from Russia and Denmark, which focused on Alraune's mother and father, respectively. The restoration sports quite a few intertitles, in German, some of which were present in the original. Absolutely remarkable, and a must for anyone who appreciates excellent cinema.

An unscrupulous doctor (Paul Wegener) creates a living 'mandrake', the soulless offspring of a prostitute inseminated with the semen taken from an executed criminal. The unnatural progeny, Alraune (German for mandrake), is played by temptress extraordinaire Brigitte Helm, best known for playing the saintly Maria and her evil Maschinenmensch avatar in Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' (1927). Although the film is sometimes classified as horror/science fiction, it is more of a romantic melodrama, as the doctor slowly becomes infatuated with his creation, who is beginning to aspire to human feelings. Human artificial insemination had been around since the late 1700s, so other than the choice of sperm donor, there is nothing particularly novel about the premise, which is essentially a test of the frequently overly-simplified 'nature/nurture' dichotomy (in reality, it is nature 'plus' nurture, not nature 'or' nurture). The eponymous 1911 novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers had been films twice before this version and several times afterwards but the 1928 silent is considered to be truest to the original story. The film has not aged well - not a lot happens and the silent acting comes off as a bit theatrical. There are several versions on-line, with and without music. The image quality in the one I watched was not great but the score, a mix of recognisable 'classics', helped pass the time spent watching the relatively boring film.

The Austrian filmmaker Henrik Galeen is one of the beacons of the rightly celebrated expressionism of German film in the 10s and 20s, while his name is wrongly known to very few and mostly goes under the weight of the work of directors such as Fritz Lang or Robert Wiene. His work Alraune shows how exceptional Galeen was at what he did.

Galeen uses the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, which anticipated the concept of artificial insemination by decades and addressed it. The director brought the book, and thus the subject, to a wider audience than Ewers' book could.

A Frankenstein-esque professor (the equally gifted filmmaker Paul Wegener, who later became an opportunist through his association with the fascists of National Socialism) plans to create a woman based on the Alraune myth, i.e. The human-shaped plant that symbolizes misfortune and happiness can bring, especially in relation to childbearing. The professor thinks about the breeding of certain types of people in an anti-humanistic manner and decides, to explain his words, to use "degraded subjects of society" for this experiment. The portrayal of the involuntary nature of the participants, the inhuman view of people and human experiments, the lack of ethics on the part of a scholar or doctor are all anticipations of what would soon doom Germany and then Europe and large parts of the world. The result is Alraune (Brigitte Helm), the first human being to use artificial insemination. She grew up in a convent school, apparently an experiment in the perverted educational-theoretical sense of the neo-humanists, looking for the relationship between genetics, i.e. The predestination of human existence, and socialization, i.e. The influences of the environment on the human individual. Alraune escapes from this experiment and ends up at the circus after her anti-social attitude has already been shown several times. Helm plays Alraune really impressive. She vacillates between the experimental malignancy of the being and the incomprehension of one's own being, which triggers sadness in the main character.

The professor can finally find Alraune, but Alraune finds out what kind of machinations she came into being and decides, almost according to her nature, but still understandable for everyone, to take revenge on the professor. This requires an understanding of injustice, through which the wonderful dialectic of the film stands out very clearly. Mandrake may be created from the "corrupt", but the basis of her nature lies in the facets of the human. The professor, on the other hand, came about "naturally" but is himself a being who inflicts suffering on other people - and this without the history of the injustice inflicted that Alraune experienced.

The magical, surreal aspects of the plot now come more and more to the fore through the main character. She seduces the professor and ruins him, especially financially; the human aspect no longer seemed to have played a major role in this blueprint of fascist medicine.

Ultimately, after completing her revenge, Alraune decides against the predestination of the experiment and proves the will of man as the good of his self-determination. The fact that love is the decisive factor here is part of the history of modern educational sciences, which rightly determined that, for example, parental love or friendly affection play an important role in the good development of a human being.

In this way, Henrik Galeen packs a fundamentally humanistic statement into an hour-and-a-half film and inspires with the basic characteristics of expressionist filmmaking. Impressive images, surreal confusion, a spider's web of theses and refutations make this film a classic in film history.

I guess my feeling is what you may hear about this film before you watch it, is actually more interesting than watching the film itself.

Not only are virtually all the scenes in this film dialogue scenes, there is very little going on visually other than photographing these scenes in a static way. To explain other problems I need to go vaguely into some details but they don't contain any real spoilers, no specifics will be gone into.

So you know going in, this is a sort of Frankenstein film, meaning a man creates a being in this case a female. So you'd expect a creation scene? Nope, not in this film. There is an escape scene later, you'd expect that'd be an exciting scene. Nope they tell you about the escape afterwards. The film is just not interesting in anything purely visual, the exception being a couple shots of the Mandrake root. Kind of like Vertigo, which is a film whose unspoken subject in Necrophilia, this film's unspoken subject is Incest. But also like Vertigo the film isn't really about this "unspoken" subject really, it's just there for as Hitch might say, "naughty" people to think about outside the real content of the film itself.

As a talky film and lacking the ability to talk the film moves at a very slow pace. This is the type silent film where they show people's lips and mouths moving for a long time, you cut to the intertitle to explai what they say, then you cut back to the scene and watch them still speaking. This is not a unique thing to this silent film, but the smarter filmmakers didn't do this.

The lead female Alraune is acted pretty well, but all the acting is pretty surface level and pretty "Big," again not something that can be common in silent films, but not in the best of them.

Also as I write this in 2025, no good version of the film exists so the translations I could find from German into English were pretty bad and the visual quality also poor. I hear a restoration exists in HD. That would certainly help the film. It will however remain a static and talky film.

There can't be a review giving this silent movie any proper judgement. One star is as possible as ten stars are since you are guessing anyway, because whatever version you watch, it is incomplete: The longest version up to date, being merged from Russian and Italian analog material, is still missing 400 m. Especially a dance performance of vanguard artist Valeska Geert is totally lost, among other scenes. And this might also explain why we don't see laboratory scenes of Alraune's making.

So this movie lacks coherence, though the acting of Wegener and Helm is superb and subtle, unlike common silent movies. Still, if you are not (yet) into silent movies or Brigitte Helm's eyes, better start with one that wasn't so much tampered with. But if you'll watch this one, then you are to enjoy a great allegory about humanity being proud of a creation of its own making, then falling for it which works on the destruction of its creator.