Das Tagebuch des Dr. Hart

Paul Leni is a German director who is today best-known for the classic Conrad Veidt film "The Man Who Laughs" (1928). But that was towards the end of Leni's career: the director died quite young. He started his directorial career amidst WW1, and "Das Tagebuch des Dr. Hart" (The Diary of Dr. Hart, 1918) is, depending on the source, his first, second, or third film. It is a contemporary account of World War One, with a clearly propagandist endgame.

Dr. Robert Hart (Heinrich Schroth) is the quintessential German ideal, a man, whom everybody loves. Everybody except Count Bronislaw (Ernst Hoffmann) that is. He has his eye on the same woman, but they don't have the time to solve it, since the war breaks out. Bronislaw goes to serve the Russian armed forces, while Hart enlists as a field medic for the German side. Russian cossacks are destroying the Polish countryside, terrorizing the people and poisoning their wells. So the German heroes must save Poland by occupying it. Poland becomes independent, and Hart and Bronislaw becomes friends, just as their two nations should. Friends forever.

It is a curious historical product, to say the least. The propagandist tendencies are hammered in so hard, that it becomes impossible to enjoy the film as a drama. That is not to say that Leni is doing a bad job, director-wise. He manages to cram in some very nice shots, like the one of Dr. Hart nursing a wounded soldier on the roadside, as the faceless soldiers in the background march to battle. There is also explosions and some action sequences, which are directed fairly well. Character-wise this does not work, because the characters lack genuine personalities. They are just supposed to be "German", or "Polish", or "Woman".

The film tries to honor the important service provided by field medics, or at least the German ones. This goal gets a little bit lost, I feel, when the film starts to ponder the relationship between the nations. The depiction is very one-sided. Russians are shown as savages, and Germans as heroes. Poland owes its very existence to Germany, it appears. The film does not hold up, but it's interesting nevertheless.

Almost a short film at only fifty minutes, Paul Leni's feature film directorial debut was an effort as some light war propaganda by the German Imperial government to dramatize how Poles and Germans could get along just fine in the new order of things with Germany taking land in the early days of the Great War. Leni, who had risen up in the nascent German film industry as a set designer, doesn't get a lot of room to flex visually in this tale touching on real life, but he does bring a certain visual flair to what he does film which is a wane little story, a sort of romance with indistinct characters.

Dr. Hart (Heinrich Schroth) is a small town doctor, well educated, and a major medical figure in the Imperial army back home just before Germany declares war on Russia, one of the early domino falls of the outbreak of World War I. On the nearby river, he rescues and returns the boat of Ursula (Kathe Haack), a pretty young girl with whom he starts the small romance. These early scenes of idyllic Germany get crushed with the news of the declaration of war, a moment presaged interestingly by a small variety of characters arguing over the merits, the main focus being on the aged Graf Bransky (Adolf Klein). Always attended by his daughter Jadwiga (Dagny Servaes), he represents the older, aristocratic side of Poland, the kind of person that the aristocratic Germany should be able to get along with well.

Part of the problem with the narrative of the film is a common problem of lesser silents in that there are simply too many characters that look too similar, especially once all of the men are in military uniforms. Dr. Hart is joined by most of the young men of the village as well as a host of others as he joins the column marching towards Poland, and, honestly, Dr. Hart gets lost in it. You'd think it would be easy with him being the central character and a doctor, but he looks like several other men in the film and there are other doctor characters. It's honestly kind of hard to track. This feels like a physical production too ambitious for the little story it's trying to tell.

There are moments of quietness to the film before battle begins, and I'm mostly thinking of Dr. Hart visiting his university on his way to the front where he receives a heroes welcome. Hart is singled out visually in the scene (part of the film's strengths is Leni's strong compositions) with the rest of the men rising to salute him with a toast and he remains seated, and it's a surprisingly melancholic moment. But, then again, he gets lost in the shuffle of an incomprehensible battle with no real geography to it, mostly involving Bransky's estate, which he retreated to after the start of the war. Hart gets injured while trying to get there. There are other characters running around. Honestly, I was just kind of lost. I wonder if the copy I had had too few subtitles (the copy I did find had only German/French subtitles, but I read enough French to get by), not that I'd ever argue that silents need more subtitles, because they rarely do.

There's a nursing train that Ursula arranges, Hart injured, and a reunion that's nice, and it's a quick fifty minutes that doesn't do much.

I don't necessarily dislike the film, but it's not exactly a strong directorial debut overall. Where it is strong is in the aforementioned visual framing. There are strong shots all over the place, my favorite being a very low angle shot looking up at the doctor helping a soldier that passed out on the side of the road while the line of infantry continues by them, row by row. It would have been even better if the accidental silhouette had continued through the shot before the film had corrected itself, front-lighting the figures more distinctly. Still, it was good stuff. It's mostly unshowy stuff, just having a conscious knowledge of where things should go in frame for largely aesthetic reasons, but it works and is pretty consistent.

It's a weirdly undemanding little film that is both too wane on the one hand regarding its thematic material (the extent of its ideas of camaraderie between Germans and Poles is trying to rescue Bransky from...general chaos of battle, I guess) and overstuffed with too many characters that look alike taking up too much screentime. It's mostly worth any time for the strong visual compositions, and that's helped by the fact that the film is only fifty minutes long.

It was an interesting little discovery, and not much else.