Ombre ammonitrici

For further reading I recommend an excellent article on the film in the film magazine 'Traffic' (nb. 33) by the German movie aficionado Enno Patalas. Patalas was also the driving force behind a complete restoration of the film at the Munich Filmmuseum - surprisingly there are some (hand- )colored sections in the original version. The shadow theater puppets shown in the movie were created by the German expressionist artist Ernst Moritz Engert, who was well connected to the early expressionist art- and literature-scene in Berlin and Munich. I adore the movie for exploring the deep aesthetic relations between the art of the shadow play and movie as an art itself - from my point of view the earliest and most reflected approach to provide a genuine philosophical statement on film.

This had been something of a holy grail for me: while there's very little that's actually written about it (even following this DVD release from Kino - I came across only 1 online review!), its reputation as a highpoint of the German Expressionist movement had always preceded it and I had personally been intrigued for years by a single still from the film in the British periodical from the early 80s, "The Movie".

Well, having at long last watched the film (thanks, Kino, also the 'rescuers' of another rare Silent classic - Paul Leni's THE MAN WHO LAUGHS [1928]), I can say that it's a genuine masterwork which well and truly belongs with the other classics of the early German cinema (particularly the Expressionist horror films, even if WARNING SHADOWS is not a genre effort per se). Still, there are undeniable macabre overtones in the story about a dinner party comprising a jealous man, his flirtatious wife and her four suitors that's 'invaded' by the owner of a traveling puppet-show who may or may not be a magician as well.

Actually, the film looks forward to several others in its theme and approach: first of all, its complete lack of intertitles (this is a purely visual film) precedes F.W. Murnau's more celebrated THE LAST LAUGH (1924), the silhouetted puppet show anticipates Lotte Reiniger's THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926; the first 'animated' film) and the 'film-within-a-film' scenario (where we have the magician 'borrowing' the shadows of the guests in order to allow them to see for themselves what is to be the tragic outcome of the night) also looks forward to a similar 'morality play' performance at the centre of another Murnau film, TARTUFFE (1925)!

As I said, the film's look - sets by Albin Grau and camera-work by Fritz Arno Wagner (both of whom had worked on Murnau's NOSFERATU [1922]) - and the techniques deployed - particular attention is given to the lighting scheme as, in the absence of dialogue, this functions as much as an illumination of the various characters and what they may be thinking as the actors interpreting them! - are incredible (even after all these years): the plot itself is very simple and, in fact, if the film has a fault it's that it takes this a bit too slowly; all the various characters are introduced at the very start in a prologue which occupies the first five minutes of the picture! Then again, by the time the magician's terrifying and murderous visions had reached their crescendo (this here is, by far, the best section of the film), I had become so completely absorbed that I was actually surprised when the picture shifted back to the main narrative, indicating that it was nearing conclusion!

As befits an Expressionist film, the acting style (but also the make-up) is slightly exaggerated with the result that some of it may seem awkward today (the leading lady and the three elderly suitors, for instance). Much better are the three more notable names in the cast - Fritz Kortner as the husband, Gustav von Wangeheim (who had been Jonathan Harker in NOSFERATU) as the infatuated youth and especially Alexander Granach (yet another NOSFERATU alumnus, where he had made a creepy Renfield) as the scruffy-looking and somewhat unhinged magician; indeed, the latter makes for a truly memorable character - and I could just imagine him going to the next house or the next village after the end of our story to provide some more of his specialized 'entertainment'!

The figure of director Arthur Robison, then, is something of an enigma: he was an American who ended up working in Germany; I haven't seen any of his other work and doubt how much of it actually survives at this juncture - but he did contrive to make the original version of THE INFORMER (featuring, apart from a very young Ray Milland, German actors Lars Hanson and Lya De Putti!) in Britain in 1929, while in 1935 came his remake of the oft-filmed German folktale THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE, starring the great Anton Walbrook in the famous dual role...

I shudder to think what might have been of the German school if Caligari and Nosferatu had been among the lost films. There's just not a whole lot that has reached us from this movement, much less truly great works. Recently restored by the Murnau foundation, this is meant to be one of the most evocative ones, a great title we had been missing.

Most of it passes with little notice, a night of erotic angst, rivalry and a marriage falling apart with the lavish mansion of a baron as the stage of the theater. The prospective lovers feign and thrust, eventually really thrust; we get to see this in shadows. Shadows, a nocturnal hallucination as the title goes. It's the arrival of a shadow-player that is the most intriguing here. Oh, eventually his magick tricks were all serving a benign purpose, domestic bliss is salvaged from desire most foul, the soul restored into proper order.

The trick is that he gives the parties involved a vision of what might unfold, the dangers involved. His small audience wakes up from the cinematic illusion dazzled, baffled, rubbing their eyes with disbelief. And we pull further back in the final shot to see curtains falling on this level that we experienced as reality.

Is everything inside the nested story so artificial because it was the times still inflected by theater, or because the shadow play is inherently artificial? Is the shadow player the protagonist himself, made from his mirrored image, and so conjuring for himself a wish-fulfillment illusion where everything is made alright?

If you were looking to come to this for German expressionism, you might want to reconsider. There is a great shot of the illusionist pushing back, elongating the shadows of his players. But it's serving and is part of the great self-referential tradition of cinema, films about the illusion of watching films.

Shadows are used to add distinction to a simple melodrama, in which four men try to seduce their host's flirtatious wife, introducing a gallery of different ways of using shadows for dramatic or storytelling purpose. However, I found the resource too distancing, especially the use the art of Chinese shadows to narrate a long tale that forces us viewers to relate representational metaphors to the actual story we are watching, as the play within the play in "Hamlet". In this case, the Chinese images are not clearly defined, and the filmmakers decided not to use intertitles... Add that wigs, costumes and sets are not particularly impressive, so there you have. A good try, but not as clear or clever as other German Expressionist movies.

I caught this at the Cinematheque a couple of times in Paris. It is a film with no intertitles (except at the beginning for identifying the characters) and, like "The Last Laugh", depends on the camera and editing to tell the story. The action in both films, then, would have to be slow as not to confuse the viewer. This is the lesser of the two but the Murnau film has long been an established masterwork. Frankly I don't know much about Art(h)ur Robison. He was an American working on German-looking films in Germany during the Expressionist phase.

This film does indeed feature shadows and the lighting is necessarily bright. What I particularly enjoyed was being pulled into the action of the shadows along with the guests. In this respect the film was quite brilliant. The acting is really quite good and despite the slow speed of action, the film has barely dated at all.

Curtis Stotlar