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You know those moments when you feel something creeping behind you, but when you turn, there’s nothing there? That sense of “something’s wrong” that’s just hard to shake? Well, some films do just that—they get under your skin, like a slow burn that’ll leave you with that nagging sense of dread long after the credits roll. It’s not just about jump scares, folks; it’s about the kind of psychological disturbance that keeps you up at night, staring at your bedroom door, wondering if you locked it properly.

Maika Monroe, Lili Sepe, and Daniel Zovatto in It Follows (2014) | Credit: The Weinstein Company

These movies? They’ll make your mind a haunted house. The tension? It’s like someone’s whispering right behind you… but when you look, all you see is your own reflection. Yeah, it’s That kind of unsettling.

So grab your blanket,...

Slippery Somnambulist.

After closing out February with discussions of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s vagina dentata-centered horror comedy Teeth (listen) and one of the “good” Amityville franchise entries in Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (listen), we’re taking a look at the oldest film we’ve ever covered in Robert Weine‘s classic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)!

In the film, Franzis (Friedrich Feher) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) encounter the crazed Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), who has just opened up a sideshow featuring his somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), a hypnotized man who the doctor claims can see into the future. At the performance, Cesare predicts Alan’s death, and by morning his chilling prophecy has come true — making Cesare the prime suspect. Unfortunately for Franzis, Caligari has set his sights on his fiancé Jane (Lil Dagover) next, and it’s only a matter of time...

Subjective trauma becomes subaltern desire in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s proto-horror silent classic that’s justly, if mostly, celebrated for its Expressionist, practically vertiginous images. By focusing almost exclusively on its pioneering formalism, the more historical and socially neutral readings of the film, aside from the work of scholars Alexander Doty and Harry Benshoff, have lost sight of its thoroughly embedded queer narrative.

Cesare (Conrad Veidt) is a murderous somnambulist under Dr. Caligari’s (Werner Krauss) control. Cesare is first glimpsed, outside Caligari’s tent at the local carnival, as a life-sized drawing that makes a caricature of Veidt’s slender face, to the extent that his cheeks are exaggeratedly shrunken in, perpetuating an effeminate stereotype indicative of physiognomic depiction. Cesare’s actual face is first glimpsed in close up, eyes closed as he furrows his brow and slightly moves his lips. Once his eyes open,...

Serial killer movies have always been popular, since they speak to common fears, and the common fascination with the dark side of the human soul. Ever since the dawn of cinema, there have been crime movies. In fact, some of the most influential movies from a century ago deal with serial killers, showing the timeless appeal of these ideas. As movies have evolved over the years, there have always been serial killers on screen, just in different guises.

The changing faces of movie murderers over the years have reflected the filmmaking trends and societal attitudes of the time. Starting in the 1920s, serial killer movies were used as a way to explore the dehumanizing destruction of the First World War. Serial killers were later seen in screwball comedies of the 1940s, gritty detective dramas of the 1990s, and superhero movies of the 2020s. Throughout every period of film history, there...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on October 22 via Kino Lorber. The 1920 silent horror classic has been meticulously restored in 4K by the F. W. Murnau Foundation.

It includes a new orchestral score by Emmy-winning composer Jeff Beal (House of Cards), along with an orchestral score by Studio for Film Music at the University of Music Freiburg and an electronic score by DJ Spooky, both from 2014.

Special Features include:

Audio commentary by composer Jeff Beal Caligari: How Horror Came to the Cinema Restoration Demonstration

In the film, a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community.

The quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema is directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, and Rudolf Lettinger star.

The post...

If discovering brilliant filmmakers appeals, it’s difficult to to better than this five-disc, nine-feature labor of recovery and restoration from Lobster films. Julien Duvivier is well known for a couple of pictures, one of which screened not so long ago on Eddie Muller’s TCM film noir show. But seeing his silent masterpieces may change your thinking about real cinematic art: theory meets narrative effectiveness through both technical innovation and delicate direction of actors. One silent in this set, about the economic power of a department store (!) is so effective, at the finish you’ll be convinced that a sync sound version couldn’t possibly be better. The set is appointed with expert introductions and analysis . . . this is the real French cinema that no ‘New Wave’ can invalidate.

Cinema of Discovery Julien Duvivier in the 1920s

Blu-ray

Flicker Alley

1925 – 1930 / B&w

1:33 Silent Ap. / 14 hours, 17 min.

Street Date January...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I've spent 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out. This is the final Forgotten By Fox entry."Have you ever seen any of your victims?" Robert Shaw is asked mid-way through End of the Game (1975), a line borrowed from The Third Man (1949). This I take to be author Friedrich Dürrenmatt's revenge, on behalf of his native Switzerland, for Orson Welles' celebrated crack about the cuckoo clock in Carol Reed's thriller, which appeared just before he wrote the book this film is based on.End of the Game is adapted from Dürrenmatt's 1950 novel The Judge and His Hangman by the author himself and Maximilian Schell, who also directs, inventively if a little inconsistently. Some scenes have the correct tragic force...

A collection of 55 still photos from the 1919-1920 production of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” are now up for auction, courtesy of Sotheby’s. Robert Wiene’s silent horror film is widely considered the defining work of German Expressionist cinema and went on to inspire the look of such film classics as F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” Bids for the collection can be made through Friday, April 3 at 12pm Et. Sotheby’s estimates the photographs will sell between the $20,000 and $30,000 mark. The starting bid is $13,000.

The catalogue note reads: “This remarkable group of 55 photographs documents many of the psychologically and visually twisted scenes from the 1920 silent film ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ generally recognized as the first true horror film. Robert Wiene directed this tale of an insane, diabolical hypnotist who manipulates a somnambulist to execute a series of murders. Considered the first German Expressionist film,...

Lang’s mysterious silent melodrama from 1921 is a parable about love and death that captivates with its ambition, enigma and sophistication

The only response to this 1921 silent movie by Fritz Lang, now restored and rereleased, is a kind of amazement – at its ambition, its enigma, its combination of innocence and sophistication. As so often with early cinema and silent cinema, you see the kinship with fable and fairy story, but also find yourself suspecting that it is somehow silent cinema that is truly aware of the medium’s possibilities; these seem to elude the more evolved, yet earthbound realist cinema that comes later.

Destiny is a parable fantasy: a young woman (Lil Dagover) is horrified when her fiance (Walter Janssen) is led away by the implacable figure of Death (Bernhard Goetzke) who has recently bought a plot of land that he has turned into a walled garden for his captured souls.

Jim Knipfel Feb 26, 2019

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is almost a hundred years old, yet still casts a long shadow over all the genres it invented.

At its heart, is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari an anti-authoritarian call for rebellion, an object lesson in conformity, or an allegory about how we are all mere pawns lost in a culture gone completely mad? That’s up to you to decide. What’s interesting is that nearly a century after it was first released, the film’s backstory remains such a swirl of misinformation, conflicting memories, urban legends, shaky recordkeeping, and contradictory ego trips. It’s impossible to pin down any solid truth.

How the script originated, how the production went, who decided to tack on the framing story at the last minute, what the framing story means, who decided to go with the Expressionist design, and what sort of critical and...

Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) with Music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra screens November 5th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 E Lockwood Ave,) as part of this year’s this year’s St. Fritz Lang’s Destiny Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found Here.

There’s nothing better than seeing a silent film with live music and you’ll have the opportunity Saturday November 5th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium. There’s a new restoration of Fritz Lang’s Destiny (Der müde Tod 1921) a dizzying blend of German Romanticism, Orientalism, and Expressionism and Cinema St. Louis will be screening it at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. The film will be accompanied live by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra, who will debuting their new original score for the film.

Destiny marked a bold step for Fritz Lang,...

The schedule for the 25th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (Sliff) has been announced and once again film goers will be offered the best in cutting edge features and shorts from around the globe. The festival takes place November 3-13, 2016.

Sliff kicks off on November 3 with the opening-night selection St. Louis Brews, the latest home-brewed documentary by local filmmaker Bill Streeter, director of Brick By Chance And Fortune: A St. Louis Story (read my interview with Bill Here)

According to Sliff, the festival will feature more than 125 filmmaking guests, including honorees: Actress Karen Allen (Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Animal House), director Charles Burnett (Killer Of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger), winner of the Cinema St. Louis Lifetime Achievement Award; and director Steve James (Hoop Dreams).

Full information on Sliff films, including synopses, dates/time, and links for purchase of advance tickets is available on the Cinema St.

Few filmmakers have had a decade-long run quite like director Fritz Lang did from 1921-1931. Featuring films like Metropolis, Spies and lest we forget arguably his greatest film, 1931’s M, Lang’s run throughout the ‘20s and into the ‘30s is a collection of films that any director would kill to have listed on his iMDB credits page.

And one of the films that started this series is maybe the director’s most underrated masterpiece, 1921’s silent epic Destiny. One of the “weirder” entries in the filmography of Fritz Lang, this neo-surrealist horror/drama tells the story of a woman as she encounters the physical manifestation of death, a black cloaked-man (Bernhard Goetzke), after he steals away her main squeeze (Walter Janssen). Attempting to get him back at all costs, Death offers the woman three chances to save her lover, tasking the woman (played by Lil Dagover) with saving the...

In an age of franchises and “cinematic universes” that seems to number in the thousands, it should come as no shock that the idea of feature length, serialized motion pictures date back to the earliest days of silent cinema. However, while most cinephiles are obviously familiar with franchises like James Bond and Star Wars, and even lay people are cognisant of the Marvel “Cmu”, few people outside the realm of film scholarship mention the silent serials like Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas. Even when legendary auteurs are the creative forces behind them.

Such is the case with Fritz Lang and his superb action/adventure serial, The Spiders. Drawing inspiration from the aforementioned Feuillade series, this 1919 serial was originally intended to be a four part epic, with only two “episodes” being filmed. Broken into The Golden Sea and The Diamond Ship, the story introduces us to a man named Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt...

When Fritz Lang began in film he was a better writer than director. This lavish two-part thriller sees him concocting a multi-genre mashup, shoehorning cowboy action thrills and an exotic lost Incan civilization into dagger-and-poison serial skullduggery. The Spiders Blu-ray Kino Classics 1919 / B&W / 1:33 flat / 173 min. / Street Date August 23, 2016 / Die Spinnen / available through Kino Classics / 29.95 Starring Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, Lil Dagover, Georg John. Cinematography Karl Freund Designers Otto Hunte, Carl Ludwig Kirmse, Heinrich Umlauff, Hermann Warm Music (2012) Ben Model Produced by Erich Pommer Written and Directed by Fritz Lang   There appears to be nothing new under the sun, even if lovers of Indiana Jones don't realize that most everything he did, had been done long before in silent serials. I have a lazy habit here of claiming that Fritz Lang invented most of the basic ideas we see in every adventure genre except the western. But these...

Death doesn't take a holiday in this, the granddaddy of movies about the woeful duties of the Grim Reaper. Fritz Lang's heavy-duty Expressionist fable is as German as they get -- a morbid folk tale with an emotionally powerful finish. Destiny Blu-ray Kino Classics 1921 / B&W / 1:33 flat / 98 min. / Street Date August 30, 2016 / Der müde Tod / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen, Bernhard Goetzke, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Georg John. Cinematography Bruno Mondi, Erich Nitzschmann, Herrmann Saalfrank, Bruno Timm, Fritz Arno Wagner Film Editor Fritz Lang Written by Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou Produced by Erich Pommer Directed by Fritz Lang

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari takes the prize for the most influential work of early German Expressionism, but coming in a close second is the film in which Fritz Lang first got his act (completely) together, 1921's Destiny (Der müde Tod). A wholly cinematic...

Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Dorothy Davenport becomes a judge and later State Governor in socially conscious thriller about U.S. women's voting rights. Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Will women's right to vote lead to the destruction of The American Family? Directed by and featuring the now all but forgotten Willis Robards, Mothers of Men – about women suffrage and political power – was a fast-paced, 64-minute buried treasure screened at the 2016 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held June 2–5. I thoroughly enjoyed being taken back in time by this 1917 socially conscious drama that dares to ask the question: “What will happen to the nation if all women have the right to vote?” One newspaper editor insists that women suffrage would mean the destruction of The Family. Women, after all, just did not have the capacity for making objective decisions due to their emotional composition. It...

It can be said with little hesitation, and without even looking at the slate of what’s to come, that the restoration of a Fritz Lang film will be among any year’s finest cinematic offerings. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation deserves real credit, then, for bringing us a new version of his 1921 epic Destiny, here presented in a recolored edition that reflects Lang’s original intentions and with a new score by Cornelius Schwehr.

After premiering at this year’s Berlinale, the movie will begin running next month, courtesy of Kino. Ahead of that is a preview featuring a pull-quote from none other than Luis Buñuel — and if it’s good enough for him, who are you to pass this up?

See the preview below:

Synopsis:

A young woman (Lil Dagover) confronts the personification of Death (Bernhard Goetzke), in an effort to save the life of her fiance (Walter Janssen...

Exclusive: Restored version of 1921 classic will get limited theatrical in late spring.

Kino Lorber has acquired all Us and Canadian rights to the digital restoration of Fritz Lang’s Destiny (Der Müde Tod), which received its world premiere in Berlinale Classics on Friday.

Lil Dagover plays a young woman who meets Death (Barnhard Goetzke) and is given three chances to reverse destiny and find her missing fiancé.

Destiny will get a limited theatrical run in late spring ahead of a multi-platform release.

Part I. A Filmmaker’s Apotheosis

April 20th, 1938 marked Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. In the past five years, he’d rebuilt Germany from destitute anarchy into a burgeoning war machine, repudiated the Versailles Treaty and, that March, incorporated Austria into his Thousand-Year Reich. In Nazi Germany, fantasy co-mingled with ideology, expressing an obsession with Germany’s mythical past through propaganda and art. Fittingly, Hitler celebrated at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Germany’s most prestigious cinema.

There, Nazi officials and foreign diplomats joined dignitaries of German kultur. Present were Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of Berlin’s Philharmonic Orchestra; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and confidante; actor Gustaf Grundgens, transformed from Brechtian Bolshevik to director of Prussia’s State Theater; and movie star Emil Jannings, Oscar-winner of The Lost Command and The Blue Angel, now an Artist of the State. Also Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who nationalized German cinema in...

1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?

Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.

Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...

Kino Classics refurbishes Robert Weine’s 1920 landmark title The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the film that marked the birth of German Expressionism as well as the flagship of the horror film genre. Tempered by bookends meant to diminish interpretations of parallelism between insanity and authority, its stark, jagged angles and ingenious uses of shadows predates the dark beauty of film noir, featuring fantastic set designs that still rival the ability of contemporary film. Eerie, carnivalesque, and as arresting as ever, it’s a title worthy of this remastered revisit.

The story of Caligari, developed by Carl Mayer (responsible for Murnau’s Sunrise and The Last Laugh) and Hans Janowitz, is incredibly simple. Basically, the eponymous doctor happens to have control of a sleepwalker that does nefarious deeds for his master, namely murdering inhabitants of the small hamlet late at night. There is a slight twist to the proceedings, though it...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Directed by Robert Wiene

Written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz

Germany, 1920

In the period of Germany’s Weimar Republic, a unique and volatile pre- and post-war era within a window of less than 20 years, the German people were experiencing a torrent of new ideological, social, and political shifts. What was once traditional and normal was giving way to the modern and unusual. What was typically viewed as quintessentially German was now being inundated by outside influences, by strange and foreign people and their imported cultural baggage. Whether or not these elements were as directly and obviously portrayed in movies as some like Siegfreid Kracauer and Lotte Eisner would argue (quite convincingly in many ways), there can be little doubt that film was influenced to one degree or another by this state of the German populous. The times were surely changing, and in no film...

Top 100 horror movies of all time: Chicago Film Critics' choices (photo: Sigourney Weaver and Alien creature show us that life is less horrific if you don't hold grudges) See previous post: A look at the Chicago Film Critics Association's Scariest Movies Ever Made. Below is the list of the Chicago Film Critics's Top 100 Horror Movies of All Time, including their directors and key cast members. Note: this list was first published in October 2006. (See also: Fay Wray, Lee Patrick, and Mary Philbin among the "Top Ten Scream Queens.") 1. Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock; with Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam. 2. The Exorcist (1973) William Friedkin; with Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow (and the voice of Mercedes McCambridge). 3. Halloween (1978) John Carpenter; with Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Tony Moran. 4. Alien (1979) Ridley Scott; with Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt. 5. Night of the Living Dead (1968) George A. Romero; with Marilyn Eastman,...

With so many films released on the run up to Halloween it’s been hard to keep up with reviews, so we’re going to play catch-up with another review round-up looking at some recent releases in brief. This time round we have reviews of Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari, Saints & Soldiers: The Void, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Pigman Murders.

Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari

Stars: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Rudolf Lettinger | Directed by Robert Weine

Synopsis: At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari presents the somnambulist Cesare, who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers. But at night, the doctor wakes Cesare from his sleep to enact his evil bidding…

My thoughts: Along with Last Year in Marienbad and The 400 Blows, Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari was one of those “important” films that I,...

Actor and director who brought dark good looks and a commanding presence to his roles

Austrian by birth, Swiss by circumstance and international by reputation, Maximilian Schell, who has died aged 83, was a distinguished actor, director, writer and producer. However, he will be best remembered as an actor, especially for his Oscar-winning performance in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – an early highlight among scores of television and movie appearances. He also directed opera, worked tirelessly in the theatre and made six feature films, including Marlene (1984) - a tantalising portrait of Dietrich, his co-star in Judgment, who is heard being interviewed but not seen, except in movie extracts.

Schell courted controversy and much of his work, including The Pedestrian (1973), dealt with the second world war, its attendant crimes and the notion of collective guilt. In 1990, when he was offered a special award for his contributions to German film, he refused to accept it.

Maximilian Schell movie director (photo: Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell) (See previous post: “Maximilian Schell Dies: Best Actor Oscar Winner for ‘Judgment at Nuremberg.’”) Maximilian Schell’s first film as a director was the 1970 (dubbed) German-language release First Love / Erste Liebe, adapted from Igor Turgenev’s novella, and starring Englishman John Moulder-Brown, Frenchwoman Dominique Sanda, and Schell in this tale about a doomed love affair in Czarist Russia. Italian Valentina Cortese and British Marius Goring provided support. Directed by a former Best Actor Oscar winner, First Love, a movie that could just as easily have been dubbed into Swedish or Swahili (or English), ended up nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Three years later, nominated in that same category was Schell’s second feature film as a director, The Pedestrian / Der Fußgänger, in which a car accident forces a German businessman to delve deep into his past.

In Robert Wiene’s 1920 dreamlike horror classic, veteran German actor Werner Krauss plays the mysterious Dr. Caligari, the apparent force behind a creepy somnambulist named Cesare and played by Conrad Veidt, who abducts beautiful Lil Dagover. The finale in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has inspired tons of movies and television shows, from Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir The Woman in the Window to the last episode of the TV series St. Elsewhere. In addition, the film shares some key elements in common (suppposedly as a result of a mere coincidence) with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2011 thriller Shutter Island. The 1920 crime melodrama Outside the Law is not in any way related to Rachid Bouchareb's 2010 political drama. Instead, the Tod Browning-directed movie is a well-made entry in the gangster genre (long before the explosion a decade later). Browning, best known for his early '30s efforts Dracula and Freaks,...

Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Conrad Veidt on TCM: The Hands Of Orlac, Casablanca, Nazi Agent Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Above Suspicion (1943) A honeymooning couple are asked to spy on the Nazis in pre-war Europe. Dir: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray, Conrad Veidt. Bw-91 mins. 7:45 Am Contraband (1940) While held up in a British port, a Danish sea captain tussles with German spies. Dir: Michael Powell. Cast: Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson, Hay Petrie. Bw-87 mins. 9:30 Am All Through The Night (1942) A criminal gang turns patriotic to track down a Nazi spy ring. Dir: Vincent Sherman. Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Kaaren Verne. Bw-107 mins. 11:30 Am Jew Suss (1934) A Jewish businessman using his wealth to benefit his people discovers he's not Jewish. Dir: Lothar Mendes. Cast: Conrad Veidt, Frank Vosper, Cedric Hardwicke. Bw-104 mins. 1:...

Conrad Veidt is Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" performer of the day. An international star since the 1920s, Veidt worked in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Hollywood — twice. [Conrad Veidt Movie Schedule.] In the late '20s, Veidt was the star of unusual Hollywood fare such as Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928), in the title role as a man with a grin-like scar where his mouth should be, and Paul Fejos' The Last Performance (1929), as a magician in love with pretty Mary Philbin — a Universal star who also happened to be Veidt's leading lady in The Man Who Laughs. With the arrival of talking pictures, Veidt returned to Germany, but with the ascent of the Nazis he fled first to England and later to the United States. In the Hollywood of the early '40s, Veidt became everybody's favorite Nazi in movies such as Nazi Agent, Escape, and Casablanca.

One of the world's great film culture apostates, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is mostly notorious for the seven-hour-plus 1977 film "Our Hitler," and for Susan Sontag's rocket-to-Mars essay, ambitiously praising it to the heavens, and for being the most recalcitrant of the New German Cinema's unholy four (with Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog).

Finally, two of his famous earlier films have been released on video to contextualize that later behemoth, "Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King" (1972) and "Karl May" (1974), the three of which supposedly comprise a "German trilogy." Syberberg hardly seems disposed to ever make films about anything else, and it's an unassailable career project, especially in light of the last decade or so of Holocaust movies produced in Germany and elsewhere, which have tried to straitjacket and even romanticize the horrifying mystery of German culture's evolution.

Syberberg has always regarded it as a monstrous enigma, and his movies reflect his position in every frame.