Mandragore

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.

Hanns Ewers wrote the original screenplay for 'The Student of Prague', the finest version of which is generally considered to be that of 1926 directed by Henrik Galeen. Here Galeen directs this extremely loose adaptation of Ewer's novel 'Alraune' which reunites him with star and co-director of 'The Golem', Paul Wegener, who plays mad scientist Jakob ten Brinken. The role of the soulless femme fatale Alraune who drags men to their doom is tailor-made for Brigitte Helm, following her impact in Lang's 'Metropolis'.

By the time Ewer's novel was published, news of Russian experiments in artificial insemination involving animals had already reached the West and seemed the stuff of nightmares. Such a pity therefore that this film fails to fulfill expectations.

Although it contains some Expressionist flourishes it lacks the overall visual style and imaginative flair of Galeen's contemporaries, early scenes are victims of censorship cuts, the succession of men who fall under the spell of Alraune's sexual charisma are little more than ciphers and it is weakened by a lame, unsatisfactory ending.

The real fascination of the piece lies in the dynamic between Paul Wegener and Brigitte Helm whose scenes together are riveting.

Despite its weaknesses the influence on Hollywood's mad science/creation films is there for all to see although its depiction of destructive female sexuality would never be replicated.

Being a product of the Silent era, this German variation on the Frankenstein theme actually preceded the definitive James Whale pictures; a rare (the copy I acquired was culled from an old Italian TV broadcast that I somehow missed out on) and still very little-known film – despite the involvement of Henrik Galeen (THE GOLEM [1914 and 1920], NOSFERATU [1922] and THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE [1926]), Brigitte Helm (METROPOLIS [1927]) and Paul Wegener (THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE [1913], THE GOLEM [1914, 1917 and 1920] and THE MAGICIAN [1926]) – this is probably due to the fact that, in spite of some clear Expressionist trimmings, the plot is mainly treated as sophisticated melodrama! Especially disappointing for genre buffs is the fact that the creation scene is completely by-passed – shown only in a split-second flashback towards the end when Alraune (Helm, a veritable femme fatale spawned from the mandrake root by ambitious alchemist Wegener) discovers her unnatural origin when she happens upon the scientist's diary! Galeen, however, demonstrates a sure eye for pictorial detail throughout (particularly when dealing with the carnival and casino settings) and the basically 'incestuous' relationship between creature and creator is treated with amazing sensitivity and depth for its time. The ending, then, is equally non-horrific as Alraune, resigned now to her soulless existence, goes away with her creator's long-infatuated nephew while Wegener pays the price for his tampering with nature by being left all alone.

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'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.