Le montreur d'ombres

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.

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

This is an unusual, very different sort of film, completely visual as it has no intertitles, in keeping with the original German version. About a man who is full of anxiety (his eyes continually popping out in jealous rages) over the attentions his woman has been paying to a handsome youth and several other male admirers (meanwhile, though she likes to flirt, she actually seems more interested in gazing at herself and posing in front of mirrors). The action all takes place at a house dinner party one evening, where our beautiful and alluring peacock lady is busy enticing the man, the youth, and three gentlemen, then all are "entertained" by a strange traveling entertainer and his shadow puppet play, who causes all to hallucinate a vision of "things to come".

This film is very interestingly photographed, full of sharp shadows against brightly lit walls that set some of the action, plus lavish period costuming and well-draped sets that look like they belong on a stage. The action is mostly slow and dreamlike, a bit too slow at times as this drags just a little through parts. Still, very interesting to see. The print on the DVD, tinted in sepia/yellow, pink, and bright lavender tones, looks quite nice. The music score is excellent and suits this very odd silent film quite well.

As the story unfolds, a night of entertainment slowly transforms into a nightmare of insane jealousy, violence, and death. Or does it?

Enchanting, fascinating, and oddly macabre, WARNING SHADOWS uses light and dark to explore human nature. The use of shadow by candlelight -whether through silhouettes, shadow puppets, or shadow / mirror images- is striking.

This is another silent, expressionistic masterpiece. Co-stars Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the Grand Illusionist / Shadow Puppeteer, whom he plays with unabashed, sinister glee!...

"Warning Shadows" shouldn't work as well as it does. There are no titles, causing the plot to be confusing if not closely paid attention to; the Expressionistic elements are abundant but also strangely removed in style; the acting is often tongue-in-cheek, and the overall artiness is seemingly self-conscious. However, those same elements also contribute to this film's majesty and originality. There is simply no other film (that I'm aware of, anyway) that approaches the beauty and sheer erotic oddness of this obscure classic. I cannot adequately describe exactly what it is that makes "Warning Shadows" one of my all-time favorite motion pictures, so...just see it. It's available on DVD from our great friends at Kino.