Jeremias (1922)

Several year ago, NORTHEAST HISTORIC FILM, a regional film archive located in Bucksport, Maine, received a gift of many reels of 35mm film from a collector. Among the reels was a five reel feature dated 1925 entitled THE FALL OF JERUSALEM distributed by the WHOLESOME FILM SERVICE of Boston. The film was printed on tinted safety stock, very unusual for 1925, and probably indicating that it was intended for screening in non-theatrical settings. The images and the condition of the film is extraordinary, and it has been preserved by George Eastman House.

After several years of research by Jan-Christopher Horak and other film scholars, it was determined that this is a retitled print of JEREMIAS (1922), no doubt the only one still existing. The film was directed in Germany by Hungarian director Eugen Illes, and filmed in a former Zeppelin hangar outside Berlin. This is a big budget production with many extras and lots of period costumes.

As for the film itself, its pretty dull stuff, probably on interest only to film scholars or history buffs.

gerhild

"unclejappy" errs with regard to several aspects

A user called "unclejappy" from Maine claims in his comment (06. 12. 2004) that the identification of this film was done "by Jan Christopher Horak and other scholars", and "after several years of research".

This and other claims of "unclejappy" are wrong.

At the screening in Sacile in October 2004 during Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, when everybody was still guessing what this "mystery film" was, I positively recognized juvenile Walter Rilla (=Amosa, captain of the royal guard). I talked to Werner Mohr, a collector of autographed photos from Berlin, who was with me in the identification session held later in the course of the festival, and we agreed it was definitely Rilla.

I'm researching Rilla's life and work. According to what is known as yet, he was not in films at all prior to mid-1920, and not in co-productions or foreign films prior to 1924-1925 (when he starred in Cutts' The Blackguard, a D/GB co-production). So I simply needed to check titles of German productions post 1919 and prior to 1925 for a film matching the content of the "mystery film"seen in Sacile, and I rapidly arrived at the right title.

Consequently, the identification of Jeremias aka Der Kampf um Jerusalem, Berlin censorship date Oct 25 1922, has been done very quickly in October-November 2004 by myself, independently of Mr. Horak.

The confirmation that I had not only hit upon the right film but that there is also a fragment of it in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, came from fiction film curator Mrs. Barbara Schuetz in an e-mail to me (03. 12. 2004): The Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv holds act two of the film. The fragment is a partly b/w and partly tinted & toned print, and already transferred to safety stock. Restoration work on the film will soon begin.

Cinegraph has published an entry on Walter Rilla recently, but amongst his credits Jeremias is not mentioned. Thus my identification of Jeremias adds a new and very early film to Rilla's filmography; to be precise, it marks his second appearance in a film.

So the claims of "unclejappy" are wrong in several aspects: The identification was done very quickly and not only by Mr. Horak, but at the same time or earlier by me, the print in Maine is not the only survivor, and the film was partly tinted and toned.

Gerhild Krebs

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Trivia
A copy of the film was found in Massachusetts by a film collector in 1998. The print was labeled "The Fall of Jerusalem," but had no credits other than the name of a distributor. There were only a few passing references of the film in the US, and no mention of it in European records. Nobody knew where it came from or who made it. In 2004, after years of research and detective work a lip-reading expert, and positive Id's of actors in the film led to the discovery that it was a German film called "Jeremias."