Tag Archives: German

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979)

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When Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and a host of other horror icons were lining up at the doors of Universal Studios in search of eternal fame, somehow the humble golem failed to get the invite. An immensely powerful beast molded out of clay, brought to life by a mystic Hebrew incantation, it may have had too much in common with Mary Shelley’s invention; or more likely, Hollywood’s Jewish studio chiefs prudently sidestepped anything that would offend sensitive and vociferous gentile audiences. Still, even without the spotlight, the legend of the golem has quietly endured, so much so that Golems appear in the vaunted Reader Suggestion Queue twice. Today we examine these two tales, one a literal origin story, the other something more abstract.

THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920)

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam

DIRECTED BY: Paul Wegener,

FEATURING: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lothar Müthel, Lyda Salmonova,

PLOT: When the Emperor decrees that all Jews must leave the city of Prague, Rabbi Loew invokes the help of the demon Astaroth to construct a defender for his people out of clay.

COMMENTS: An early classic of German expressionist cinema, you will find quite a few reviews of this silent rendering of the original folk tale about the avenger of clay. They tend to focus on three main topics: the source material that came to inform the film, the peculiar history of how it came to be made, and a detailed recap of the plot. It feels like someone’s got my number, because that’s where my instincts would normally lead me, as well. So let’s try and cover those basesin one fell swoop, and then we can turn in a different direction: the ancient folktale was codified in a 1915 novel, which writer/director/star Wegener spun into a trilogy. The first two, set in contemporary times, are now lost to history, but the third, a prequel delivering the backstory in which a rabbi summons the warrior to defend the Jewish people but soon loses control of his creation, has survived the years, and that leads us here.

That background established, it’s important to note how neatly The Golem serves to meet the moment while paving the way for the horror legends of the future. While the story is set in medieval Prague, the fanciful decoration owes more to Méliès than the Middle Ages: impossible peaks tower over the city, while buildings are adorned with twisty staircases and walls never Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST (VORMITTAGSSPUK) (1928) / APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALICIA (1994)

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Recommended (for both)

Repression in a society is often noticed first in the arts. When works are banned or proscribed for subject matter deemed offensive to the state, or when artists and their patrons are threatened if they do not alter their messages so as not to displease the powers that be, an attentive eye can pick up the seeds of repression being planted. One might even notice it in attacks on the programming at the national center for the performing arts. Today, our attention turns to a pair of short films that are in the orbit of repression: one that was its victim and one expressly about it.

The title card that precedes “Ghosts Before Breakfast” points the finger  clearly at its tormentor: “The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art.” The accusation seems absurd to modern eyes, so it’s instructive to recall, in the march to World War II, just how much the ascendant Fascists despised modern art, especially surreal and abstract works. No doubt that attitude came from the top, considering failed artist Adolf Hitler was a strict devotee of classical styles. Dictatorships are always humorless scolds, though, and the Third Reich was especially obsessed with a devotion to German propriety and order. Director , who literally wrote the book on Dadaism, was always going to run headlong into trouble.

Nothing that ensues in “Ghosts’” 500-second running time would seem to merit the iron jackboot of censorship: a bow tie refuses to stay knotted, body parts detach and spin around, and men disappear behind poles. (That last is a nifty special effect once accomplished by your humble correspondent.) Most notably, a quartet of bowler hats liberate themselves from the tyranny of resting upon men’s heads, choosing instead to fly about the neighborhood in flock formation until tea is finally served. It’s mostly lo-fi camera trickery in the Méliès tradition, not overtly serious at all. (Occasionally, one can see the strings on the hats and even the shadow of the marionette’s pole, and it detracts from the short’s charm not a whit.) Richter is always a playful surrealist (witness the giddy way he skewers the evangelization of capitalism in Dreams That Money Can Buy), and “Ghosts” captures that spirit in its simplest form. It’s light, it’s fun… no wonder the Nazis hated it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Featuring unimaginably brilliant special effects achieved through the use of stop-motion animation as well as live-action tricks, the film chronicles the delightful protests of objects ranging from hats to water hoses. The entire short is structured like a relentless magic trick, inviting the audience to witness a bewildering spectacle where the laws of physics completely break down.” – Swapnil Dhruv Bose, Far Out

Oh, how they would have utterly loathed “Alicia,” Jaume Balagueró’s nightmare musing on the abhorrence of femininity. After our young heroine menstruates during a moment of idle self-pleasure, uniformed thugs haul her away to become a kind of indentured remora to a hideously bloated creature. Alicia’s act of defiance is to have the temerity to reach sexual maturity, at which point she is a commodity for the beasts to consume and discard. Balagueró’s film (a student work that presages his future efforts such as the REC series) exudes a palpable sense of a terrible power that punishes people for who they are.

In less than 8 minutes, there’s no time to be subtle, and Balagueró dials up the unsettling and odd atmosphere well past the initial premise. Alicia herself (played by twins Ana and Elena Lucia) is as white and smooth as a cherub, the very essence of purity before her blood drips onto a book titled “The Drama of Jesus.” Rubber-clad troops force the girl to consume a goopy slime that emits from their masks and drill into her neck in a cascade of oily fluid. When she finally emerges from this dark underworld, she exits through a refrigerator, as if she has only been kept around as food. Meanwhile, the final shot is the ogre framed with the shape of a cross, just in case you’re wondering whom to implicate. The theme of the punishment women endure is explicit, but the concept is dressed up in grotesque imagery that carries the slight story up to another level.

Film is storytelling, and storytelling is speech. Richter may have only intended to tweak the establishment, not rouse the beast; Balagueró was clearly prepared for whatever expressions of offense or disgust might come his way. But both are compatriots in cinema, for storytelling is also bravery, and there’s nothing weird about standing up for their voices.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…a disturbing and even suffocating atmosphere in which we also glimpse hints of the purest Cronenberg every time the mutilations of the flesh come into play.” – Rubén Collazos, Cinemaldito (translated from Spanish)

(“Ghosts Before Breakfast” was nominated for review by Rafael Moreira; “Alicia” was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (2006)

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Die kathedrale der neuen gefühle

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DIRECTED BY: Helmut Herbst

PLOT: Members of a Seventies Berlin commune travel through space aimlessly in a shipping container clutched in a giant fist, until an amnesiac stowaway divulges information on the location of the commune’s founder.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even in the world of animated psychedelic European science-fiction—a small niche, admittedly—there aren’t many projects that open with a naked figure trampolining on a small patch of bell peppers as the titles scroll by in the background. That turns out to be practically the baseline of “normal,” in light of what follows.

COMMENTS:  Various members of the commune/spaceship frequently repeat the phrase “My eyes are cast down in awe,” and it’s a fitting description of the experience of watching The Cathedral of New Emotions. Expanded from director/co-writer Herbst’s 1971 short, Cathedral follows the antics of a 1970s commune repurposed as soft 1970s sci-fi in the vein of or Samuel Delany. It’s like an animated Dark Star with sex and drugs, with a slight element of The Final Programme in the mix. When the spaceship is contained in a fist, hard science is not going to be a primary element, especially when the spacecraft has windshield wipers that sweep off detritus such as bugs and a Hawkman from “Flash Gordon.” The journey through space isn’t just physical. The main space of concern is the metaphysical: one character remarks that “he lives in his head,” and upon his rediscovery of commune founder Madson, a self-described “merchant of images,” he tells another that they are “also just fiction.” There’s a political element, with May ’68 and the Vietnam War referenced both directly and indirectly through the disaffected and somewhat aimless behavior of the “crew.”

Cathedral comes across as a smarter and hornier version of an offering made for stoners with brains. There is a lot of sexual imagery and content, both hetero and homo (a cocooned threeway, a visual pun regarding “blowjob”). If it’s still not clear, the lyrics of the Krautrock-styled theme song at the beginning and end of the film feature the chorus “You’re inside of me/Deep, deep inside of me, ohhh.” In keeping with the Adult Swim comparison, the closest  (watered-down) equivalent might be “Superjail!” (although that show features more grotesque cruelty and violence than sex.) Cathedral even has a pair of indeterminately gendered twins who serve roughly the same function as similar “Superjail!” pair, providing a mocking chorus and running commentary on the action. The TV cartoon’s design is also more grotesque than Cathedral‘s, although Herbst includes an element of grotesquerie related to sexual body horror.

Cathedral made its home video premiere courtesy of Deaf Crocodile as a (now sold-out) limited deluxe edition with a booklet including essays from Walter Chaw and Alexander McDonald and slipcover. The standard edition includes a commentary by German film historian Rolf Giesen that is as much a history of German animation as a discussion of this film (description is somewhat pointless because the film is experimental, Giesen says upfront, but he does talk about Cathedral and Herbst in the latter part of the commentary); a visual essay by filmmaker Stephen Broomer; “Container Interstellar,” the 7-minute short that was expanded into Cathedral; a 25-minute documentary examining Herbst’s work (mainly television shorts and an acclaimed documentary on the DADA movement); and an interview with Herbst, who died in 2021.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Defying any kind of logical description, the animated German sci-fi fever dream The Cathedral of New Emotions can proudly stand as the trippiest title released to date by Deaf Crocodile — and that’s saying something!”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

The Cathedral Of New Emotions [Blu-ray]

The Cathedral Of New Emotions [Blu-ray]
  • German director Helmut Herbst's long-lost animated sci-fi feature, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GRIMM LOVE (2006)

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aka Rohtenburg; Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story

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DIRECTED BY: Martin Weisz

FEATURING: , Keri Russell, Thomas Huber

PLOT: An American student delves into the mysterious case of a German man who killed and ate a willing victim.

COMMENTS: In his book Popular Crime, Bill James writes, “Most of us who read crime books, I would argue, do so out of a desire to better understand the fraying edges of society. That is not unhealthy, and we are not titillated by these events.” It’s a reassuring sentiment, one that absolves us of guilt over our fascination with the grisly and sometimes perverse ways in which one of us harms another. So maybe that’s the permission we’re seeking to feel okay about wanting to look closer, as Grimm Love does, at the case of Armin Meiwes: to understand the mystery of the man who ate a willing victim before said victim was quite done dying.

Grimm Love understands our discomfort, which is why it provides a character representing both our curiosities and our qualms. Our stand-in, Katie, is well chosen, since we feel confident that the post-“Felicity”, pre-“The Americans” Keri Russell wouldn’t lead us anywhere that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go. Her investigation is part of her post-graduate studies in Germany, after all, and if she has a compulsion, it must be because there is something to learn. (At no point does she even hint at what her thesis could possibly be.) Sure, maybe the school principal is going to be offended at the mere suggestion of the awful crime, but that nice lady out on her lawn seems to understand, and so she’ll bemusedly point the way to the murderer’s dilapidated house. People are just interested in these things, you know.

Grimm Love actually presents two parallel stories: a dramatization of the lives of the killer and his victim (here renamed Oliver and Simon, and played as adults with brooding intensity by Kretschmann and Huber) paired with the inquisitive Katie’s linear investigation after the fact. This structure accomplishes two important goals: it gives us a character we can feel less squicky about following, and it pads out the length of the film, because a movie that only focuses on the cannibalistic principals doesn’t have a whole lot to say. From the standpoint of basic historical knowledge, there’s nothing for us to learn, since Katie’s roommate recaps the entire story for us in the opening minutes. We’re left to try and discern just what is so compelling about this story for ourselves, and the answer is wanting. Yes, Oliver has a troubled childhood, abandoned by his father and brother to be left alone with a mentally ill mother. He doesn’t fit in at school, he’s exposed to the slaughtering and butchering of animals, and he has access to illicit content on the internet. But why did he succumb to depravity, in contrast to so many others? No one can say. Meanwhile, Simon suffers an accident when young, then copes with loneliness and develops a desire to mix intense pain with intense pleasure. But at the time he agrees to serve himself up to Oliver, he is in a committed relationship, and he seems to regret the pain he’s about to cause his lover. Why does he remain irrevocably unfulfilled? No one can say.

Russell can shed no light on the subject, either. Her narration repeatedly refers to an irresistible drive, an urge to go deeper, but it’s not because she’s gleaning important facts about the human condition. She’s not taking notes or interrogating witnesses, and she never articulates an insight or a discovery resulting from her research. She’s just drawn to the macabre, tempted to touch the forbidden. She’s a looky-loo. The only questions answered here are mundane: He bit off what? Cooked it and served it to him? How’d he clean up the mess? Grimm Love pretentiously suggests that it has something significant to say, but Katie’s in-the-moment reaction when she finally gets to glimpse the terrible scene for herself gives the game away. And that’s where we end the film: Simon is dead, Katie is utterly repulsed and regretful, and Oliver? Well, he’s just out of meat. End credits. The film has toyed with casting him as a tragic figure, bereft of love at home yet intensely kind and considerate to his prospective food. But his aims are ultimately selfish: he’s killed before, and he hopes to kill again. What we already knew, we now know with matching visuals. It’s not revelatory. It’s just ugly.

It’s okay to be intrigued by the deeds that bad men do. But while sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned about the nature of our society and the monsters that it can produce, it’s also true that  sometimes the monsters should be slain and left to rot. The only message Grimm Love has is that it has no message. If you just want to see inhumanity personified, it’ll do. If you want to learn something, best to do your looking elsewhere.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s an accomplished offering, but there are a few problems with the pacing and what I imagine are directorial choices (a back-and-forth plot devices, a dual narrative, plus flashbacks and imaginary moments).… Sort of a Hansel & Gretel meet Hannibal Lecter mish mash of psychology and horror, Grimm Love may not be perfect — but it’s pretty unforgettable.” – Stacy Layne Wilson, Horror.com

(This movie was nominated for review by Celluloid. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Grimm Love (Fangoria Frightfest)

Grimm Love (Fangoria Frightfest)
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