#500: Schatten — Eine nächtliche Halluzination (or, Warning Shadows)
A hidden gem of German Expressionist film, or just jumping at shadows?
Initial release: October 16, 1923
Director: Arthur Robison
Before I get started I want to express my thanks to everyone who helped me get this far. 500 reviews (not counting my separate review series of World War 2 shooters and post-apocalypse games) is no small feat, and it’s been a wild four and a half years, full of ups and downs (mostly downs.) It’s kept me sane, given me purpose — and I’m ready to tackle the next 500. Hopefully you’ll stick around for it. — june❤
When they hear the term “silent film,” most people probably imagine something like the short films of the first couple of decades of the 20th century, where everything is sped up, set to ragtime music, and everyone converses strictly in short, humorous intertitles. Some people probably think instead of the works of Charlie Chaplin; personally, I think of Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Indeed, it’s my view that the silent era is best defined by the German Expressionist movement; while filmmakers the world over were pretty much inventing whole new techniques just to get the image they wanted, it was the German Expressionists who understood aesthetics were everything in a visual medium where nobody truly spoke. What better exemplar of this philosophy and purity of focus than a silent film with no intertitles whatsoever?
By 1923, the German Expressionist period was in full swing, and the previous year’s Nosferatu was a smash hit (in spite of the legal threats it faced for being an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.) Albin Grau was a self-professed occultist and producer on Nosferatu for the short-lived film production company Prana Film; he had wanted to make another film in that vein for his new company, Pan-Film, but was unable to get Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau on board due to the latter having signed on with film production megagiant UFA. So instead, he approached Artur Robison, an American-born filmmaker who began making films in the mid 1910s and who already had a reputation for creepy flicks with his directorial debut being the 1916 chiller Nights of Horror. Together they made Schatten — Eine nächtliche Halluzination (lit. Shadows: A Nocturnal Hallucination, but just called Warning Shadows in English-language markets.) Schatten might be seen as a thematic followup to Nosferatu, not just because of the Albin Grau connection but also sharing two actors and — crucially — the cinematographer, the brilliant Fritz Arno Wagner, to whom both films owe their unique visual style and willingness to plumb the depths of the human psyche through the use of light and shadow.
Schatten is somewhat unique in silent film for having no intertitles whatsoever. While this isn’t a feature wholly exclusive to this film — early Japanese cinema used a live narrator called a benshi (弁士) instead of intertitles — it’s certainly almost unheard of in the west. Instead, Robison prefers to let his imagery tell the story, in this case a story of a jealous husband who nevertheless feels powerless to stop his wife from being courted by other men, to the point that a group of suitors actually come over for dinner. The dinner party is interrupted by a traveling showman, who puts on a shadow pageant for the group, inspired by — and directly referencing — Chinese shadow puppets and to a lesser extent the magic lanterns popularized in the 18th century. Thusly the film reveals itself as a love letter to not one but two precursors to film; indeed, in 1896, Russian thinker Maxim Gorky described the then-brand new medium as a “kingdom of shadows,” for what is film but the ultimate shadow play? (At least it was before we stopped needing projectors to watch.)
Shadows and mirrors play important roles in the film’s visual style; they are the outline of every character, a reflection of their fears and darkest desires. This point is driven home in the latter half of the film, during which the dinner party descends into madness and melodrama, with kidnapping, murder (implied through the use of shadows) and outrageous jealousy — only for the next scene to pull us back and reveal that it was all just a shadow play for the dinner party-as-audience. Did any of that violence happen? Or was our traveling showman simply playing tricks? There’s the genuine question of whether the cast had somehow fallen into the shadow play itself, giving in to their darkest fantasies. That this is all done without intertitles reveals the purpose of the film: it’s all about the interplay of performance and audience, looking for the line between the two and intentionally blurring it.
Or maybe it’s just a weird, hallucinatory mess with no clear plot. In all honesty, while that’s a less charitable assessment than I’d personally give it, it’s not a completely unfair one. What we can discern from it borders on morality play — in this case, jealousy is bad — but is elevated by the melodramatic acting (ah, but this is silent film, and expressive melodrama was the only way to act!) Ultimately, though, however you might feel about the film, its visual panache is not to be denied.
I love silent film, and I love especially German Expressionism; while I don’t think I would be listing Schatten high on my must-watch list of the genre, it still deserves at least an honorable mention for its Nosferatu connections and sharp visual style.
