The Golem (1920)

Toronto Film Society presented The Golem (1920) on Saturday, November 2, 2024 as part of the Season 77 Virtual Film Buffs Screening Series, Programme 2.

Production Company: RKO release of K.B.S. (Admiral) Production.  Associate Producer: Samuel Bischoff.  Director: Felix E. Feist.  Screenplay: John Goodrich and Warren B. Duff, based on the novel Deluge: A Romance by S. Fowler Wright (London, 1927).  Cinematography: Norbert Brodine.  Special Effects Director: Ned Mann.  Special Effects Photography: William N. Williams.  Sets: Ralph De Lacey.  Film Editor: Martin G. Cohn.  Music Director: Val Burton.  Sound Engineer: Corson Jowett.  Release Date: August 18, 1933.  Running time: 70 minutes.

Cast: Paul Wegener (The Golem), Albert Steinrück (Rabbi Loew), Lyda Salmonova (Miriam Loew), Ernst Deutsch (The Rabbi’s Famulus), Hans Stürm (Rabbi Jehuda).

Made once before in 1914 by Wegener and Henrik Galeen, and re-filmed as a talkie in the ’30’s in France by Julien Duvivier with Harry Baur as the Emperor, The Golem is one of a considerable number of films with legendary or supernatural themes made in Germany in this period- among them The Student of Prague, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, and Siegfried.

In this story, the clay image of the Golem, a legendary figure of the Middle Ages, is brought to life by an old Rabbi to deliver the Jews from oppression of their overlord. The film was internationally famous in its day and is of considerable interest for the richness of its atmosphere, its exterior settings and its lighting, as well as for the acting of Wegener.

H.H. Wolenberg in 50 Years of German Film says: “A decisive gain for the German cinema in its development into an art with the great actor Paul Wegener. Above all he discovered novel possibilities of the camera in trick-technique and in bringing to the screen the supernatural and the fairy-tale.  As leading actor of his films he was never bettered in his particular style, nor did any other camera ever cast the spell of his legendary world over the eyes of the public.  His greatest achievement was The Golem.  The story held the audience enthralled. Medieval Prague with its ghetto came to fantastic life, and if there is any work to prove that the film may be an independent art form it is The Golem.”  (Mr. W. May have overstated things a bit, but we think it’s worth seeing! – George G. Patterson.)

Paul Rotha in The Film Till Now lists The Golem among German films “superb in their creative architecture”, and writes of “the co-ordinated movements of the crowds in this remarkable film.  Seen at times through a window, they moved along narrow streets in straight lines and intersected straight lines across the screen.  The fact that their direction was restricted and indicated by the walls of the streets added emphasis to their destination and intent.”

Notes by George G. Patterson

1919’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari introduced the world to the bizarre sensibilities of German expressionism. Although it arose out of German Romanticism, cinematic expressionism gave voice to the nightmarish fears of the forces of modernity out of control, a vision compelling in its weirdness and dangerous in its implications for democracy — some have seen in cinematic expressionism an allegory for the rise of Fascism in Germany. 1920’s The Golem is a lesson in rendering the uncanny in cinema. Wegener’s film gathers to itself ancient story materials and folklore, joining the darkest imaginings of premodern Europe to the new medium of the cinema, and speaking the medieval through the modern.

Writer/director Paul Wegener had long been fascinated by the rabbinical legend of the Golem, the giant clay monster who stood by to save the Jewish citizens of Prague from the anger of an emperor who accused them of the ritualistic murder of children. The tale of the Golem was a folktale, that, like many such tales, grew out of a need to address the unspeakable in a manner as dramatic and horrific as the thing itself, for violent anti-Semitism boiled throughout Europe and the Pale in the 1920s.

Wegener’s fascination with the story was singular: he made his first cinematic version of The Golem in 1915, and brought the character back in 1917 in The Golem and the Dancing Girl. But it is Wegener’s third version of the tale that is his most unsettling. Wegener charged his designer, Hans Poelzig, the gifted protege of Max Reinhardt, with bringing to life the Jewish ghetto of Prague. As film historian Stephen Hanson has noted, Poelzig designed the settings with cameras and lighting in mind, and in doing so, achieved a more genuinely cinematic expressionist vision than even the vaunted Caligari.

The Golem‘s cinematographer was the brilliant Karl Freund, the most stellar of all directors of photography in the expressionist cinema; his filmography includes such masterworks of the movement F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and E.A. DuPont’s Variety. Freund closely collaborated with Wegener and Poelzig on the look of The Golem, joining evocative lighting and inventive camera angles to sets and actors’ gestures to create an integrated vision of dread. Lighting, in particular, was one of Freund’s strengths, and he adroitly supports Wegener’s shifts in storytelling tone with lighting effects. With his work on The Golem, Freund shows why he was known as “the Giotto of the screen.”

But it is Wegener the actor, in his role as the Golem, who marks the film indelibly. Wegener’s Golem, with his monstrous appearance and his trancelike obedience to the command of a legendary megalomaniac, is one of the most significant ancestors of the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff. Huge, avenging and violent, Wegener’s Golem terrorizes the enemies of the Hebrews. Yet, however superhuman his attributes, Wegener’s creature is undeniably romantic. Having tasted eternal life, he nonetheless yearns for the fragile mortality of the people he observes. As a timeless invention of Rabbi Loew’s supernatural abilities and Nietzchean conscience, the Golem’s existence allows him neither pleasure nor pain. Ironically, the Golem envies the uncertainty and finite life of the humans who stand in terror of him. They fear his immortal powers, and he desires a short, passionate, unpredictable life like theirs. The grasping toward humanity by Wegener’s beast is one of the most affecting transformations in all of cinema.

The Golem is a richly symbolic narrative drawn from Jewish mythology. But the question remains after the Golem’s ultimate fate is decided in a startling instant at the end of the film: is this a sympathetic portrait of the oppression Jews faced throughout Europe, in crowded ghettoes of twisted lanes and dark hovels? Or is The Golem more demented “proof” of Jewish necromancy, another in a long line of paranoid fantasies about Jewish spellmakings over Gentiles? For Paul Wegener, the story of the Golem proved so fascinating that he retold it again and again, rewriting it, directing it, and playing the creature himself, in a remarkable artistic quest to understand the tyrannical power of religious myth.

Notes were prepared for the New York State Writers Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian,
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University.