Scott Lord Silent Film: Genuine, A Tale of A Vampire

In The Haunted Screen, author Lotte H. Eisner chronices that although the film Cabinet of Dr. Caligari fell short of creating a new genre, director Robert Weine continued developing the elements of genre that could be found in the first film in the second, "Genuine". She credits scenarist Carl Mayer with having "immediately concieved action in terms of images", included those interpreted by the "body wriggling Fern Andra".

Actress Fern Andra, Dowager Baroness von Weichs, born in the United States, had been a child tightrope walker. In addition to appearing under the direction of Robert Weine in the film "Genuine", during 1920 Fern Andra starred under Weine's direction in the film "The Night of Queen Isabeau" (Die Nacht der Konigin Isabeau). The film is considered a lost silent film with no existing copies survive.

Actress Fern Andra directed ten films for Fern Andra Film between 1915-1919, before her having acted on the screen for producer Eric Pommer.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine) Silent Film

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Golem, How He Came into the World (Paul Wegener, 1920)

Exhibitor's Herald during 1921 praised the film "The Golem" (Der Golem) for its "ingenious handling of the masses engaged in many of the scenes, persons numbering in the thousands", claiming, "the point of direction and composition" was a "splendid piece of work". It also added, "The lighting, photography and general detail is lacking, and the characters, many of them, are over done in make-up."

Author Lotte H. Eisner, in his volume "The Haunted Screen", explains the contemporaneity of "The Golem", "Paul Wegener always denied having had the intention of making an Expressionist film with his Golem. But that has not stopped people from calling it Expressionist." Seeing the film as an import, or "art film"- an idea particularly important to Scandinavian film companies during that decade almost up to the departure of Charles Magnusson from Swedish Biograph, and therefore an idea frequent in the extratextural film discourse of film critics and reviewers- Picture Play Magazine during 1921 also compared "THe Golem" to "Doctor Caligari" and the theater of Max Reinhardt in its having translated to the screen "the immense imaginative possiblities of the futurist school of dramatic expression". That year periodical highlighted the film with a two page photo dislay, each photo taking up half a page, explaining that "sensational success is predicted" while introducing the "foeign made film", "one of the most important European productions". The photocaptions pointed out the films "curious haunting beauty." The British peridical Pictures and Picturegoer during 1923 did in fact approach genre theory by combining then recent early examples of the mystery thriller, including John Barrymore in his appearance in Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, in the article Macabre Movies, distinguishing "The Golem" as a "picturization of a mediaeval legend" but comparing its "Cubist scenery" with that of "Doctor Caligari" with its half-lit ineteriors.

Wegener had given a lecture during 1916 entitled "The Artistic Possibilities of Cinema" as a proponent of "cinematic lyricism" where lines would appear then change as moving surfaces.

Motion Picture World, rather, during 1921 chose to begin with the film's "subject matter" and its "preposteruous story". "He has grasped the most essential fact about his duties as a director- to tell a story in action and develop characters at the same time. Every foot of film advances the progress of the story. There are no cutbacks, no halts for bits of local color or parenthetical description of any of the characters. He knows the meaning of the word drama."

The periodical Motion Picture News during 1921 noted, "Wegener deserves double credit for he also plays the tile role and makes it an unforgettable figure."

Paul Wegener wrote,directed and starred in the his first adaptation of the novel "The Golem" in 1915, presumed to be almost entirely lost with only fragments surviving. Henri Galeen co-wrote and co-directed the photoplay exhibited as "Monster of Fate" in the United States, where Wegener appeared in the 1926 film "The Magician", directed by Rex Ingram.

Author Kenneth Macgowan, in his volume Behind the Screen, inaccurately credits Stellan Rye, director of the 1913 film "The Student of Prague", as having directed "The Golem" by complimenting his collaboration with screenwriter Henrik Galeen. Macgowan writes," Key light and shadow, the selection and composition of scenes, and above all, a script that progressed clearly, logically and imaginatively, these men created one of those motion pictures that made the screen of 1917 something of an adventure."

Silent Film Silent Film Lon Chaney

Scott Lord Silent Film: Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, Edison Manufactu...

Authors Dennis R Cuthcin and Dennis R. Perry in their work "The Frankenstein Complex, when the text is more than a text" view the silent film "Frankenstein" as having been inspired by several stage adaptations, specifically Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, which, produced in 1823 by Richard Brinkley Peak, may have been remote to the Edison stufio in New Jersey, as may have been the other fifteen theatrical adaptations of "Frankenstein" produced before 1851. The University of Pennsylvania presently includes Henry M. Milner's The Demon of Switzerland (1823) and The Man and the Monster (1826) among them, but admits that several theatrical adaptations were burlesque or musical comedy.


That intertitles were at first often explanatory shows the beginning of a narrative cinema. During an early scene of the silent film "Frankenstein" (J. Searle Dawley, Edison, 1910, one-reel) there is, in between scenes, an expositiory intertitle that uses a close shot of a letter to develop plot and character within the narrative, a form of the epistolary form of the novel transferred on to the screen. A similar insert shot is used in the film "A Dash Through the Clouds" (1912).

J. Searle Dawley directed at Edison Film Manufacturing Company untill 1913, when he joined Edwin Porter at Famous Players Company, where he directed actress Marguerite Clark.

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