Hitler loved Metropolis, and it convinced him to send Goebbels to recruit Lang for the Ministry of Propaganda–and Lang left for America.

In which we learn all Alan and Paul's secrets.

You may be wondering why we’re talking about Nosferatu on a podcast about science fiction films. I added this movie to our list for a couple of reasons:

Today we’re going a little further afield of standard science fiction by looking at the 1920 German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari!

The writers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, who are said to have set out to write a story denouncing arbitrary authority as brutal and insane, although that’s under some debate (more on that later).

The film’s plot was inspired by several events in the writers’ lives, which included

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is considered to be the first German Expressionist film. What’s Expressionism? The site StudioBinder describes it this way: 

German Expressionism is a particular artistic style that first appeared in poetry and theatre around 1910. It became popular in film 10 years later after WWI. It comes partly from German Romanticism and gives a subjective view of the world. It visualizes the country's collective anxiety through distorted and nightmarish imagery. Expressionists had little interest in their work being aesthetically pleasing. This style flourished after the horrors of WWI, and the inevitable economic devastation that followed.

It’s also one of the first films to employ a twist ending, although the frame tale containing the twist ending isn’t what the writers intended. Janowitz and Mayer claimed that they wanted the story to be told in a straightforward manner without the twist ending. A recovered script proved the film did indeed have a framing sequence, but the last pages of the script are missing, and we don’t know how the frame tale ends.

The frame tale and twist ending drew criticism from Siegfried Kracauer, author of From Caligari to Hitler, who felt it undermined the anti-authoritarian nature of the main story. It should be noted, however, that not everyone agrees that the story is intentionally anti-authoritarian; while Janowitz, in 1941, said it was only years after the film was released that he realized exposing the "authoritative power of an inhuman state" was the "subconscious intention" of the writers, film historian David Robinson suggested Janowitz's recollection may have changed in response to later interpretations of the film (kind of like how Groucho’s favorite Marx Brothers film seems to have changed over time).

Homunculus was originally a series of six films based on an epic poem of the same name written by Robert Hamerling in 1888, created by the German studio Deutsche Bioscop GmbH. Each film was approximately an hour long, and they were released in 1916 (except for part 6, which came out in 1917). The original episode titles were:

Although the serial was very popular in Berlin, the only remaining copies of the original films are part 4 and a fragment of part 5.

However, the story of the film doesn’t end there. In spring 1920, Deutsche Bioscop merged with Decla-Film to form Decla-Bioscop, and the new amalgamated studio edited the six films down to three and released the new version with colored tints and intertitles in September 1920. The titles of the shorter version were:

The easiest version to find online is an even more heavily edited 76-minute tinted version with Italian language intertitles, which was found in the George Eastman Museum film archives. This is the version we’ve linked to on YouTube.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, was inspired by the life and deeds of William Brodie (1741-1788), who was a paragon of high society by day but a criminal by night. A highly renowned Scottish cabinetmaker and locksmith, Brodie would create and install locks for the houses of Edinburgh’s rich elite, while creating copies of the keys to break into their houses at night to steal money and valuables to fund his secret gambling habit and provide for the two mistresses and the five children he’d had with them.

This week's episode stays in the world of silent films. Still, it crosses the line between science fiction and horror as we look at an early adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, produced in 1910 by the Edison studios.

Recommended: Check out the Library of Congress's curated online collection, Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies.

From History of Edison Motion Pictures:

Edison's laboratory was responsible for inventing the Kinetograph (a motion picture camera) and the Kinetoscope (a peep-hole motion picture viewer). Edison's assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, performed most of this work in 1888. Motion pictures became a thriving entertainment industry in less than a decade, with single-viewer Kinetoscopes giving way to films projected for mass audiences. The Edison Manufacturing Co. (later known as Thomas A. Edison, Inc.) built the apparatus for filming and projecting motion pictures and produced films for public consumption. Most early examples were actualities showing famous people, news events, disasters, people at work, new modes of travel and technology, scenic views, expositions, and other leisure activities. As actualities declined in popularity, the company's production emphasis shifted to comedies and dramas.

From Decline of the Edison Company:

The Edison Company tried to improve its image through several initiatives. Imitating its competitors, Edison developed a stock company of actors in 1910. The company also tried to cultivate an image of respectability by making films for public service organizations like the American Red Cross or the New York Milk Committee. Famous literary works or historical events became the inspiration for film plots.

Points to ponder:

Introduction

Join us as we look at the history of Science Fiction Film.

Welcome to Watch This! SPACE! Dive through the airlock of reality and into the universe of speculative cinema as we look at what was, to see what could be.

For the first week, we watched four early, early examples of science fiction films:

From The Origins of Science Fiction Film (1900s - 1920s):

The origins of film began in the early 1900s with short black and white films created to extend the magic of theater on screen. Science fiction cinema is one of the first genres to be translated to film, but as a way for magicians to use illusion, theatrics, and trickery to stun crowds. One early pioneer of cinema, Georges Méliès was a magician by trade and used cinema to create dozens of films, including Le Voyage dans la Lune (A voyage to the Moon) (1902) based on stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. All of Méliès' films are applauded for exploring special effects and creating worlds of fantasy and whimsy. Science fiction literature continued to influence the new medium with films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), Frankenstein (1910), and The Lost World (1925). Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) is one of the first films to utilize stop-motion animation by special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien. Science fiction film became a vehicle for prediction and social commentary in Europe with films like Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) and Metropolis (1927). Metropolis, directed by German expressionist Fritz Lang, is widely celebrated as the important and influential science fiction film.

Discuss science fiction and its literary roots, including how it intertwined with fantasy (medieval romance, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.) and horror (Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, etc.)

Acknowledge the major source of the week: Janne Wass’s site scifist 2.0.

Points for discussion:

Repeated in print, the films seems a mess, and in a sense it is. But just like modern action film directors use fast cuts and special effects to thrill a viewer, so did Méliès. In his first five years of filmmaking he more or less developed most of the tricks that made up the bulk of special effects up until the birth of computer graphics. These included double exposure, superimposition with a black background creating what would later be called “blue screen” or “green screen” photography, time-lapse photography, stop tricks, forced perspective with moving cameras and pulleys, dissolves, and early animation done by hand-painting directly on the film frames. To all this Méliès added beautifully realized sets, complicated and sometimes gigantic puppeteered props, extravagant costumes and stage effects like smoke and fire.