Film Review: The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prague, 1913)

Cinema during its first decades struggled to be taken seriously. For most of the cultural establishment, it was considered nothing more than a cheap circus-like attraction, enjoyed mostly by impoverished and often illiterate masses, unwilling and unable to appreciate the finer achievements of art and culture. There were, however, actors, artists, writers and intellectuals who gradually began to challenge that view. One of them was German actor and director Paul Wegener whose 1913 film debut The Student of Prague is often considered to be the first feature horror film in the history of the world and the first art film in the history of German cinema.

The script was written by Hanns Heinz Ewers, the most prominent author of German horror fiction at the time (and who also appears together with Wegener in the introductory shot depicting the two of them admiring the Prague panorama). Ewers' text was very loosely based on "William Wilson", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the legend of Faust. The plot begins in 1820 Prague where the protagonist, a student named Balduin (played by Wegener) enjoys a reputation as the city's greatest carouser and swordsman. He is, however, at the same time penniless, which creates a huge problem after meeting and falling in love with the aristocratic Margit von Schwarzenberg (played by Grete Berger). So, when a sinister-looking gentleman named Scapinelli (played by John Gottowt) offers 100,000 gold coins in exchange for anything Balduin owns in his room, he readily agrees, convinced that he owns nothing. He realises his error after seeing that he has lost his reflection in the mirror and instead gained a sinister-looking doppelganger. His attempts to romance Margit are sabotaged by Lyduschka (played by Lyda Salmonova), a Gypsy woman in love with him, but even more by his doppelganger whose bloody crimes will be attributed to Balduin.

The Student of Prague is one of those films that is interesting only due to its historical importance and actually doesn't represent much of a groundbreaking technical achievement nor does it have the ability to entertain an audience more than a century after its premiere. Wegener, a member of a highly prominent family (his cousin Alfred Wegener was a renowned geographer and his son Peter was a renowned physicist) who abandoned law studies for the sake of an acting career, was one of the first actors to recognise the true potential of the new medium of film, but his directing abilities in The Student of Prague appear to be very limited. Most of the shots are, like in almost any film of the era, static and the lack of sound is followed by a lack of proper exposition through intertitles, making many of the scenes overlong and acted in an overly theatrical fashion. Wegener as an actor is nevertheless solid and cinematographer Guido Seeber uses simple but effective optical tricks to allow Wegener to play two versions of the same character in the same shot. Czech actress Lyda Salmonova (who would later become Wegener's real-life wife) impresses more with her scenes of dancing and climbing than with her acting.

Despite all those limitations, the audience at the time was quite impressed and The Student of Prague became a huge commercial success. More importantly, it caught the attention of intellectuals and scientists, including the noted Austrian psychoanalyst and Freud's disciple Otto Rank who wrote an article with a detailed interpretation of Balduin's character and motivations in Freud's academic journal. The Student of Prague was remade twice – in 1926 as a more technically polished silent film directed by Wegener's friend Henrik Galeen and in 1935 as a sound film directed by Arthur Robison. Wegener himself became one of Germany's earliest film stars and directed a series of silent horror films in the 1910s, many of which were sadly lost. His work on The Student of Prague is sometimes credited as an inspiration for classics of German Expressionism like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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