The Student of Prague (1913); Der Student von Prag (German title);
A Bargain with Satan; or, The Student of Prague (UK title)
Country: Germany
Production Company: Deutsche Bioscop GmbH
Director: Stellan Rye
Screenplay: Hanns Heinz Ewers
Cinematographer: Guido Seeber
Music: Josef Weiss
Production Design: Robert A Dietrich, Klaus Richter
Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia
Budget: 30,000 Marks
Cast: Paul Wegener (Balduin) Fritz Weidemann (Baron Waldis-Schwarzenberg), John Gottowt (Scapinelli), Lyda Salmonova (Lyduschka, a country girl), Grete Berger (Margit, Countess Waldis-Schwarzenberg), Lothar Körner (Count Waldis-Schwarzenberg), Alexander Moissi.
Length: 57 mins/5,046 feet (41 mins on DVD at 24 frames per second), later cut to 4,817 (4,500 feet in UK)
Synopsis: Suffering from financial problems, student Balduin signs a Faustian pact with Scapinelli, an old man with magical powers, offering anything in his room in exchange for 100,000 gold pieces and the woman of his dreams. Scapinelli takes Balduin's soul in the form of his reflection and the student finds himself increasingly plagued by the Doppelgänger, until it kills on his behalf.
Review: By 1913, film had taken hold of the public interest in most of the developed world, but was largely held in contempt as being a "low" art form. German author Hanns Heinz Ewers, an admirer of Poe and friend of Aleister Crowley, was an early evangelist of the possibilities of film over theater and had a contract with Berlin's Bioscop to produce 10 films and write eight screenplays.
He had previously collaborated on the script for Der Verführte (The Tempted) with the theater actor Paul Wegener, a member of Max Reinhardt's famous Deutsches Theater. Another strong proponent of cinema, Wegener, beginning his screen career here, would go on the create The Golem series and appear alongside Brigitte Helm in Golem-collaborator Henrik Galeen's 1928 adaptation of Ewers' Alraune, a distaff take on Frankenstein.
Ewers was also responsible for saving the career of Danish director Stellan Rye, who left Denmark penniless having served three months in gaol for homosexuality. In a brief but prolific career Rye would produce 13 films after directing Der Verführte and The Student of Prague, before dying at the age of 34 in a French prison hospital, having fought on the side of Germany in the First Battle of Ypres.
Ewers and his collaborators (film was seen as a writer's medium at that time), along with cinematography pioneer Guido Seeber, created an excellent snapshot of a developing style and a medium in transition from primitive beginnings to a recognized art. Seeber's camerawork veers from static, dull interiors to some stunning location work on the streets of Prague, but two scenes – one a card game illuminated by a single light from above, the other a lover's tryst, in which Balduin meets his intended as Scapinelli's shadow threatens from below – show early sign of what would become the German Expressionistic style, later developed by Karl Freund (The Golem, Metropolis), Willy Hameister (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), and Fritz Arno Wagner (Nosferatu, Warning Shadows), into one of the dominant influences of the first three decades of cinema.
The acting betrays the stage origins of its protagonists, with some hard-to-take mugging from Wegener that shows none of the subtlety he would later bring to The Golem and Fünf Unheimliche Geschichten (he went on to deliver a lecture on the importance of minimalism in screen acting in 1916), and a similarly over-expressive performance from John Gottowt as Scapinelli. But the importance of the film lies not in the performances, but in its key place as an early example of fantasy cinema and of that particularly German obsession with narcissism, duality, and impending doom expressed in the doppelgänger.
Production on The Student of Prague was completed at the beginning of July, 1913 and it premièred - with a censor ban on showing to minors - on August 22nd in Berlin's Mozart Halle accompanied by perhaps the first music score composed specifically for a German film. Following the release seven months earlier of Max Mack's Der Andere (The Other), a variant on the Jekyll and Hyde story generally regarded as the first German film to have artistic merit, The Student of Prague received considerable interest, with reviewers gushing: "A pioneering innovation in the poetry of film" (Vossischen Zeitung), "Ebers has carried it off with the finest taste and technical cunning" (Berliner Tageblatt), and "…a total success." (Deutsche Nachrichten). Unfortunately, as is often the case with early silents, opinions differed by the mid-1920s and it was dismissed as naive and ridiculous when re-released in 1926.
The Student of Prague has been remade four times, in 1926 by Wegener's friend Henrik Galeen, starring Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss (reuniting after The Cabinet of Dr Caligari); in a 1935 sound version, starring Anton Walbrook, directed by Arthur Robison (Warning Shadows); in 1990 as a mini-series for Czech television; and as a 2004 Czech/US independent short.
The 1913 version was shown in November 2008 as an art event at the Now Museum in Glasgow, Scotland by Canadian illustrator Judd Brucke and English artist Jack Wrigley, along with a 10-piece band.
Availability: DVD from Alpha Video, with synthesizer soundtrack by Paul David Bergel, Region 0, May 2004, $7.98. The only available copy, transferred from videotape taken from a 16mm print, the image is inconsistent and the soundtrack would test the patience of Michael Nyman, but we should thankful that Alpha has brought this to us at a reasonable price.
Reference
Das Motiv des Doppelgängers als Spaltungsphantasie in der Literatur und im deutschen Stummfilm, Gerald Bär, Rodopi, 2005.
The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, Lotte H Eisner, Thames & Hudson, 1969 and University of California Press, 2008.
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Seigfried Kracauer, Princeton University Press, 2004.
A Pictorial History of the Horror Movie, Dennis Gifford, Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1973.
Der Student von Prag, Lee Tsiantis, filmreference.com
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