Mandrakery

I suspect most people have never heard of Henrik Galeen’s Alraune, and very few of the folks who have would call it one of the world’s great classics. It’s kind of middling, and rather longer and slower than is good for it. Objectively, it’s good more than it is great. I don’t care about that, though, cos Alraune is possibly the most important film I’ve ever seen, and objecrivity be damned.

So, it’s mid-July 1990. I’ve only recently worked out how to tune the TV to pick up SBS (which only broadcast on UHF). Accordingly,  I’d started looking at the TV guide listings for SBS now that I could watch it. And one week I was struck by the sight from a film apparently from 1927 (in which year it was made, though actually released in January 1928) showing that Saturday night.

What the Christ was a film from the 1920s doing on Australian TV? And who know films were even being made then? Needless to say, I had to watch this thing…

I had next to no real knowledge of cinema at this time. I was 15, rarely went to the cinema, and mostly saw the films I did see on video or TV. As such, I had no sense of film’s history. Before this, I think the oldest film I’d seen was this one, which I think aired one day as a midday movie (remember when the TV networks here still did those?) and I just happened to have the TV on at the time. I do recall in what must’ve been 1988 or 1989 that Channel 7 showed the original Frankenstein, but it was very late at night and at that age late night TV was a bit beyond me. But I did watch the first few minutes and I got a sense something I can only call great age (probably cos Seven were likely showing a ratty old 16mm print they’d had for decades), and that this came near the beginning of something. Hard to explain, but thus it was.

And I wasn’t entirely wrong about that, cos in 1931 Hollywood was still dealing with the introduction of sound technology a few years earlier… but, as I obviously now know better, there’d been this whole world of silent cinema that I was almost entirely ignorant of; I have a very vague memory of seeing a clip of Metropolis before this, but that’s about it. And now there was a film from 1927 on TV. This was almost too much to believe.

And I loved it. I was blown away by its very existence, obviously. I can’t remember the last time I watched, though I did find a very old entry on Livejournal dated February 14 2005 where I wrote about the film cos I was dubbing my by-then kind of elderly recording of it to a better-quality tape, possibly I watched it while doing that. As far as I know SBS never showed it again (I read the TV guides religiously so I would’ve seen it listed if they had), it was too obscure a film to be on video to rent/buy, and even now the only copies of it I can see on Youtube are kind of crap. Full marks, therefore, to Deaf Crocodile for putting out on blu. (Just wish the English subtitles didn’t keep calling Alraune “Mandrake”. I know it’s technically not wrong as such, but I still don’t like it for some reason…)

I wonder, though, how I’d react to it if I were only discovering it now. Probably the way I summed it up at the start of this. Notably, this restoration is massively longer than I recall the film being when I first saw it; I don’t remember just how long that was but I think it might’ve been about 100 minutes. This version is about 134 minutes (not including the opening text on the restoration). It’s a silent film so that may be down to frame rate differences, but I think there’s some actual new footage… but it’s so long since I last it I don’t recall precise details.

As I said, it’s good rather than great. Wiki calls it a “science fiction horror film”, but really it’s more of an erotic melodrama that’s built on Alraune herself being the product of semi-weird science; I actually only got on this viewing just how grotesque the mandrake myth presented here really is. It gets by mostly on Brigitte Helm’s performance in the lead role, otherwise the acting is inclined to ham a bit, and the length is kind of preposterous given the pacing. And I still don’t care.

Because everything followed from Alraune. The initial befuddlement at the idea of a film made in 1927 ignited curiosity in me, I had to know more. First stop was the old Britannica article on film history, then to actual books. Gradually I came to the understanding that film was A Thing that could be and should be taken seriously, it had an interesting history and there was art to it, all of that, and I still had to know more. My horizons suddenly expanded vastly, and they still are. I then discovered you could actually study this stuff academically, and the later result of that was me spending 11 years as part of the 2SER film show. I owe Henrik Galeen a fair bit, really.

1989-90 was a period in which I feel now I was finally starting to come into myself and really discovering things that were mine. I don’t know how else to describe. H.P. Lovecraft put me onto a wider world of books, The Doors put me onto a wider world of music, and Alraune put me onto a wider world of cinema (especially silent cinema, which will always be a major fascination of mine). There were other “important” films I saw for the first time in 1990, but none of them was as big for me as Alraune was. Goes to show you it’s not necessarily the great classics that change everything for you.