Before the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(programme from the performance)
Before Caligari (Eric de Kuyper)
The Treasure Trove of Jean Desmet (Emmy de Groot / Frank van der Maden)





Archa Theatre and Goethe-Instituut-Prag present

Before the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Re-discovered films from 1911 - 1919 with musical accompaniment.


October 7, 1996 5:00 p.m.

Weihnachtsgedanken (Christmas Thoughts)
Unknown director,1911, 9 min.
It is Christmas Eve. A young woman, whose daughter has been killed in an automobile accident, begs for money to buy the dead girl a present. A passer-by takes pity on the woman, but the toy store is already closed. In desperation she finally tears a doll away from a little girl in order to place it on her own daughter's grave. She herself dies at the grave.

Die schwarze Kugel (The Black Ball)
Directed by Franz Hofer, 1913, 39 min.
Gussy, the sister of the music-hall performers Edith and Violetta, has committed suicide because the man she loved was unfaithful. She leaves her sisters a photograph of the man and a letter exhorting them to avenge her. Edith soon recognizes Count Giron, who is wooing Violetta, as the man in the photograph. Violetta renounces any desire for a love relationship with him; and together the two sisters confront the unscrupulous philanderer with their knowledge of what he is. Driven into a corner, he begs the sisters to forgive him. They refrain from shooting him, but they will not forgive him.

Die Verräterin (The Treacherous Woman)
Directed by Urban Gad, 1911, 43 min.
Frustrated in her love for a Prussian lieutenant, Yvonne divulges the location of his regiment to the partisans. She learns that the lieutenant has been captured and sentences to death, and does everything she possibly can to persuade the leader of the partisans to free the prisoner. Her efforts are in vain. She later commits a counter-betrayal and leads reinforcements against the partisans. The troops arrive just in time to save the lieutenant; but in the ensuing battle Yvonne is hit by a bullet of the leader of the partisans. She dies in the lieutenant's arms.

Musical accompaniment: Jatka è. 5, Filip Topol


October 7, 1996 8:00 p.m.

Zweimal gelebt (Twice Lived)
Directed by Max Mack, 1912, 24 min.
A little girl narrowly escapes being hit by a car while a taking a walk; her mother, thinking she has really been hit, suffers a shock from which she cannot seem to recover. The woman spends several days in a sanatorium, and the doctor to whom she is assigned falls in love with her. Then she actually seems to die. She awakens to discover the grieving doctor holding a vigil next to her. It does not take long for him to recognize that she has lost her memory. He seizes his chance and travels abroad with her. But they go to the same place where her husband and daughter have gone to try to assuage their grief. She encounters the child, and recovers her memory. Torn between her two lives, the ill-fated woman jumps off a bridge before she can be forced to make a decision.

Der geheimnisvolle klub (The Mysterious Club)
Directed by Joseph Delmont, 1913, 41 min.
Gerhard Bern learns that his brother has committed suicide in Rotterdam. Together with a private detective, Gerhard sets off in search of any traces his brother may have left behind. Consul Verstraaten, familiar with local conditions, will help him. Gerhard falls in love with Ilse, the Consul's daughter, while the detective discovers that the financial assets of Gerhard's brother have been signed over to a gentleman named van Geldern, who presides over a mysterious club for card players. Gerhard joins the club, and finds out that it is an assembly of potential suicides. The members stake their lives in their games; whoever draws the ace of spades must kill himself and leave all his money to van Geldern. Finally Gerhard manages to end the scoundrel's activity.

Das Recht auf Dasien (The Right of Exist)
Directed by Joseph Delmont, 1913, 43 min.
Alarmed by noises coming out of a house, the ex-convict Joseph Dermott manages to enter the building. There he finds a woman named Edith lying unconscious at the foot of the stairs. He flees immediately. The housekeeper returns home and summons the police, who find traces of Dermott. Suspected of burglary and attempted murder, Dermott again becomes a fugitive. In the course of a wild manhunt, Dermott happens to arrive at the clinic where Edith is now a patient; she has been suffering from amnesia since her fall on the staircase. An operation has been planned, but a blood donor is needed. Dermott volunteers; the doctor notices the tattoo on his underarm and identifies him as the wanted criminal. The Berlin police are notified, but Edith recovers her memory and clears Dermott of all suspicion.

Musical accompaniment: Jindøich Biskup, Filip Topol


October 8, 1996 5:00 p.m.

Und das Licht erlosch (And the Light Went Out)
Directed by Fritz Bernhardt, 1914, 41 min.
The wholesale merchant Werle and his ward Gerd are both trying to win the love of Inge, a guest in Werle's house and the daughter of friend who is a shipowner. When the older man notices that Inge is interested in Gerd, he quickly sends his ward to the colonies on business, and later intercepts all of Gerd's letter to Inge. The girl does not know what to make of Gerd's sudden disappearance and subsequent silence, but then she marries Werle since her father has gone bankrupt. When Gerd writes to his guardian that he is returning home because he misses Inge, Werle grows panicky. He hires two miscreants and steals out with them into the night, in order to destroy the beacon in the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor so that Gerd's ship will run aground. But Gerd nonetheless manages to reach his guardian's house and to talk with Inge in private. Together they come to realize that they have been the victims of Werle's treachery. The merchant makes one more desperate attempt to escape justice, but fate allots him his well-deserved punishment and leads the lovers to happiness.

Wandas Trick (Wanda´s Trick)
Directed by R. Portegg, 1916, 46 min.
Wanda Schmied works at Löbel's cigarette factory. Löbel likes his employee and takes her out in the evening. But he does not want to marry her. Then Wanda wins first prize in a lottery. Löbel is in financial straits and now asks her to marry him. She rejects his proposal. She gives up her old job and shows Löbel a plan for an advertising campaign. A picture of the now famous Wanda is to be hidden in a single pack of Löbel cigarettes, and she will marry the person who buys this pack. Of course she intends to manipulate fate a little…


October 8, 1996 8:00 p.m.

Kasperl-Lotte (Lotte of the Marionettes)
Directed by Emil Albers, 1913, 12. min.
Lotte, the adorable little foster-daughter of a puppeteer, is molested by cheeky older boys. Hans rushes to her aid and carries her shopping-basket home for her. She lets him look behind the scenes in the puppet theater, where the marionettes are hanging in a row. Hans accidentally damages the "Kasperle" marionette (Kasperle is the approximate German equivalent of Punch), and Lotte is beaten by her foster-father. From that moment, the two children are inseparable. When the puppeteer moves on, Hans' grandparents, with whom he lives, take Lotte into their home so that the two can always be together.

Die Liebe der Maria Bonde (The Love of Maria Bonde)
Directed by Emerich Hanus, 1918, 43 min.
Old Frau Bonde lives with her three grown daughters. One of them, the frail Gunne, is engaged to Martin; the two perform stunt-riding acts together. But Martin has long been in love with Maria, Gunne´s younger sister. Once day Gunne is injured during a performance; Maria substitutes for her and does the act at Martin's side. Against her will Maria must finally acknowledge her love for Martin; the two marry in secret and hide their marriage from her family. Her mother catches them kissing, and they finally tell the truth to Gunne. Gunne dies from the shock. After Frau Bonde has given the marriage her blessing, Martin and Maria live happily together for a while. Maria has a child and is no longer able to ride; Anella, the youngest sister, takes her place. From that moment Maria is tormented by the fear that the old story could repeat itself. Jealousy and despair become too much for her; she sees only one solution to the problem…


Die Börsenkönigin (The Queen of the Stock Exchange)
Directed by Edmund Edel, 1916, 53 min.
Helene Netzler, the owner of the "Glückauf" copper mine, learns that the mine is being exhausted and that her own financial situation is thereby threatened. She goes into the mine to assess the situation personally. Lindholm, the mine's manager, has found a new vein of copper which promises great yields; so Helene immediately orders that all the shares, which for several days have been flooding the market, be bought up. Meanwhile the experts have confirmed Lindholm's discovery. At a celebration in her home, Helene promotes Lindholm to part-ownership of the mine. Lindholm takes a liking to Helene's cousin Lina, a poor relations living a s a companion in the house. But Helene has fallen in love with Lindholm…

Musical accompaniment: Iva Bittová, Vladimír Václavek, Josef Ostøanský, Pavel Koudelka





Before Caligari

This selection of films offers another look at a period of German cinema which has been largely forgotten: the years immediately prior to, during and just after the First World War - the years before DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI.
          In subject matter and style, German filmmakers of those years took a more international approach than, for example, their more regionally oriented colleagues in Russia or Scandinavia. German films in the years before CALIGARI exhibited all the topics and tendencies that one could observe in, say, the French or American cinema of the time (though perhaps to a lesser extent in the Italian cinema, which was going its own special way). And German filmmakers showed even greater diversity than the filmmakers of other nations: they produced a wide range of comedies, form simple vehicle for routine gags to subtle situation comedies to bittersweet fairy-tales (especially Franz Hofer´s films); they made all sorts of adventure movies, with detective and action stories particularly distinguished by variations on the respective genres; and they presented psychological conflicts in the tradition of melodrama (films with Henny Porten) but also with a social perspective, for example DIE BÖRSENKÖNIGIN, with Asta Nielsen at her best.
          Even more remarkable is the fact that the German treatments of all these genres and varieties had an individual flavor of their own. Far from being simple imitation, the German cinema of this period was very rich and complex, with unique and specific characteristic, as the selected films will show.
          This uniqueness appears most clearly in those production where noted personalities like Asta Nielsen left their special stamp. But one can, I think, find surprising discoveries in the works of forgotten filmmakers who pursued their tasks with a real auteur spirit. Franz Hofer and Emerich Hanus deserve particular mention in this regard: Franz Hofer´s career is a show piece of versatility, and the selections from Eremich Hanus´s work leaves the impression of a man who knew how to make well-controlled psychological cinema which transcended the limitations of conventional melodrama. In every length-category (one-reelers, two-reelers, three-reelers, feature-length), we can find examples of outstanding filmmaking. Not all of these works are by the names mentioned above; as a matter of fact, most of them are more or less anonymous. Film historians have all too often been hampered by a penchant for seeing everything under the rubric of "personality" (usually the director or star), with the result that many films which are not in some way "signed" are simply disregarded. Such a tendency does a grievous injustice to this particular period of German cinema, a period whose richness comes mostly from non-personalized films (unlike, for example, the more recent Autorenkino, or cinema of authors), and from genres and the relationship of individual films to their genres. Here the whole is more important than the parts, making the overview provided by this retrospective all the more interesting and illuminating.
          One can, of course, concentrate on tracing the roots of the cinema of the Weimar Republic; this was in fact the explicit theme of the Before Caligari retrospective in Pordenone, Italy, in 1990. But I think that such a specific that such a specific treatment, while valuable in its own right, fails to convey the amazing diversity and versatility which were the special qualities of German cinema during the years before Weimar. "Anything is possible" would have been an appropriate slogan for those years. The films with Asta Nielsen are both known and notable examples; but it behooves us not to limit our knowledge and out enjoyment to what is already known when there is so much to discover and rediscover…
          I am convinced that this program is both a representative selection and a rich documentation, and that the viewer will find it extremely rewarding.
          Perhaps none of these films can be called "spectacular" (in the manner of, say, D. W. Griffith´s INTOLERANCE), but each of them exhibits astonishing quality and originality. Some of the comedies and dramas convey subtle atmosphere or admirable finesse in characterization, giving the best of them a "European" touch. Many crime films of the period display a real gift for shooting on location, sometimes with documentary tendencies. But we also see meticulous craftsmanship in the interior shots, for example in Hofer´s beautifully decorated films or the manneristic style of Hanus.
          Once again, it is the films in their entirety, their interrelations and interplay, that provide a fitting impression of a period of German cinema which has long been largely consigned to oblivion, but which certainly deserves to be rediscovered and remembered.

Eric de Kuyper


Eric de Kuyper was born in 1942. He studied in Brussels and Paris, and founded the Department of Film Studies at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands. He has held guest professorships in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Liége. He is a filmmaker, film historian, and author and co-editor for various publications. He lives in Nijmegen.





The Treasure Trove of Jean Desmet

The story of Jean Desmet (1875 - 1956) is a rags-to-riches saga like those made popular by the American writer Horatio Alger. After entering the film business with a mobile theater in about 1907, he opened his first movie-house in Rotterdam in 1909. He was soon opening theaters in other towns. But the mere ownership of theaters did not satisfy Desmet; he became interested in the buying and selling of films. From 1910 to 1915 he was the head of a highly successful company which bought, sold, and hired out films. After 1915, he gradually became increasingly involved in the real estate business, but he never sold any of the films or related documents that were still in his possession.
          When Jean Desmet died in 1956, he left an enormous collection of hundreds of films and thousands of documents, which his relatives donated to the Nederland Film Museum in Amsterdam. The documents include material such as posters, photographs, and printed programs, but also papers relating to the administrative and business aspects of cinema - letters, bills, financial statements, contracts, and the like. The collection contains what is roughly estimated to be about a hundred thousand documents covering the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1950´s. For the film historian, the most important of these documents are those from the years 1907 to 1920, when Desmet was still actively involved in the film industry, and which was a crucial period of great and rapid development in film. Desmet´s collection is an extremely rich source of information about this period.
          In the Desmet archive there are about 900 films with a total length of some 200 kilometers (about 125 miles) of nitrate film, a highly inflammable material which is gradually decomposing with the passage of time. Practically all of these films date from 1910 to 1915; and the majority of them are on-reelers with a running-time of about ten minutes, the average length in those days. About 700 of the films are feature films; the others can be classified as documentaries.
          The collection is indicative of Desmet´s broad international interest in cinema: about 270 films come from France, at that time the most prolific film-producing country in Europe and possibly the world; 220 are from America, a remarkably large number for that period; there are 130 films from Italy, 75 from Germany, 25 from England, 35 from Denmark, and 2 from Russia. There is but one Dutch feature film in the collection (DE GREEP, 1909). Do these figures correspond with the overall output of films in the various countries during those years? They may well do so. At any rate, it is quite clear that the collection offers a broad survey of international film production from 1910 to 1915.
          There is a remarkably high proportion of comedies, particularly from France and Italy. In the French productions no fewer than thirteen comedians appear, including Artheme, Bout-de-Zan, and Rosalie, all of them in their own films. In the Italian productions, we find about nine, for example Polidor, Cretinetti, Kri Kri, and Toto. All of the above, were masters of the slapstick genre. Since the other countries are also represented in this genre, it is possible to compare the comic productions of various countries with one another.
          Another prominent genre in the collection is the sentimental film. A couple of German films starring Henny Porten - PERLEN BEDEUTEN TRÄNEN (Pearls Mean Tears), 1911; ALEXANDRA, 1912 - probably moved Dutch audiences as deeply as they did German ones. Unhappy endings, however, seem not to have been much appreciated: the copy of the 1915 Italian melodrama FIOR DI MALE shows no sign of wear and tear.
          The American films in the collection are from a number of producers. Remarkably well represented is Vitagraph, a very popular studio of the time. There are, however, only a few productions from American Biograph, the studio that employed a director who was later to achieve undying fame: D. W. Griffith. Yet there are some Griffith films in the collection, among them THE LONEDALE OPERATOR and BILLY´S STRATAGEM, both from 1911.
          Quite a few of the films are unique in the most literal sense because they have probably survived only in the Desmet collection's copy.
          In 1985, the Nederland Film Museum decided to initiate a large-scale project to save and conserve the Desmet collection. The collection is considered to be an integral part of the nation's film history, and as such it belongs to the national heritage. The primary concern is the preservation of the films, but the Film museum is also attempting to save the other items, particularly the posters, from becoming irretrievably lost.
          One of the remarkable aspects of the films in the Desmet collection is the frequent use of color. 80 per cent of the films are tinted to some extent. Today we tend to forget that tinted films were a very popular phenomenon before the First World War. From the very earliest film presentations, people were looking for ways to show movies in color. The first attempt in this direction was the careful coloring of each separate frame with a pencil. The next development was the use of stencils; with the help of these the same color could be applied at the same place in successive images. This was done mainly by women. Each woman had her own color to apply on part of each image. It was a kind of assembly-line work, but it still took a lot of time and was consequently very expensive.
Then the processes known as tinting and toning came into use. With tinting a whole sequence of images was dyed in one color, and toning used the emulsion on the film to chemically transform a black-and-white image into a color image. The use of both tinting and toning in the same sequence made it possible to utilize two colors at once. The main function of the colors was to create a certain atmosphere in the various scenes and to emphasize crucial moments of the story.
The films in our program constitute only a very small part of the collection, but with them we have attempted to convey an impression of the collection's variety and originality.

Emmy de Groot / Frank van der Maden


Emmy de Groot was born in 1955. Since 1980 she has worked as a restorer at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and is currently at work on, among other projects, the restoration and reconstruction of the Jean Desmet collection.

Frank van der Maden was born in 1948, and studied history in Nijmegen. He is a film historian and archivist at the Nederlands Filmmuseum and other institutions, and is currently working at the Joris Ivens Archive. He lives in Amsterdam.