The Golem: Heroes and Villains

Golem-blogging, essay 11 of 21 

The knight Florian and Miriam in The Golem (1920).

Heroes and Villains 

In The Golem (1920), oppression is bad. We, the audience, are always guided to be on the side of the oppressed. Oppression derives from the imperial court. And the opposite of the imperial court is the synagogue, where the oppressed gather. 

But when it comes to defining heroes and villains, the above paragraph is about as far as I’m willing to go. The individual characters themselves are surprisingly fluid and ethically ambiguous. A character who appears heroic in one scene may take on a different character in the next. 

As the appointed representative of the imperial court, Florian initially appears to be a potentially villainous character. His ongoing flirtation with Miriam can be read as lecherous and self-serving. But in the end, he becomes a victim himself, earning at least a modicum of sympathy. 

Rabbi Loew lectures Miriam.

Miriam has been seen as a dark seductress by some, and she certainly is flirtatious and sexual. But the movie also presents her as a fairytale princess, and so it is impossible not to side with her when Rabbi Loew forces her to her knees and tells her that he will appoint a guardian over her to force her to behave properly. As an audience, we feel that the princess must escape from the bower where she is trapped. She deserves to be rescued by a knight. By the end of the movie, she must fill the familiar role of the heroine carried off by the monster. 

Famulus.

Famulus starts as a sympathetic character, but ultimately it is his rash actions that will be a catalyst for disaster. At the close, his character will appear ambiguous at best. 

The Golem moves from being an amoral servant (a potential source of good works if appropriately guided) to a dangerous, uncontrolled monster. 

And, above all, there is Rabbi Loew. I’ve already commented on how the Jewish community is passive in their response to oppression in the opening scenes. Audiences may sympathize with a passive response, but in their search for a hero, they want action. By creating a Golem to protect the oppressed community of the ghetto, Rabbi Loew offers an alternative to passivity. His response is pro-active and, therefore, potentially heroic. 

But just as quickly as the movie sets up Rabbi Loew as being wise and pro-active, it swiftly undermines his heroism in two ways. First, as mentioned above, he threatens his daughter, placing himself in the role of the oppressor (and raising concerns that his use of magic may be as much for his own personal use as for the community good). Second, in learning how to create a Golem, he consults a book on Necromancie. In an earlier post, I argued that the movie views magic as amoral, rather than immoral. But necromancy is pushing the envelope. I think at this point, it is natural for the audience to decide that Rabbi Loew may be venturing into areas that are very, very dangerous. He is playing with fire.

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem: Art Direction

Golem-blogging, essay 10 of 21 

The massive sets of the Prague ghetto in The Golem (1920).

Art Direction 

The Golem (1920) is divided by intertitles into five chapters. By the end of the first chapter, the audience has toured Prague from the poor streets of the ghetto to the emperor’s court. The production design is amazingly ambitious, using very different styles for the various settings to reflect not only the characters’ wealth or lack thereof, but also their psychological states. By contrast, the artistic design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is relatively simple, with all scenes embracing the same expressionist aesthetic. This works well for Caligari, but the very different approach of The Golem is equally successful, as well as exponentially more complex. 

The city streets of the Jewish ghetto, built on a scale to rival D.W. Griffith’s great Paris sets for Orphans of the Storm (1921) in the following year, are the most memorable of the movie’s sets. The buildings look ancient and massive—like true storybook structures. They tend to have rounded edges as if they were molded out of clay themselves. 

The emperor signs the decree.

The most extreme contrast with the ghetto is found in the design of the imperial court where the emperor resides. Ably assisted by cinematographer Karl Freund, production designer Hans Poelzig emphasizes an artfully balanced symmetry with the emperor’s throne at the center. Graceful ornamental ironwork provides a royal backdrop for the throne, and soft textures dominate the foreground. There’s only one jarring element, but it’s an extremely important one. Note the scene where the emperor signs the decree. It’s one of the few off-center compositions in this scene, and it’s framed to include a curious wooden structure to the right of the throne, intentionally distorted so as to be barely recognizable. It’s a cross, ominously twisted in the background, perhaps suggesting the perversion of Christianity represented by the decree that the emperor is signing in the foreground. 

The winding staircase.

Rabbi Loew’s home anchors the movie and it is surprisingly varied in its artistic designs. Most of the house, especially the magnificent winding staircase that leads to the rabbi’s rooftop observatory, is in the massive, molded style of the buildings of the ghetto. But the Rabbi’s house contains other chambers that break away from the prevailing design in interesting ways. 

Miriam’s room is a pre-Raphaelite delight, with walls decorated with delicate lines and flourishes suggestive of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press designs. It is a feminine room, more in keeping with a courtly style of storytelling than the rest of the house.

Rabbi Loew descends to the secret chamber.

Most significant of all is the secret chamber where Rabbi Loew designs and sculpts his Golem. The secret entrance is hidden beneath a carpet, where a door in the floor opens to reveal a staircase. The rabbi descends to a lower door, where he must break a seal to enter. And inside is the one room in The Golem which genuinely shows some influence from Caligari, in the form of expressionistic irregular shapes etched onto the door. Fittingly, this is the most magical chamber in the house, the room where reality crosses into dream/nightmare. As Rabbi Loew descends the stairs and enters here, it is almost as if the movie is descending into a deeper level of consciousness and tapping into the wellsprings of the subconscious, the world of the horror movie proper.

Atmospheric silhouette of the Prague ghetto at night.

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem: Sexual Symbolism

Golem-blogging, essay 9 of 21

The Rabbi's daughter Miriam in The Golem (1920).

Sexual Symbolism

Miriam likes the boys. 

The first two scenes with Miriam are very similar in structure. First there’s a medium or closeup of Miriam, either behaving flirtatiously or preening, followed by a shot of a man, Famulus (the Jewish assistant) in the first instance and Florian (the Christian knight) in the second. With Famulus, Miriam openly teases. She approaches him yet stays just out of reach. She seems to enjoy her effect on him as he responds with the confusion of a shy boy. 

The flirtation with Florian careens off down a different track. Florian is introduced in the scene at the emperor’s palace, where he is at first indistinguishable from the other smug couriers. Since this directly follows the scene of the devout Jews at prayer, the audience is clued to see the royal court as shallow and hypocritical. When Florian is selected by the emperor to deliver the decree to the Jewish ghetto, Florian becomes the center of the viewer’s attention and the representative of the court. Florian is presented as an indolent fop, the playboy of medieval Prague. As the court’s official representative and carrier of the anti-Jewish decree, Florian fills an essentially villainous role at this point. 

Miriam's pre-Raphaelite style bedroom.

Miriam in search of her knight.

Miriam seems to telepathically sense Florian’s approach. From her upstairs bedroom, designed in a delicate pre-Raphaelite style, Miriam fits the iconographical image of the princess locked in a tower chamber, awaiting rescue. The sight of her leaning out the window, in search of a knight to rescue her, is pure storybook. When Florian looks up, the movie’s most highly-charged sexual flirtation is on. 

The Christian knight Florian.

Florian is memorable for the long-stemmed flower he likes to play with between his lips and for the out-size feather that springs from his hat. Are these intentional phallic symbols? Usually, I choose to bypass Freud and assume that a cigar is just a cigar, so my first inclination is to regard these objects as yet another lively aspect of the movie’s imaginative production design. 

But then the chalice arrives… 

Miriam enters the room, carrying a bowl of fruit and a chalice. Florian stands at a distracted distance from the two rabbis. From the instant of her entrance, Florian and Miriam are intent only on each other, oblivious to the presence of the two older men. Miriam lays down the bowl then, smiling invitingly, offers the chalice to Florian. But before giving it to him, she sips from the brim of the chalice herself. Then she hands it to him and he drinks, his eyes fixed on her. The chalice is at the center of this scene and the invitation is wonderfully explicit. 

The male feather and the female chalice – there’s no way this is unintentional. This is savvy knowing filmmaking, winking at the audience in a way that is much closer to Ernst Lubitsch than Caligari, and it wittily sets the stage for the triangle plot that will eventually ignite the movie’s climax.

The flirtation is on!

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem: Identification with Victims

Golem-blogging, essay 8 of 21 

Identification with Victims 

At one point in the academic study of film, it was assumed that point-of-view camerawork was the primary method of establishing audience identification. In chapter 15 (Star and Auteur) of his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Robin Wood argues that there are other ways, equally powerful, to encourage audience identification, including: 

“Identification With the Threatened or Victimized: A recurrent motif of Hitchcock interviews: there is a 'natural' (read: endemic to our culture) tendency to identify with the character who is threatened.” 

In The Golem (1920), the audience is primed to identify with the people who are threatened and victimized. 

Miriam, Rabbi Loew, and Famulus.

In the movie’s opening minutes, we have: Crisis, followed by response – the Jews are facing misfortune and therefore, they should do… something. And the something that they do is to gather as a community for prayer. Note that this first response is visually passive. There is no pro-active community response, except to pray and to wail at fate. As presented here, the Jewish community is open to the audience’s sympathy but is not taking a heroic role. The audience is led to see the Jews as victims (specifically, victims of misfortune), which is also the way that the Jews in the movie seem to view themselves. 

The decree.

At this point, we have our lead trio of figures (Rabbi, Miriam, Famulus) and a community of passive victims. Naturally, the audience is expected to empathize with all these figures, but we want action, too. And it is only at this point, with the audience’s sympathies clearly placed with the threatened Jewish community, that the “Christian” and imperial charges against the Jews are stated. In the form of a medieval document, we get to read the litany of traditional slanders: “Decree Against the Jews: The many serious charges against the Jews can no longer be disregarded, being that they crucified our Lord, wrongfully ignore the holy Christian holidays, thirst after the goods and lives of their fellow men, and practice the black arts. Hence we decree that all Jews evacuate their quarter, known as the ghetto, before the new moon.” 

Taken by itself, this decree is a traditional list of anti-Jewish sentiments. It might be approved by organizers of a pogrom, or Nazis, or the KKK. But this movie was not made for such an audience. In these opening scenes, the audience has already been led to accept the Jews as figures of empathy. As I have argued previously, even the accusation of practicing the black arts was not necessarily positioned as being an evil thing. Meyrink’s books and numerous popular occult explorations of the time primed the German public to regard the occult as a field neither necessarily good nor bad. The audience would have been expected to react to this anti-Jewish decree as one of monstrous unfairness, with all the audience’s sympathies firmly placed with the Jewish community. 

The following scene, in the emperor’s palace, further deepens the audience’s empathy with the Jewish community by contrasting the pampered lives of the writers of the decree with the devout, prayerful Jewish community.

Worship in The Golem.

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem: The Occult and Orientalism

Golem-blogging, essay 7 of 21:

The Occult and Orientalism

Rabbi Loew studies the stars in The Golem.

Google The Golem (1920) and you’ll easily find comments criticizing the movie for being anti-Semitic. Most of this criticism is nonsense.

The first ten minutes of The Golem establish the character of our Jewish heroes while explicitly addressing the wrong-headedness of Christian prejudice against the Jews. This means that the opening is explicitly anti-anti-Semitic.

Using classic movie grammar (far shot to medium to closeup), The Golem opens by introducing the protagonist, Rabbi Loew, on his rooftop observatory. In the first intertitle, he is referred to as the “revered Rabbi Loew” and the intertitle goes on to establish the looming crisis that will propel the narrative: “…Rabbi Loew reads in the stars that grave misfortune threatens the Jewish community.”

This opening assumes that viewers will: 1) accept that astrology and Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism are realities in this movie’s fantasy world and that only wise men are able to read the mystical signs, and 2) accept that the community represented by the Rabbi does not deserve “misfortune.” There is also a floating assumption, missed by many writers on this movie, that the viewer will not be offended by references to the occult and mysticism. Actually the movie is clearly targeted for the audiences that were open to the weirdness of Caligari and that made Meyrink’s Golem novel a huge success just a few years before. This audience would not assume that occult = evil, but would be fascinated by the suggestions of supernatural influences in the world.

Miriam, the Rabbi's daughter.

In swift movie shorthand, we’re introduced to the flirtatious semi-romance between Famulus (Rabbi Loew’s assistant) and the Rabbi’s daughter, Miriam. The Rabbi tells them of his astrological discovery, and the Rabbi and Famulus rush off to see the community elder, the Rabbi Jehuda. Then the community gathers for their response: prayer and lamentation before a Menorah.

The hero of The Adventures of
Prince Achmed.

In these scenes, the characters are presented as exotic, in the “Orientalist” style popular in paintings of the 19th and early 20th century. Miriam, in particular, is depicted in an Orientalist style, with her large earrings, flowing dress, and ambivalently flirtatious attitude. This is not a presentation that suggests evil, anymore than audiences would be expected to view the heroes of Orientalist entertainments such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) or The Thief of Bagdad (1924) as evil. There’s no ethical/religious judgment here. Orientalism and heroism often go hand in hand. See Shakespeare’s Othello for an early exercise in Orientalist heroism--an example which is actually mildly relevant to the tangled relations between ethnic groups depicted in The Golem.

Watch The Golem (1920):

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem: Opening Night

Golem-blogging, essay 6 of 21:

Opening Night

The Golem: How He Came Into the World

If you went to see The Golem on opening night, October 1920, chances are…

Paul Wegener in the 1915
The Golem.

You would be familiar with the idea of the Golem, a monstrous man made out of clay, from the hit 1915 movie and possibly from the less popular 1917 sequel, The Golem and the Dancing Girl. The first was a contemporary story about the ancient Golem being discovered and brought back to life. The second was a contemporary comedy about an actor playing the Golem. Because you’d know the Golem from these movies, his appearance in the new movie would neither shock nor surprise you.  He’d be more like an old familiar face.

You would be aware that The Golem was the title of a popular novel written by Gustav Meyrink and published in serial form from 1913-1914 and then as a very successful novel in 1915, riding high on the popular success of the first Golem movie. Perhaps you’ve even read it—at the very least, you’re aware of it. The book is a challenging artistic piece that interprets the ancient Jewish legend through the memories and hallucinations of a 20th century artist and craftsman. You would know that the book has fascinated many people with its bold explorations of occult matters.

Disturbing images in The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

You would have seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and perhaps it’s made you think that you've been underestimating the movies. Maybe they really are a new art form and not just a new-fangled shallow form of entertainment. Caligari made you think—in fact, you couldn’t get it out of your head for days. It was disturbing and very modern, but it also told a strong and exciting story while showing you things on the screen that you'd never seen before. It was like a dream—or a nightmare—on the screen. You know that it has become an international hit and that people in other countries are now speaking of the German film industry with respect. Other countries haven’t shown respect for Germany lately, so this is a good thing.

You are familiar with Paul Wegener and have seen him in several movies. You know that he is a star and a leading figure in Germany's film industry. You can recognize him easily—as the Golem or in other roles.  He’s a big man with very distinctive features. In addition to seeing him as the Golem, you have seen him in The Student of Prague (Wegener's first movie, and a huge hit), The Yogi, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and probably some others. All of these movies have fantasy or occult elements in them, so you have come to associate Wegener with the weird and the strange.

And so you enter the theater expecting the familiar, in the form of Wegener and his Golem makeup, but ready for the unexpected in the form of fantasy and horror. Your hopes are high because this movie is expected to be important. It is an event and it has attracted a large eager crowd, who wait for the lights to dim and for the orchestra, down in the pit in front of the screen, to strike up its opening chords.

The Golem confronts young lovers in the climax of The Golem (1915).

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© 2011 Lee Price

The Golem as Metaphor

Golem-blogging, essay 5 of 21:

Political interpretation:  The strong man as savior in The Golem).

The Golem as Metaphor

My preferred way of looking at The Golem (1920) is as a monster movie, with no hidden agendas. But like many fantasies, The Golem lends itself to allegorical readings. Cathy Gelbin’s excellent essay “Narratives of Transgression, from Jewish Folktales toGerman Cinema” suggests three different possible approaches to The Golem:  first a political, then a religious, and finally an artistic interpretation.

The political interpretation: Apparently, this reading stems from Siegfried Kracauer and his well-known book, From Caligari to Hitler. Gelbin says that Kracauer “perceived the resentful Golem as reflecting Germans’ grudge against their international ostracism after World War I, and as anticipating the rise of the Nazi dictatorship.” The strong man comes to power as a savior and then goes out of control. Or to put it into a neat equation: the Golem = Hitler. If intentional, it would have been extraordinarily prescient of Wegener and crew to foresee all this in 1920. For me, the really fascinating thing about this idea is that it has the Jewish ghetto representing all Germany. It seems a little farfetched to me, but I can see how the movie could resonate with genuine feelings of post-war ostracism among the German people. Were some teenagers in the audience—the  up-and-coming Nazis of the future—identifying with the unfair discriminatory treatment directed towards the Jews when they watched this movie in the early 1920s? That would be ironic indeed.

The religious interpretation: God molds man out of clay in Genesis. Then man rebels against God. Fascinated by the God/Adam and Rabbi/Golem parallels, Argentinian genius Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem called “The Golem.” Borges’ golem is a disappointment to his creator, never even finding the strength to become a true monster. He mimics the rabbi’s devotions and can’t even master the simple task of sweeping of the synagogue.

The end of Dr. Moreau in
Island of Lost Souls (1932).

When Hollywood mad scientists emulated God ("He meddled with things that man was meant to leave alone" is the classic line), they were invariably punished for their impudence.  However, the lessons of Borges and Hollywood don't fit comfortably with the 1920 Golem.  In the movie, Rabbi Loew's motives are pure, his intentions are good, and he is knowledgeable enough to understand the risks of his project.  In this, he functions more as a God surrogate than as an example of a person who dares to play God, like a Dr. Moreau or a Dr. Frankenstein. The movie never mocks or condemns Rabbi Loew.

The artistic interpretation:  The molding of the clay is an artistic act, and the artist breathes life into his creation.

Molding the golem's clay
in The Golem.

Rabbi Loew is the artist, and the Golem is his sculpture. Once the work is finished, it takes on a life of its own, and the artist watches impotently as the public misinterprets the meaning, purpose, and actions of the thing which he created.

Of these three approaches, the religious seems most helpful to me, and most likely the only one of them that may have intentionally crossed the minds of the filmmakers. Here’s Borges again, in a translation by James Honzick:

     In his thirst to know the knowledge of God

     Juda permutated the alphabet through complex variations

     and in the end

     pronounced the name that is the Key

     the Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace,

     over a mannequin shaped with awkward hands,

     teaching it the arcane knowledge of

     symbols, of Time and Space.

                                                 Jorge Luis Borges

Watch The Golem (1920):

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rent through Netflix,

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© 2011 Lee Price