Veidt Dances an Expressionist Ballet

My interest in Conrad Veidt was tipped by a Halloween-season showing of the 1924 silent thriller, The Hands of Orlach, for which Dennis James provided live organ accompaniment at the Indiana University Auditorium. Veidt’s career spanned a quarter century, beginning in 1917 with the silent movies and into the talkies, ending at his death in 1943 at age 50.

Hans Walter Konrad Weidt was born in Berlin, Germany, on 22 January 1893. He was drafted into the German Army during World War I and saw action in the Battle of Warsaw but contracted a serious illness that subsequently earned him a discharge in 1917. That year he returned to Berlin to pursue an acting career. He would eventually appear in more than a hundred films.

One of his earliest, most memorable performances was in the classic German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in 1920. Veidt played the sleepwalker Cesare to Werner Krauss’ Dr. Caligari. By the end of the decade, he was making movies in Hollywood as well.

Veidt was vigorously opposed to the Nazi regime. When Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began a purge to rid the German film industry of Jews and liberals in 1933, Veidt and his third wife, Ilona, a Hungarian Jew, emigrated to England. Throughout the World War II era, he donated large amounts of his personal fortune to the British war effort.

He became a British citizen in 1938, although he and Ilona moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s. Ironically, his best-known Hollywood role was as a Nazi officer, Major Heinrich Strasser, in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman film, Casablanca.

Veidt suffered a massive heart attack while playing golf in Los Angeles and died on 3 April 1943.

Handsome, gaunt, and exuding an aura of anxiety, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes maniacal, Veidt was at his best in the German Expressionist films of the late Teens to early Thirties. In The Hands of Orlach, in which he plays a pianist whose injured hands are replaced with those of an executed murder, according to critic Lotte Eisner, Veidt “dances a kind of Expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly, simultaneously drawn and repelled by the murderous dagger held by hands which do not seem to belong to him.”

It was a pleasure to rediscover not only the tantalizing stylizations of the German Expressionist silent films but also to witness one of the masters of that art at work.

Going Silent

Recently I saw Asta Nielsen, Denmark’s leading silent screen star, in a 1921 version of Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.

Hamlet, in which she played the title role as a woman dressed as a man, a fiction created by her mother, the nefarious Queen Gertrude, to ensure the throne and her own position. A brilliant, perfectly apt piano score was created in the moment by Indiana University professor Larry Schanker. It all proved to be a delightful evening at the new IU Cinema.

As in most silent screen dramas, there were moments of unintended hilarity, which served as a reminder that viewers of historical film need what Northrup Frye termed, to enjoy fiction, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” This suspension is necessary to enter into the world of fiction, a world in many cases quite unlike the “real” world in which we live at this moment.

To watch a silent film from the Teens or Twenties—a century ago—we also need a willing suspension of modernity, or modern sensibilities. We must mentally turn back our internal calendars to a time before color and talking motion pictures, before television, before airplanes, before the Internet, and all that.

In short, we must put ourselves, as best we can, into the 1920s, in this case, so that we not only understand but also are immersed in the ethos of that bygone era. Otherwise, our understanding of the film—and our enjoyment of what today seems naiveté—will be utterly diminished.

It also must always be remembered that what seems hackneyed in a silent film often was brand new at the time and now is hackneyed only because it has been used subsequently over and over. To understand and appreciate fully the films of any bygone era requires that we learn anew an old vocabulary, much like learning a language no longer spoken and known only by the cognescenti.