Cinema
The Golem: How He Came into the World
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam
Paul Wegener · 1920
Synopsis
In the Prague ghetto, Rabbi Loew reads in the stars that a misfortune threatens his people. The emperor soon signs a decree expelling the Jews from the city and has it delivered by the knight Florian, who falls in love with Miriam, the rabbi's daughter. Loew then shapes a giant out of clay, the Golem, and animates it with a magic word enclosed in an amulet placed on its chest. Invited to a court festivity, he brings the creature there, and it holds up the palace ceiling at the moment it collapses; in gratitude, the emperor withdraws his decree.
Context
This is the third film its author devoted to the Golem, after a first version and a comedy of 1917, both lost. He co-directed it with Carl Boese and wrote the screenplay with Henrik Galeen; Hans Poelzig designed the ghetto sets, built on the Ufa grounds at Tempelhof, and Karl Freund operated the camera. Wegener himself plays the creature. The premiere took place on 29 October 1920 at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, and the film was subsequently a success in the United States.
Who it is for
A silent film of an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half depending on the restorations, with intertitles, based on a Jewish legend of Prague.
Prizes and reception
Restored in 4K by the Murnau Foundation, with the Royal Belgian Film Archive, from the rediscovered original negative.