The Man Who Thought Life

The mysterious Mr Steinmetz can bring objects and living beings into existence by will alone, but everything he makes disappears again after a while. He therefore goes to a well-known brain surgeon, Max Holst, and asks for help. When Holst refuses, Steinmetz creates a double of him to take his place, and the film’s real question opens there: who decides which of the two is the real one, and on what evidence. This was Jens Ravn’s first film, and for all its small budget it asks about the nature of reality from a position Philip K. Dick would make familiar a few years later. Henrik Stangerup wrote the screenplay from Valdemar Holst’s 1938 novel. It was shot in black and white and selected for the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. The record gives the running time as 93 minutes where sources say 97.