Warning Shadows

A count gives a dinner at his manor in nineteenth-century Germany. At the table sit his wife, the four men courting her, and an uninvited shadow player. Working his hands in front of the candles, the performer shows the guests what the night could become: who would kill whom if the jealousy kept growing, how the household would come apart. By the time the show ends and everyone comes back to themselves, the tension at the table has been spent. Arthur Robison's film is one of the very few silent features to do without intertitles; after the cast is introduced, not a single title card appears. The choice was deliberate, an argument that cinema could tell a story purely in images rather than inheriting its methods from literature or the stage. Alexander Granach as the shadow player and Fritz Kortner as the jealous host carry some of the most cited images in German Expressionism.