Zigeunerblut

A caravan of smoke-swathed violins lumbers across the Danube at dusk, carrying with it the scent of absinthe and the promise of ruin; within this procession rides Lya De Putti’s nameless Romani girl—eyes like chipped obsidian, wrists shackled by ancestral melodies—who, for one silver coin and a half-remembered lullaby, becomes the paid bride of Max Laurence’s aristocratic runaway, a morphine-dulled lieutenant who believes that marrying into “Zigeunerblut” will cauterise the wound of a war he never fought. Their midnight union, witnessed only by a blind bear-keeper and a priest who recites the liturgy backwards, detonates a chain of betrayals: first, the lieutenant’s cigarillo-scarred father (Carl Fenz) buys the clan’s camp and razes it to erect a carnival of electric bulbs and human curiosities; next, the girl’s vengeful cousin (Fritz Moleska) sells his shadow to the same carnival for a rifle and a box of Turkish delight, vowing to retrieve the “stolen blood.” Between ferris-wheel waltzes and rifle-shot ricochets, Putti dances a tarantella on broken mirror shards, seducing the camera as if it were a confession booth, while Laurence—half mesmerised, half repulsed—discovers that his wedding ring is forged from the melted coins once nailed to the corpse of a saint. Vienna’s snow-globe palaces, Bohemian glassworks, and marshy graveyards collapse into one feverish mise-en-abyme where every kiss tastes of rusted tambourine and every goodbye is delivered via tarot card. The climax arrives in a candlelit ossuary: Moleska forces Laurence to play Russian roulette with the embalmed heart of a virgin, Putti slices her own palm to fill the bullet chamber with her blood, and the gun—an 1848 revolution relic—refuses to fire, as though even metal recoils from the finality of folklore. Dawn finds the caravan reassembled, now led by a child who wears Laurence’s officer coat, while Putti’s silhouette, superimposed on the rising sun, becomes the first reel of cinema to burn itself alive rather than fade out.