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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Ilka Grüning’s face, lunar and lacquered, fills the first shot like a silent accusation. The camera holds until pores become craters, until the viewer feels complicit in every wrinkle the lens magnifies. This is not mere portraiture; it is indictment.
What follows is a Möbius strip of melodrama: the actress, credited only as „Die Schauspielerin,“ rehearses a death scene while her own life expectancy shrinks with each studio hour. Director Fanny Carlsen—one of Weimar’s too-few female scenarists—threads autobiography so tightly through fiction that the splice marks bleed. You sense Carlsen’s sly grin behind every intertitle; she knows the studio will market this as „sentiment,“ never guessing it is also autopsy.
Lya Mara, as the up-and-coming ingénue who supplants her, moves like a sped-up waltz in contrast to Grüning’s slow sarabande of defeat. Their single shared dressing-room scene—two silhouettes superimposed on one cracked mirror—should be bottled as pure celluloid poison.
Károly Huszár plays the director-cum-puppeteer with such velvet sadism that you half expect him to twirl a mustache made of sprocket holes. Instead, he underplays: a slight tilt of the head signals recasting, a flicked cigar ash relegates an extra to the abyss. Power, the film whispers, is never loud; it is the soft click of a casting-office door closing.
Paul Westermeier’s cinematographer—always half in silhouette, always wiping his spectacles with a strip of film negative—serves as the movie’s moral retina. When he finally turns the camera on himself, the resulting double exposure feels like an ethical short-circuit: who is consuming whom?
The set design is a fever chart: velvet drapes sag like exhausted lungs, arc lamps buzz like dying wasps, and the painted clouds on the backdrop flake into snow that never quite reaches the ground. This is Berlin’s UFA studio as Bergmanian purgatory, years before either director or studio would admit such a place could exist.
Compare it to Madame Butterfly’s Orientalist gloss or Das Geheimnis von Bombay’s colonial swagger, and Carlsen’s film feels like a scalpel laid beside travelogue postcards. Where those films escape into exotica, „Memoiren“ burrows inward, excavating psychic celluloid.
Because the soundtrack is forever lost (or never recorded), modern prints float on eerie hush. You hear your own breath sync with the flicker, a ghost duet. I recommend pairing it with something contrapuntal—try Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata—so that the silence acquires fangs. Suddenly every cut feels like guillotine, every iris-in like a pupil dilating in grief.
Note: the surviving 35 mm at Bundesarchiv is missing Reel 5. The jump is brutal: one moment the star clutches a morphine vial, next she is face-down in a backlot puddle. Cine-myth claims the reel was burned by censors for „glorifying self-erasure.“ More likely it disintegrated from its own silver-nitrate shame.
Ilka Grüning, primarily known for maternal bit-parts, here unleashes arias of self-disgust. Watch her hands: they flutter like trapped moths when complimented, then stiffen into mannequin claws when she glimpses her own poster being trampled. It is a masterclass in corporeal Semaphore of Shame.
Richard Georg, as the washed-up matinee idol reduced to playing corpses, has only five minutes of screen time yet manages to die thrice: once in a film-within-film Western, once in a cheap farce, once in the actress’s fever dream. Each death is framed identically—low angle, chiaroscuro—until the repetition becomes a memento mori carousel.
Carlsen’s script anticipates by a full century the Twitter mantra „the gaze is male.“ Here the camera literally weighs 90 pounds, yet it crushes women flat. When Mara’s character lands the lead, her first act is to pose for a still portrait; we cut to men in the darkroom enlarging her lips to billboard size. The film slyly zooms out to reveal the enlarger’s red light bathing their faces in satanic glow. Consumption has never looked so fluorescent.
But do not mistake it for simple victimhood. Grüning’s final close-up—half-smile, half-rictus—proposes a darker bargain: perhaps to be devoured by the lens is also to become immortal, even if the immortality is a scar that never quite scabs.
Shot mere months before the premiere of Die lachende Seele, this film predicts the coming cynicism of the Weimar street pictures. The same streets that would later echo with Dietrich’s heels here thrum with the quieter percussion of dreams imploding.
Curiously, the production company, Terra-Film, would pivot to detective serials within two years, as if terrified by the abyss it had glimpsed in Carlsen’s negative. History repeats: studios always retreat from self-reflection faster than a vampire from sunrise.
As of this month, a 2K restoration streams on the eye-burning back page of a niche European archival site—no English intertitles, so keep a bilingual friend on retainer. Blu-ray rumors swirl like cigar smoke, but rights are tangled between two estates that refuse to speak since someone optioned Grandma’s diaries for a Netflix miniseries.
If you must pirate, at least donate the equivalent ticket price to a women-in-film foundation. Penance matters.
The last frame is not an image but a hole: the lens capsizes into overexposure, and for three seconds the screen is white-hot void. It is the closest cinema has come to filming its own death rattle. You sit in the dark afterwards feeling like you have swallowed a reel of barbed wire—every sprocket a question, every perforation an answer you are too terrified to read.
Grade: A- (upgraded from B+ because history tried to erase it, and failed.)
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