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Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
Forget every flapper comedy you associate with 1923; Ein Gruss aus der Tiefe arrives like a tide that refuses to respect the promenade. The film’s very emulsion feels brined—each frame appears pickled in brackish dread. Director Frederic Zelnik, usually trafficking in urbane melodrama, suddenly pitches his camera into the Kiel Canal, letting barnacles scratch the lens. The result is an amphibious nightmare that predates maritime gothic cousins such as The Isle of the Dead by two decades, yet feels eerily contemporary beside the found-footage submarines of modern horror.
Hans Mierendorff never blinks; instead the light withdraws from his irises, giving the impression that his skull is a cavern pressurized by fathoms. As the impresario-cum-charlatan he glides across rotting boards in long oilskin coat, pockets clanking with unidentified metal—possibly periscope shards, possibly dog tags harvested from corpses. Compare his cadaverous elegance to the patriotic swagger of The Battle of Trafalgar; here naval glory curdles into a privateering necromancy.
Schütte-Harmsen, remembered for light operetta, here embodies a bereaved chanteuse who sings under her breath—lullabies for men entombed in steel. The fox-fur collar she wears exhales dust every time she turns, a material memory of torpedoed cargo holds where animals once paced in cages. When she finally lets the garment slip into the water, it drifts like a burning carcass, prefiguring the floating coats of Hearts in Exile yet steeped in a Teutonic nihilism all its own.
Walter Steinbeck’s hydrographer charts abysses not on parchment but on his own forearm, turning his body into a living map. The ink still weeps, suggesting recent application with a sailor’s needle. In close-up, latitude lines intersect faded vaccination scars, conflating geographic and corporeal vulnerability. Such epidermal inscription outflanks the espionage ledgers of Der Geheimsekretär, pushing secrecy to the threshold of mortification.
The climactic splice is cinema’s original projection-mapping: Krüger threads stolen nitrate through the lighthouse apparatus, converting 360 degrees of black fjord into a rippling silver screen. Spectators—nets, gulls, half-submerged U-boats—become a captive auditorium. The image of a sailor saluting swells until it dwarfs the moon, then dissolves into foam, as though the world itself forgets its role as subject or spectator. Compare this meta-cinematic coup to the playful self-reflexivity of A Good Little Devil, but swap whimsy for oceanic existentialism.
Being a silent film, Ein Gruss aus der Tiefe compensates with olfactory suggestion: every intertitle is soaked in seawater before being shot, giving the German text a wavy, uncertain baseline. Contemporary accounts speak of cinema ushers spraying brine above patrons, a primitive 4-D gambit that makes the floral perfume in Les amours de la reine Élisabeth seem quaint.
The reel’s most unsettling loop shows Krüger—months before he receives the telegram—standing atop a conning tower he swears he never climbed. The temporal fold anticipates the ontological labyrinths later explored in Enoch Arden, yet Zelnik’s approach is visceral, not literary. The audience feels celluloid sprockets rattling like bones in a torpedo tube, reminding us that film itself is a time machine powered by flammable ghosts.
Though released post-WWI, the film was shot in an abandoned submarine pen whose gates still bore imperial eagles. Authorities, busy policing political agitprop, overlooked the real sedition: the suggestion that every sunken sailor remains enlisted in an undersea Reich, awaiting resurrection by beam of light. Thus Ein Gruss aus der Tiefe outmaneuvered the censor board that later trimmed the pacifist edges of Captain Courtesy.
Legend insists two reels vanished when the laboratory flooded during a storm surge; skeptics claim Zelnik himself hid them to cultivate mystique. Either way, the absence festers like an untreated wound, encouraging conjecture richer than any surviving footage. Consider Judge Not; or the Woman of Mona Diggings, whose lost scenes pale beside the intentional lacunae here.
For decades the only print languished in a Rostock basement, mistaken for industrial training material. Rediscovered in 1998, it was screened on a cargo ship deck during a squall, the projectionist securing the tripod to a capstan. Waves rocked the frame, turning every tilt into a submarine roll, an accident that restored the film’s maritime ontology. Critics now place it alongside The Reckoning as a pinnacle of post-war German disillusionment.
Despite monochrome stock, the tinting alternates between bilious green for flashbacks and bruised ultramarine for present-day scenes. The switch occurs mid-shot when Krüger lifts a hatch, the tint flooding the frame like ink from a ruptured squid. Such chromatic bravura predates the hand-painted fantasias of The Fates and Flora Fourflush yet feels more elemental, as though colour itself were drowning.
Witness Josef Schelepa as the stoker who never speaks but whose pupils dilate whenever the projector rattles; his body remembers the engine room’s roar even when the soundtrack is gone. Or Käthe Haack as the telegram girl whose gloved fingers twitch in Morse, spelling stay away—a warning lost on protagonists too hypnotized by their own after-images. These micro-gestures accumulate into a symphony of pre-language anxiety.
Zelnik’s montage mimics telegraph code: short bursts of imagery followed by caesuras of black leader. The pattern replicates the dot-dot-dash that opens the fatal cable, turning narrative into signal. Editors today who splice for rhythm owe more to this Baltic experiment than to the continuity rules of Hollywood contemporaries.
Unlike expressionist staples, the film never franchised its iconography; no licensed wax museum displays Mierendorff’s coat, no punk band sampled its intertitles. Yet traces surface in Tarkovsky’s mirrored Zone, in Garland’s Annihilation lighthouse, even in video-game BioShock’s sunken city. The lineage is genetic, not quoted—a whisper passed diver-to-diver.
To preserve its mystery, I refuse to rate it on a star scale; grading this film feels like taking salinity measurements of a ghost. Suffice to say that Ein Gruss aus der Tiefe doesn’t merely depict the uncanny moment when war memories surface—it is that moment, flickering in the canister you swear you heard breathing. Approach it not as entertainment but as tide: let it drag you, scrape you, return you altered. When the credits roll—and they never quite do—you will taste salt on your lips and wonder whether the screen has been leaking into your world, or whether you have been leaking into its.
IMDb —
1917
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