Das große Licht

"Das Grosse Licht," translated as either "The Great Light" or "The Big Light," is an interesting German silent film from 1920, and we're only left to imagine what it might've been originally, as although what remains adds up to a fairly coherent narrative, today's 4k digital restoration by the Deutsches Film Institut & Filmmuseum, which was shown at the International Bonn Silent Film Festival, is less than half the film that premiered 7 May 1920 in Berlin. Reportedly, the original film was 2,009 meters in length and long considered lost until a Dutch distribution print was rediscovered in the archives of the EYE Filmmuseum, which held 774 meters of reedited nitrate that appeared to have already been attempted to be restored. Only 113 of the 212 Dutch intertitles remained. Even with the 2019-2020 restoration pushing the length to what corresponds to 805 meters, that adds up to about a 44-minutes-long film at 16fps, for what originally would've been a picture lasting 110 minutes.

Much documentation for the production is lost, too, and so the restoration had to rely on Felix Philippi's 1901 play, from which the film is based, as a guide. I especially wonder whether the film originally included any grander views, including exteriors, of the Berlin Cathedral, which is reportedly where the film was shot in addition to in studios. The climactic sequence, where characters climb staircases to the tops of the building, gives a sense of a structure towering over the city, but there are no corresponding reverse shots of the Cathedral itself as seen from the outside. Reading up a bit on the Cathedral, it was being built, or rebuilt, during the time that Philippi would've written the play, completing a centuries-long transition of the area and structures from a Catholic church to a cathedral for Lutheran and Calvinist German Evangelicals.

This is also a nice way to conclude the Bonn film festival after one of its prior screenings was of a German film from the prior year, "Women Who Shouldn't Get Married" (a.k.a. "Frauen, die nicht heiraten sollten," 1919), which, although preservation of all silent films is worthwhile, is a lousy and sexist artifact. "The Great Light," on the other hand, while it focuses mostly on male characters, was adapted and directed by a woman, Hanna Henning, who I'm otherwise not familiar with. Although her Wikipedia stub claims her "the most prominent and prolific women director working in the German film industry during the silent era," she's become so obscure that there isn't even a biography for her on the Women Film Pioneers Project website.

As for what remains of the film, the narrative suggests an analogy between artistic and religious creation, of artists assuming godly grandeur in the process of building art to worship God. There's an architect played by star Emil Jannings, who also serves sometimes as a storyteller within the picture in describing past events; a Bach-loving musician who nonetheless plans to play Felix Mendelssohn's "Wedding March;" the leading lady, a singer; a couple of painters, one of whom also writes a pamphlet raving about great and small lights; and hordes of construction workers and wealthy, financier types. The main drama involves the architect, Jannings, and the painter-writer, Fritz, as portrayed by a Kurt Vespermann. Thus, we have something of a battle between the character creating the stage on which the play is being enacted and the play's writer whose artistic vision is subverted. Both men portray godly pretensions. Eventually, the imposing Jannings with his long beard waves from atop the Cathedral over a housing area for workers for which he boasts of his creation and provisions for their livelihoods. If Jannings's architect is the God figure, then Fritz is the madman with a messiah complex--the son stand-in pretending himself a brighter light than the Sun, which all culminates with a head wreath and the two climbing stairs up towards the heavens atop the Cathedral.

Jannings's performance is the most impressive here. Say what you will about the would-be first Oscar-winner turned Nazi, but he has an undeniable magnetism on screen, especially remarkable so early in film history when a lot of screen acting from the era has frankly not aged well. What remains here isn't even one of his better roles--"The Last Laugh" (1924) or "The Last Command" (1928), for instance, while we're only left to also wonder regarding his performances in the acclaimed and now-lost films such as "The Way of All Flesh" (1927) and "The Patriot" (1928). At one point here, Jannings, as his character does throughout, is smoking a cigar; he ashes all over what I assume is his fake beard, but he literally leans into it--crouching forward and rather commandeers the scene. He won me over there.

Although one is left to wonder what once was here, seeing a film that's in some ways more of a promise than a realization of brilliance, there's also some beauty in its deteriorated form--the scratches and decomposition, even the film-strip impressions on some images from the nitrate having stuck together as it crumpled together and decayed in its tin cans.