Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

bre_anna In this truly fascinating, dark film, a young impoverished student sells his soul to the devil for a lot of money, in return the devil takes his mirror image (this is done brilliantly in the movie and eerily presaged when Balduin, the student is earlier practicing swordsmanship in front of the mirror), a visual metaphor for a "man at war with himself" which portents his immediate future. The student enjoys his money, but the woman he loves is unattainable (he has made a pact with the devil, he is cut off forever from love and other riches of the soul) you can have love or you can exchange your soul for money, you cannot have both. Balduin is haunted by his double (the intertitles express this beautifully as does the action. Some of the scenes are incredible, the sense of doom when the Devil disappears with Balduin's mirror image is amazing, as is the sense that his pact has forever cut him off from human society (the scene where he runs away from his double and ends up in the 'wasteland' at the edge of the town, no longer entirely human (he has lost his soul) he is like a hunted animal outside of human society. There are so many other things to say about this incredible film. Paul Wegener was an amazing actor and director, a cultural hero of mine. It helps if you know a bit about German history at the time this film was made and about German doppelganger tradition (don't google it, get a proper book)Just remember, it's a very early film, it's a little clumsy at times, but considering what it has to say and it's tragic finale, it's one of the best ever (yes it Is!)

FieCrier I watched Alpha's DVD of this, which was only about forty-one minutes long. I don't know if it was missing scenes, or run at a faster speed, or what, to account for the difference from the running time IMDb has. As with Alpha's DVD of the remake, I didn't particularly care for the musical score they'd added. I think it's possible they also missed some of the intertitles; one of the other users mentions something Balduin says after his reflection is taken that wasn't in the copy I viewed.A renowned fencer asks a man named Scapinelli to procure him a winning lottery ticket, or a woman with a large dowry. The opening credits indicate Scapinelli is a sorcerer; he isn't used much in this film, and we don't know really anything about him when we first meet him, or what relationship Balduin has with him. In the remake, Balduin doesn't ask for those things, just wishes for a rich woman (not expecting the wish to come true), and Scapinelli promises to deliver.A rich woman who is riding horses with her fiancé (also her first cousin) falls off her horse into a body of water, and Balduin saves her. In the remake, it's clear that Scapinelli guides her horse to Balduin and then causes the horse to act wildly, until Balduin scoops her off it. Here, it's unclear that Scapinelli had anything to do with it.There are many scenes here that are reproduced in the sequel. Possibly even some of the same camera shots are copied.The ending is not as powerful as the ending of the sequel. Still, this was interesting to watch and at the price of Alpha's DVDs, a bargain. Perhaps a better edition will come out sometime in the future.

Cineanalyst "The Student of Prague" is an early feature-length horror drama or, rather, it is an "autorenfilm" (i.e. an author's film). It's a piece of a movement of many movements that tried to lend cultural respectability to cinema, or just make a profit, by adapting literature or theatre onto the screen. Fortunately, the story of this book with moving pictures is good. Using Alfred de Musset's poem and a story by Edgar Allen Poe, it centers on a doppelgänger theme.Unfortunately, the most cinematic this film gets is the double exposure effects to make Paul Wegener appear twice within scenes. Guido Seeber was a special effects wizard for his day, but he's not very good at positioning the camera or moving it. Film scholar Leon Hunt (printed in "Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative"), however, has made an interesting analysis on this film using framing to amplify the doubles theme: characters being split by left/right, near/far and frontal/diagonal framing of characters and shots. Regardless, the film mostly consists of extended long shots from a fixed position, which is noticeably primitive. Worse is the lack of editing; there's very little scene dissection and scenes linger. None of this is unusual for 1913, but there were more advanced pictures in this respect around the same time, including the better parts of "Atlantis" (August Blom, 1913), "Twilight of a Woman's Soul" (Yevgeni Bauer, 1913) and the short films of D.W. Griffith.An expanded universal film vocabulary by 1926 would allow for a superior remake. Furthermore, the remake has a reason for the Lyduschka character--other than being an occasional troublemaker and spectator surrogate. Here, the obtrusively acted gypsy lurks around, seemingly, with a cloak of invisibility. I know their world is silent to me, but I assume, with their lips moving and such, that their world would not be silent to them, so how can Lyduschka leer over others' shoulders and not be noticed?Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting early films conceptually. Wegener, who seems to have been the primary mind behind it, in addition to playing the lead, would later play the title role and co-direct "The Golem" in 1920--helping to further inaugurate a dark, supernatural thread in German silent cinema.(Note: The first version I viewed was about an hour long (surely not quite complete) and was in poor condition, with faces bleached at times and such. I'm not sure who was the distributor. I've also since seen the Alpha DVD, which, at 41 minutes, is missing footage present in the aforementioned print and also has fewer and very different title cards, but is visually not as bad. The repetitive score is best muted, though.)

Elliot-10 If "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is the father of all horror films (and of German expressionist cinema), this pre-WWI film is the grandfather. The titular student, starving in an empty garret, makes a deal with the Devil-- the Devil gives him a bottomless sack of gold, in exchange for "anything in this room." The Devil chooses the student's reflection in his mirror. He walks off with the student's doppelganger, who commits crimes for which the student is blamed.The film is marred by some limitations arising out of the technically primitive state of 1913 filmmaking; the plot cries out for chiaroschuro effects, but the film is, of necessity, virtually all shot in shadowless daylight. But the scene where the reflection walks out of the mirror still packs a wallop.More interesting for the trends it fortells than for its own sake, The Student of Prague is still worthwhile.