A Fascinating Experiment, Director Robert Wiene’s ‘Raskolnikov’ Gets Its North American Premiere After 102 Years

The director Robert Wiene (1873-1938) left his native Germany in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power. Like many Jews in the film industry, Wiene saw the writing on the wall: He left for Hungary and London, ultimately settling at Paris. While living there, he set out to make a sound version of his signature film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920). The poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was to have been involved to one degree or another, but the remake never got off the ground.For which, I think, we should be grateful. Deigning to judge a picture that doesn’t exist is a fool’s errand, but the power of “Caligari” is its divorce from reality, of which an absence of sound is crucial. As it is, Wiene’s teetering fable about a sideshow barker and his sleepwalking minion has proved to have historical legs — it’s typically considered the first horror movie — and is, by general consensus, the director’s claim on posterity.All of which was brought to mind upon considering the film “Raskolnikov” (1923). Wiene’s adaptation of Feodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” is having its North American premiere at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a series, “To Save and Project: The 21st Annual International Festival of Film Preservation.” After 102 years, it’s time, don’t you think?“To Save and Project” is rife with diverting fare, including the saucily titled Joan Blondell vehicle “The Greeks Had A Word For Them” (1932), a reconstruction of Charlie Chaplin’s war-time comedy “Shoulder Arms” (1918) and Frank Borzage’s “7th Heaven” (1927), a film MoMA’s curator, Dave Kehr, describes as a “transcendent romance.” Yet it is “Raskolnikov” that sticks in the memory, not least because the thought of Wiene adapting Dostoevsky seems entirely fitting.The version that MoMA will be screening is a restoration done by the Filmmuseum München. “The German film censors,” the introductory title begins, “passed Robert Wiene’s ‘Raskolnikov’ on March 9, 1923.” We learn how the film was initially screened at Prague and later at Munich; after which, it fell off the map. Variations of the movie, each of them different and each of them incomplete, were subsequently found in Russia, Holland, Italy, and America. “Raskolnikov” has been reconstructed partly by following Doestoevsky’s narrative and partly by the judicious employment of informed guesswork. Conservators erred on the side of completism, and the end result clocks in at a little less than two and a half hours in length. For a piecemeal operation, that’s a good hunk of time.It’s to the credit of diligent conservators and, of course, Wiene that “Raskolnikov” keeps our interest. It helps to have an acquaintance with Doestoevsky’s novel or, at the very least, passing knowledge of the author’s philosophical concerns. As do the efforts of production designer Andrej Andrejew, who worked very much in the tradition of the artisans who shaped “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Stage sets were cobbled together using skewed angles, untenable architecture, selective applications of random textures, compressed spaces, and an atmosphere that is nothing if not neurasthenic.The visual stylizations of “Caligari” were reiterated in that film by the actors, each of whom was encouraged by Wiene to approach their respective character as a form of dance. That’s not the case with “Raskolnikov”: Although the acting is typical of the silent era, it leans to a kind of naturalism. Mr. Kehr notes that the players were culled from the Moscow Art Theater; at that time, all were exiled from their homeland. There is a corresponding weight to their histrionics.How well-suited is cinema to a literary source as complicated, contradictory, and convoluted as that of the Dostoevsky novel? The title character — who, after all, commits murder as a means of establishing his cultural superiority — is a hard sell for a medium as immediate as film. Wiene follows the story, yes, but he doesn’t match the moral density of “Crime and Punishment” itself. Which is to say that “Raskolnikov” is less of a cinematic milestone than a fascinating experiment. Cinema-goers taken by the warp and woof of the medium will find their interests piqued by Weine’s ambitious venture.

A Fascinating Experiment, Director Robert Wiene’s ‘Raskolnikov’ Gets Its North American Premiere After 102 Years

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