snow. granted, i woke late after a silent morning interrupted only by the yawning of cats. seeing a glaze on the roof of a house on the corner i assumed at first that the night air had simply occasioned the frost, but spying a bit closer i spotted the tiny snow specks drifting down from our refrigerated sky. and now it has begun to lay a thin blanket upon the autos, the heaps of dirt piled up by workers and the abandoned bicycles in the street, the snow gods having decided that the solstice and christmas are safely past and the winter can begin in earnest. it eases my heart which had begun to doubt the possibility of snow in this greenhouse world into which we have shut ourselves - pulling fast the door and listening for that doomladen 'click' - like a lone child trapping himself in a dead refrigerator thoughtlessly abandoned on the street.
a few days ago i thrilled to see Unheimliche Geschichten (Tales of the Macabre) at the Babylon. Richard Oswald's 1919 film adaption of five strange tales (authored by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson among others) stars Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schünzel and, most importantly, Anita Berber. I was especially excited to see the film since finishing Mel Gordon's biography of Berber and becoming better acquainted with this dark goddess of Berlin. Berber is presented as 'die Dirne' (the Harlot) in the film's introduction, her portrait hanging in an antiquariat between those of Veidt's 'der Tod' (Death) and Schünzel's 'der Teufel' (the Devil). At the stroke of midnight the portraits come alive, spring from out their frames and, after squirming about lasciviously, begin to read from the dusty volumes which are everywhere in the shop. The five stories which follow are tales of desire, madness and death. a man kills his wife, his crime only to be discovered by her lover, a mysterious lovely perishes of the plague, a man murders his friend for the attentions of a dancer, a mysterious club produces suicides in its members, and a baron is plagued by ghosts after importuning the delicate wife of a nobleman. Conrad Veidt is excellent as Death - his lank figure and skull like visage is bone chilling at first glance. Anita Berber is of course dreamy in this, her seventh film. She had already worked with Oswald several times and had played the lead in his film Prostitution. By 1919 she was the face of the erotic madness which was sweeping Berlin. Her naked dances were performed to acclaim (in the third tale of this film she is the dancer that drives men to murder, mad with desire, and we can witness her amazing talent), her scandalous personal habits were becoming legend, her life of drugs and drink had not yet taken its toll and her fame as an 'incarnation of the perverse' was growing night after night. Though in less than ten years she would be dead of tuberculosis, she was earning the lasting honors and fame which still attend to her memory and which still drive we humble imps of the perverse mad with dark desire...
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