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Classic Pick: Warning Shadows (1923)

One of the great elements of the Netflix Watch Instantly service is the availability of a large number of early examples of cinema, most of them in the public domain and now available in fairly good and complete prints via streaming. One such film is Arthur Robison’s fascinating and seminal German Expressionist work, Warning Shadows.

In its simplest terms, the film tells the story of a 19th Century baron who throws a dinner party and invites all four of his beautiful wife’s would-be lovers. In the midst of the party, a shadow-player arrives and sets up a shadow-puppet theatre as part of the dinner’s entertainment. He proceeds to act out a play depicting what might happen if the baron does not curb his jealousy and the men don’t cease their attentions to the baron’s wife. The film grows ever more complicated, melding reality with the shadow performances as the baron’s violent jealousy increases.

In part a horror film and in part a fascinating psychological thriller, Warning Shadows takes a relatively simple melodrama and transforms it into something disturbing and otherworldly. The performances are extreme and dated, but the use of shadow and light, of tinted scenes and transformative images, make the film a supreme example of German Expressionism filmmaking. Warning Shadows is also remarkable for its use of pure visuals. There are almost no intertitles or dialogue, relying entirely on the visual aspect of the medium to convey meaning. This produces an especially uncanny effect to contemporary eyes, in the true sense of watching wordless shadows enact a strange, haunting drama. Warning Shadows might not be as well known as its Expressionist fellows The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Murnau’s Nosferatu, but it is a spectacular vision of what early cinema was capable of, sticking with you long after the final frame has flickered out.