Die Gezeichneten (1922)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Film Review

By the time Carl Dreyer had completed his first three films, the Danish film industry was in serious decline and this led him to make his first film outside Scandinavia for a small German film company, Primus-Film.  Adapting the 1912 novel Elsker hverandre by the popular Danish writer Aage Madelung, Die Gezeichneten - a.k.a. Love One Another - gave Dreyer the opportunity to tackle a subject near to his heart, anti-Semitism, and in doing so delivered a film that is chillingly prophetic, not just of the anti-Jewish sentiment that would consume Germany (indeed much of Europe) in the following decade, but also of the Holocaust.  Survival in the face of injustice and oppression is a theme that runs through much of Dreyer's work, and in Die Gezeichneten we encounter another of his strong-willed heroines, in the guise of a victimised Jewish girl who gets caught up in one of the most shameful episodes in Russian history, the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1903-6.

After being lost for many years, Die Gezeichneten was rediscovered in 1961 in Moscow's film archives.  With only four prints of the film now in existence, it is among Dreyer's rarest films - one that is too easily overlooked, even though it has considerable merit. This is arguably the film in which Dreyer is most visibly influenced by his personal hero D.W. Griffith, and with its confident use of close-up, pacey editing and penchant for spectacle, it could also be mistaken for one of Griffith's more ambitious films.  Before Dreyer, no European filmmaker used the close-up to its full dramatic impact and here the device brings a frightening reality to the protagonists, revealing not only their feelings but also their dark trains of thought.  Dreyer's use of the close-up does the work of scores of inter-titles, compelling us to sympathise with his 'heroic' characters, whilst making the villains of the piece (flagrant anti-Semites) more odious and frightening.

A stickler for realism, Dreyer travelled with his set designer to Lublin in Poland to see some real ghettos on which the film's sets would be closely modelled.  The same striving for Russian authenticity led Dreyer to cast predominantly Russian actors (including prominent members of the Moscow Art Theatre, Richard Boleslawski and Vladimir Gadjarov), although the part of the villainous Rylowitsch was reserved for Johannes Meyer, the great Danish actor who had already appeared in the director's Leaves Out of the Book of Satan (1920) and would take the lead role in his subsequent Master of the House (1925).

The subdued, almost naturalistic acting style (unusual for a film of this era but quite commonplace in Scandinavian cinema) adds considerably to the film's realism and Dreyer achieves a genuine Russian feel which is highly anticipatory of the important films that Sergei Eisenstein would soon make.  Die Gezeichneten's shockingly violent ending, graphic of the chaos that inevitably results from intolerance, prefigures the grand set-pieces of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), whilst showing a horrible prescience for the racial purge that Nazi Germany would embark upon just over a decade after the film was made.

Film Synopsis

In western Russia circa 1900, Hannah-Liebe is a Jewish girl growing up in a small town inhabited by Jews and serfs.  Driven from the town by malicious gossip, she travels to St Petersburg to live with her older brother Jakov, who has converted to Christianity and now makes a comfortable living as a lawyer.  It is here that Hannah-Liebe meets up with Sascha, a student from her town who has fallen in with a group of revolutionaries.  After being tricked by Rylowitsch, a police spy, into preparing a terrorist act, Sascha is arrested.  With their mother on her death bed, Hanne-Liebe and Jakov must return to their home village, just as the government authorises a pogrom against the Jews...