THE ATLAS OF THE SCREENS
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam
The Golem
nature
Paul Wegener's film: Rabbi Loew of Prague makes a man of clay, animates him by placing a word in an amulet on his chest, and loses control of him. Shot in an expressionist Prague built at Babelsberg.
⭐⭐ THE OLDEST NODE IN THE WING AND THE MOST INFLUENTIAL, AND ITS CHAIN HAS TWO STOPS. This does not come through Kircher or Lévi — it comes from Jewish legend, through Rudolf Lorenz and the nineteenth-century Prague literature, onto film. And it is the ancestor of an entire century: Whale's Frankenstein takes its visual grammar from this film, and every made-servant-that-turns story after it — every robot, every replicant, every A.I. that will not obey — is working the same material. The single most consequential thing Jewish esoteric legend ever gave to popular culture, and almost nobody knows where it came from.
⭐⭐ THE OLDEST NODE IN THE WING AND THE MOST INFLUENTIAL, AND ITS CHAIN HAS TWO STOPS. This does not come through Kircher or Lévi — it comes from Jewish legend, through Rudolf Lorenz and the nineteenth-century Prague literature, onto film. And it is the ancestor of an entire century: Whale's Frankenstein takes its visual grammar from this film, and every made-servant-that-turns story after it — every robot, every replicant, every A.I. that will not obey — is working the same material. The single most consequential thing Jewish esoteric legend ever gave to popular culture, and almost nobody knows where it came from.
rhymes with
sephirahmalkhut
whyMalkhut — earth, clay, the ground itself, made to stand up and walk.
tags
golem · wegener · prague · rabbi loew · frankenstein
go and look
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the 1920 film itself, in full — public domain direct❡ scholarship
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