Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

gavin6942 During a dinner, given by a wealthy baron and his wife, attended by four of her suitors in a 19th century German manor, a shadow-player rescues the marriage by giving all the guests a vision what might happen tonight if the baron stays jealous and the suitors do not reduce their advances towards his beautiful wife.What strikes me about this film is just how German it is. I have no idea what was going on in Germany in the 1920s, but they had a definite vision on how to use shadows and light in their films. While this is not German expressionism, it is not so far removed that we cannot see the German aesthetic.In some ways, we might be better comparing this to "Prince Achmed", a cartoon that relied on shadows rather than drawing. Again, a German film. I am surprised by how much a country's boundary could define their films. Today, I do not feel that a film made in any one country is so obviously differently from another...

chaos-rampant I shudder to think what might have been of the German school if Caligari and Nosferatu had been among the lost films. There's just not a whole lot that has reached us from this movement, much less truly great works. Recently restored by the Murnau foundation, this is meant to be one of the most evocative ones, a great title we had been missing. Most of it passes with little notice, a night of erotic angst, rivalry and a marriage falling apart with the lavish mansion of a baron as the stage of the theater. The prospective lovers feign and thrust, eventually really thrust; we get to see this in shadows. Shadows, a nocturnal hallucination as the title goes. It's the arrival of a shadow-player that is the most intriguing here. Oh, eventually his magick tricks were all serving a benign purpose, domestic bliss is salvaged from desire most foul, the soul restored into proper order.The trick is that he gives the parties involved a vision of what might unfold, the dangers involved. His small audience wakes up from the cinematic illusion dazzled, baffled, rubbing their eyes with disbelief. And we pull further back in the final shot to see curtains falling on this level that we experienced as reality.Is everything inside the nested story so artificial because it was the times still inflected by theater, or because the shadow play is inherently artificial? Is the shadow player the protagonist himself, made from his mirrored image, and so conjuring for himself a wish-fulfillment illusion where everything is made alright?If you were looking to come to this for German expressionism, you might want to reconsider. There is a great shot of the illusionist pushing back, elongating the shadows of his players. But it's serving and is part of the great self-referential tradition of cinema, films about the illusion of watching films.

tom-3129 For further reading I recommend an excellent article on the film in the film magazine 'Traffic' (nb. 33) by the German movie aficionado Enno Patalas. Patalas was also the driving force behind a complete restoration of the film at the Munich Filmmuseum - surprisingly there are some (hand- )colored sections in the original version. The shadow theater puppets shown in the movie were created by the German expressionist artist Ernst Moritz Engert, who was well connected to the early expressionist art- and literature-scene in Berlin and Munich. I adore the movie for exploring the deep aesthetic relations between the art of the shadow play and movie as an art itself - from my point of view the earliest and most reflected approach to provide a genuine philosophical statement on film.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre I'm a passionate advocate on behalf of German Expressionist films, especially from the silent era. I'm still bitter about an incident at the 1982 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, when an audience full of idiots (jaded by high-tech S/FX movies) laughed at the cardboard sets in 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari'. Those morons didn't care that the high degree of originality and imagination in 'Caligari' more than made up for its tiny production budget.'Shadows', however, while firmly within the Expressionist genre, is too arty for its own good. While this film does have some merits, its flaws greatly outnumber and exceed its merits.All the actors perform their roles with hand-to-brow histrionics of precisely the sort which have given silent-film acting a bad reputation. Several of the actors in this movie have given good performances elsewhere, so I assume that director Arthur Robison deserves the blame for their mannered theatrics here. During one scene, when a swain aims a punch at his rival, the actor cannot simply throw a punch: he must put his fist up against the other man's face, and then shove.Alexander Granach, as a showman with a shadow box and shadow puppets, demonstrates some extremely deft hand shadows, apparently with no other props supplementing his hands. But, when the puppet-master isn't performing, Granach lurches across the screen like Igor the hunchback. Ruth Weyher is pretty and graceful but is given no opportunity to behave like a human being.This silent film was originally released with no intertitles. Several other silent features also eschewed captions -- 'The Last Laugh', "The Old Swimmin' Hole", 'The Last Moment' -- but those films had linear plots which the audience could easily follow. The plot of 'Shadows' is deeply confusing, made even more confusing by the arty pretensions, and the story would have been far easier to follow with some captions. A curator at the Murnau Archiv has told me that 'Shadows' was given intertitles by several exhibitors when it was released outside Germany.The plot -- such as it is -- vaguely reminded me of Renoir's 'Rules of the Game' and Bergman's 'Smiles of a Summer Night': in a swank country manor, some people with more money than sense amuse themselves at each other's expense. But here the cast members are introduced in arty tableaux that are more alienating than edifying. After the final tableau, we're treated to the odd spectacle of a single upraised finger casting a shadow on the screen. What does this mean, please? Later, in hindsight, we understand that this signifies the beginning of the drama's Chapter One. (I saw this film in London, where the audience burst out laughing at the start of Chapter Two, symbolised by a hand with TWO upraised fingers: in Britain, this two-fingered gesture has obscene connotations.) The finger device is confusing, and adds nothing to the story ... nor does the decision to divide the narrative into arbitrary chapters.The production design is impressive: judging by the furniture and clothes, this story takes place somewhere in Europe (probably Germany) circa 1830: again, some titles would have helped. But Robison considerably weakens the effect of these wonderful costumes and sets by obscuring them with elaborate shadows, and by gimmicky effects such as raising and lowering a proscenium curtain in front of the actors. (As if we need to be reminded that this very artificial story is merely a story!) Considerable talent, effort and expense were put into 'Shadows', to little effect. Rather a lot of today's movie-goers are sadly prejudiced against silent films, misperceiving them all to be crude and laughably overacted. Sadly, 'Shadows' is precisely the sort of movie which would convince such people that all the negative stereotypes about silent movies are true after all. My rating for this failure: 2 out of 10, mostly for the production design.