Since completing a portrait of Genuine, a high priestess, Percy becomes irritable and withdrawn. He loses interest in painting and refuses to see his friends, preferring to spend his time alone with the portrait in his study. After turning down a wealthy patron's offer to buy the picture, Percy falls asleep while reading stories of Genuine's life. Genuine comes to life from the painting and escapes.
Genuine, the tragedy of a strange house, Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire, Genuine, Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses, 盖努茵
Germany
Germany
HoopTober 22/31
✔️1 Robert Wiene film
8 different decades:✔️1 from the 1920s
6 countries: ✔️1 from Germany
Such a significant film! Not as polished as Caligari, but then, its more experimental. There’s been no attempt at formal restoration of this, which is a crime! I watched a fan edit on YouTube. The creators did a great job piecing together some of the missing parts, + designing fonts for the story:
youtu.be/6kAYjWEpzB8?si=vGPcOlBoKly8FBZM
Still, the quality of what’s available is far from great… but watchable.
It took a bit to become engaged with the narrative, but once I was I didn’t want it to end! And at the conclusion, I was attached to the characters & wanted more.
I’m pretty sure the vamp Genuine’s hair & makeup was inspiration for 1980’s icon Siouxsie Sioux.
Also Genuine’s costumes, they were amazing.
MAGNIFICENT sets, hair, and costumes. The art direction of this film is insane, Seuss meets Caligari, a gothic fever dream, a step towards 1924's Waxworks. The production detail might actually be more densely packed and creative than Caligari itself. Fantastic over-the-top acting from several characters. The 44-minute version has a fun guitar and bass score that gave something like an acoustic western horror feel. Good use of color tinting, though not as effective as in some other films (like Phantom Carriage). The story has excellent developments and truly feels like a character arc. Although the 44-minute version has sharper picture quality and score, the 88-minute version is significantly more coherent, emotional, and satisfying. The longer cut is the most essential version - but you really need both cuts for the best experience.
Very cool, very stylish, very darkly romantic.
This film is fantastic.
3rd Robert Wiene (after The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and The Hands of Orlac)
Watched with the wonderful Savage, New Orleans's premiere vampire swamp witch.
A forty minute trip into the mind of neurasthenic painter with a thing for seductress types. The same year as Caligari, Wiene plumbs similar Expressionist depths of delusion and depravity by having the set design prepared by one Cesar Klein, an extremely talented artist who worked in a number of different mediums including stained glass windows and mosaics. This experience in 3D spaces works brilliantly in relation to Genuine's visuals; it has a sense of place that is overwhelming and throughly oppressive. The world of Genuine is filled with heavy dark lines
and jagged edges,…
my dream job if i lived in the 1920s would be to design the intertitles on silent films, these go so hard
HoopTober5.0 - Movie #24 - Genuine
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the first movie to make me truly appreciate silent films, so I was shocked that the director had put out another horror movie in the same year, and a vampire movie as well! I had really high hopes for Genuine, but I was disappointed by issues that have nothing to do with the movie quality.
The biggest problem is the movie is listed at 1h30m, but the only publicly available copy I could find was for a 44m version. The run time being cut in half was noticeable to say the least. It more or less makes the story of Genuine an afterthought as none of the actors…
31 Days of Horror 2024 1/31
Hooptober 11: Super-Movie Defeat!! I’m the One Who’ll Win! 8/40
One Robert Wiene film (1/1)
Today is the first day of October, and I usually kick off my 31 Days of Horror with a silent horror film. I hadn't heard of this movie until just recently, despite me being a big fan of silent horror movies. Seeing that it's another German expressionist film, I had to see it ASAP. It took me a while to find a good-looking version of the complete 88-minute version of Genuine, but I finally found one on YouTube. I'm glad that I saw this film because it's a hidden gem. While Genuine: The Tragedy of a Vampire may not…
Hooptober 11, #38
A film by Robert Weine
I still have a small handful of films from my Hooptober list to finish up, and boy did this one make me sleepy.
This 1920’s silent film was a bit sparse in plot and character development. Even with decent visuals, I really struggle with those types of films. The thing that I did like about this is that it seemed like it may have been an influence on The Shape of Water, a film which I really loved.
Basically in Genuine.. we meet a woman who may hold some mystical powers and was kidnapped from her people and sold into slavery. She is bought by some old dude and locked in his…
Klein's chaotic space-eating set design was brilliantly congruous with Caligari's centralizing theme of mesmerism, a powerful self-symbol of cinema as totalitarian mind control. Its reuse in the inevitable follow-up however lacks this steganographic alignment and so comes off a bit token and for-itself. This combined with Genuine being not a vampire but a vamp, and less compelling and sympathetic an icon than Cesare the somnambulist, is most likely why the film is less known, a Moorish manservant whose knees all but knock together at the sight of a proprietary gold ring nary helping its cause.
As a tribal high priestess of the occult who is dethroned by civil war and marketed off into recesses of gentility, some opportunity flourishes for…
Hooptober 9.0 Film #1 of 35
1 German Silent Film
Hooptober time!!!
Not the best start imo. It was pretty bland, and not having a taste for silent films didn’t make it any better. 44 minutes of this was enough for me
Hooptober XI #27
{8 decades: 1920}
| Verdict: Hands down my favorite Noel Fielding movie!
Watched as part of the Horrorx52 challenge 32/52 {Before 1950}
| Listed: A favorite first seen in 2024.
Helena Bonham Carter hasn't aged a day!
HOOPTOBER 11—”What they don't tell ya about Satan is that he throws a wicked slider.” Edition!
[6/34]
NIGHT FIVE:
1 Robert Wiene film [1/1]
6 countries (Country: Germany) [2/6]
8 decades (Decade: 1920s) [3/8]
Typically, I either absolutely adore silent films or find them impenetrable, but this lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. There's a lot of striking imagery here (I want a skeleton with a clock head in my room too), but it's no Caligari. Watched the 82-minute fan restoration that's floating around on YouTube, which has a positively Akira Yamaoka-esque score and is generally super neat. I would probably say I appreciated this more than actually enjoyed it, but I think it's important to remember that you're sticking your head into another world when you watch a 100+ year old film, and that's pretty cool, man.
Light 6/10
