The general consensus, for many decades running, is that though The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a cinema-history landmark, and the seminal ship that launched the thematic fleet of German Expressionism (which remained the world's coolest and most influential film movement for a decade), and that the credit for the film's pioneering abstruse stylization and invention went not to the director, Robert Wiene, but to the film's team of writers, producers and theater-trained designers. (And, to a degree, the performances by Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt.) In fact, Wiene has always been short-shrifted, if only because so little of his other work has been available for viewing. (He'd made 18 movies prior to 1920, most of them lost, and worked steadily until his death in 1938.) The Hands of Orlac (1924) is a case in point, long written about but rarely seen, and never available before on home video, but a vivid, throbbing demonstration of the visual fire Wiene had to offer, with or without Caligari's set painters.

It's become a classic tale, from a 1920 novel by neglected French speculative-fictionist Maurice Renard, and it's been filmed twice since, once in Hollywood as Mad Love (1935), directed by emigre cinematographer and longtime Wiene associate Karl Freund, and once in France as The Hands of Orlac (1960). Certainly, Renard's subjective-nightmare yarn was made to order for the German Expressionists, coming fully stocked as it did with intimations of madness, hallucinatory dream sequences, macabre set-pieces, the capacity for looming and shadowy interiors, and a central premise that teetered on a razor's edge between supernaturalia and the protagonist's insanity. Still, Orlac is not a German film technically, but Austrian, shot in Vienna, at a time when the Austrian film industry still struggled in the wake of the post-WWI breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In fact, most of the great artists that made the German industry so powerful in the '20s emigrated to Germany from the empire's shattered remains, including Freund, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Carl Mayer, Willi Forst, Karl Grune and Hans Janowitz. Vienna was, of course, also the early-century hotbed of high culture and of Freudian psychoanalysis, both of which feed into and collide in Wiene's film with lurid anxiety.

Very simply, famed concert pianist Orlac (Veidt) is the victim of a train wreck, in which both of his hands were severed (off-screen); simultaneously, a psychotic killer is being put to death. Family and doctors decide to transplant the killer's hands onto the pianist – a scenario that afterwards quickly sends the convalescing Orlac on an obsessive tear, learning more and more about the killer's story as he becomes increasingly estranged with his own appendages. Eventually, of course, Orlac becomes convinced – or is it true? – that the hands are acting under their own volition, and he may become compelled to murder. It's an ingenious piece of Euro-pulp (the concept of which, varying from body part to body part, has been reworked many times, including in recent films like The Eye), but Wiene's film dominates its more sophisticated and expensive sound remakes by virtue of visual ingenuity.

Orlac is an eye-catching movie from the first scenes, in which Wiene shoots a car driving in a panic at night, from another car, using only a single nervous spotlight; news of the train crash hits town with an on-screen typographic cry of "Un Accident!"; and the site of the wreck itself is a muscular, high-contrast dose of chaos. Ironically, the look that Wiene achieved in of Orlac owes less to stylized sets than to a mastery of lighting (whereas, famously, the lighting on Caligari was suggested almost entirely by painted shadows). Wiene uses backlighting and harsh compositions to suggest a Kokoschka-angled universe, artificially distending the already ominous rooms around Orlac into infinite darkness; often, there're no ceilings or walls around Orlac's bed or parlor furniture, just black, and the characters are dwarfed by the unknowable space. (In one moment that forecasts a popular David Lynch trope, Orlac stalks into the impossible shadows, and vanishes.) To capture Orlac's dissolving consciousness, Wiene uses double exposures in profoundly creepy ways – faces appear in the sky-high darkness above our cowering hero, and during one dream a giant fist and arm cuts diagonally across the abnormal blackness, from upper right toward Orlac's tiny bed, in lower left, until its knuckles press against the sleeper – who then awakes.

But the greatest special effect might be Veidt, who turns his whole body into an Expressionist design, contorted by body horror and walking around in a tortured swoon as if his hands are huge, ravenous, paralyzing spiders he cannot disconnect from his body. Looking quite like Udo Kier at his thinnest and most frenzied, Veidt delivers a performance here that's half interpretive dance, half agonized psychosomatic seizure, and it's safe to say that, as with Caligari's Cesare, no one anywhere had the baroque physicality to match it.

It's a deeply strange film that just gets stranger, as Orlac also becomes the victim of an extortion plot (hinging on the notion of the killer's guillotined head being reattached, Frankenstein-style, to its body, which then threatens with mechanical hands), and the troubling matter of how the Orlacs – Alexandra Sorina, as Mrs. Orlac, remains in a state of lemur-eyed terror throughout the whole film – are supposed to pay their bills if the pianist's hands would rather grope for murder weapons than play Chopin. (This arm of the plot, so to speak, leads them to Orlac pere for a handout, but he's a hermited nutcase as well, living in a hulking castle set that looks left over from Lang'sDie Nibelungen, made the same year in Berlin.) If German Expressionism has any relevance today – and the success of Tim Burton and the Batman suggests it does – then Wiene deserves reexamination, and Orlac a spot on the movement's top shelf.

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by Michael Atkinson