Der Schatz (1923)
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Film Review

Der Schatz (a.k.a. The Treasure) was the first film to be directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, an auspicious debut work that presages many of the great films that Pabst would subsequently make. Prior to this, G.W. Pabst had served a stint as a director of the avant-garde theatre Neue Wiener Bühne in Vienna for a couple of years, before starting his cinematic career as an assistant to Carl Froelich on Luise Millerin (1922).  In common with many filmmakers working in Germany around this time, Pabst was strongly influenced by the expressionist movement, and this is most apparent in the film's strikingly expressionistic sets.  The latter were designed by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, a highly regarded team who worked on several landmarks of early German cinema, including F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924)  and Faust (1926).  Röhrig was also production designer on Robert Wiene's expressionistic masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which Der Schatz curiously resembles in a few scenes.

The film is set somewhere in the Balkans during the 18th century. A master bell founder, his wife and their daughter Beate live in a house with a bell foundry.  The house was built on the ruins of an older building that was mostly destroyed when the Turks sacked the region in 1683.  The bell founder is assisted in his work by the journeyman Svetelenz, who lusts after the former's daughter.  A young goldsmith named Arno arrives to lend his services and within no time a romantic attachment has developed between him and Beate.  One day, the bell founder recounts the legend of a fabulous treasure that is thought to have been buried in the region during the Turks' attack.  Svetelenz begins prowling the house at night, convinced not only that the treasure exists but that it is hidden somewhere in the building.

Meanwhile, the less muscle-headed Arno reasons that if the treasure does indeed exist it must have been concealed in the oldest part of the house, namely the central supporting pillar in the basement.  Sure enough, the treasure is discovered and Svetelenz and his employer are soon plotting to get rid of Arno.  Svetelenz offers to give up his share of the treasure in exchange for the bell founder's daughter.  Beate refuses to be sold and leaves with Arno, who has narrowly escaped an attempt on his life.  As the bell founder and his wife revel in their newfound wealth, Svetelenz returns to the supporting pillar and begins attacking it with a hammer, convinced that even greater treasures lie within...

Whilst Der Schatz has a strong expressionistic component to its design, there is also a degree of realism, and this very noticeable contrast of styles serves to demarcate the inherently good characters - namely the young lovers Arno and Beate - from the villains, a frightening trio of grotesques formed by the bell founder, his wife and the older journeyman.  The difference in acting styles adopted by the actors playing the characters in these two camps serves the same function, as does the lighting and camera positioning.  Whereas Arno and Beate would fit effortlessly into a Frank Borzage realist romance, the other characters can only be imagined in a dark expressionistic fantasy.

The young lovers are most at home in the pastoral landscape that surrounds the sinister looking bell house, basking in the Eden that is nature's real treasure; the others, ugly in both action and appearance, look as if they are part of the fabric of the twisted building that ensnares them with its hidden fortune.  Otto Tober's stylish chiaroscuro cinematography has a unique poetry that lends a picturesque beauty to the exteriors and a crushing mood of claustrophobia to the interiors. The lighting and set design work hand-in-hand to underscore the moral and psychological gulf that separates the two sets of protagonists, dividing the good from the bad, the rational from the irrational, the favoured from the doomed.

The most disturbing of the main characters is the older journeyman played by Werner Krauss, an actor who excelled in earthy villainous roles of this kind.  His character is the archetypal expressionistic ghoul, every bit as creepy as Max Schreck's Count Orlok in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) - perhaps even more frightening, as he is more recognisably a thing of flesh and blood, and powerful with it thanks to his solid physical presence.  The enormous closes ups of Krauss lusting after his employer's pretty daughter (who is barely into womanhood) are enough to turn anyone's stomach, and when he begins scouring the old bell foundry in search of a lost treasure he loses all trace of humanity - he becomes a predatory phantom of the night, driven not by love of money but by pure animal lust.  One of Germany's most revered actors of this era, Krauss showed his versatility by playing an even more monstrous fiend in Pabst's subsequent Joyless Street and then a great man of science in the lavish biopic Paracelsus (1943).

Der Schatz is a simple morality play that is more a child's fable than grown-up entertainment but it contains in embryo form themes that would become central to Pabst's oeuvre, namely the rapacity of man and his habitual ill-treatment of women.  The film's most shocking moment comes when the bell founder agrees to sell his daughter (without her consent) to the lecherous older journeyman, as if she were a mere object.  The scene is replayed in several later Pabst films, including Joyless Street (1925), The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929).  The sequence in which the three villains gloat over the treasure calls to mind the scene in The Love of Jeanne Ney in which the execrable owner of a private detective agency salivates over an anticipated windfall - significantly, each and every one of these ghastly characters meets an horrific end not long afterwards.  How eerily does Pabst's early work - Der Schatz in particular - anticipate the collapse of the Weimar Republic.