Paracelsus

When I was about 21,I saw G. W. Pabst's Paracelsus (1944).  Certain sequences in the film, which I recalled as being tedious, have remained in my memory for more than 44 years.  Recently, Kino Lorber issued a Blu-Ray digital restoration of the film and I have now watched it.  Paracelsus isn't fully successful, but it is, indeed, a remarkable movie and well worth study.  Pabst, who had been jocularly called der rote Pabst ("the red Pabst or "Pope", the meaning of his surname), was a man of the Left, certainly a Socialist if not a Communist.  His Leftist credentials were impeccable -- he had worked closely with Brecht on a 1930 version of the Dreigroschenoper ("The Three Penny Opera") and many of his most famous films involved working class poverty and social commentary on subjects such as prostitution and the exploitation of soldiers and working men.  It's not wholly clear to me how he ended up in Germany during the Hitler period, but, in fact, he seems to have been press-ganged into service to the regime and made two pictures under the close supervision of  Josef Goebbels.  The first, a period farce called The Comedians (1941) is generally accounted harmless, a bit of mildly amusing "fluff"; Paracelsus, made with prestige stars and a big budget, is another matter -- critics have generally derided the film as abhorrent Nazi propaganda and the legacy of the picture post-war was catastrophic to Pabst.  He spent the rest of his life trying to direct anti-Nazi films to establish his perquisites as an enemy of Fascism -- but Paracelsus irremediably damaged his career.

Viewed from our current vantage, the Nazi ideology in the film is low-key and, almost, invisible:  there are some speeches about the superiority of German to academic Latin that are not remarkable except in the Nationalistic context of the War -- this sort of stuff would go unnoticed if the film had been made in the twenties or sixties.  The Fuehrer imagery involving Paracelsus is so muddled that we can't tell if the hero is supposed to be a potential precursor to Hitler or an anti-authoritarian rebel.  There's no anti-Semiticism in the film; however, the involvement of Werner Krauss playing Paracelsus casts a shadow on the picture because the actor was a well-known and enthusiastic Nazi and starred in Veit Harlan's rabidly anti-Semitic Jud Suess.  Pabst eschews the most obvious ideological gesture available in the context of the film -- he could portray the plague allegorically as an aspect of the invasion of Fortress Germany. (Fritz Lang's imagery of the rat-like scurrying hordes of Mongolians in Kriemhild's Revenge, the second part of his 1924 mythological epic based on the Siegfried stories in the Niebelunglied contains much more offensive imagery of invading Asiatic pestilence.  An enthusiastically Nazi-inflected Paracelsus could surely have portrayed the threat of the plague as equivalent to the invading non-Aryan Russians or the Jews, but there is no whiff of this sort of imagery at all in the movie.  The German people (Deutsches Volk) are portrayed as prone to hysteria and gullible -- certainly, not a message that the Nazi regime would have  regarded as helpful to the war effort.  So, we are left with a film with a couple of vaguely disquieting speeches but one that is, generally, inoffensive from an ideological perspective.  And, indeed, I think that the movie is directed to clearly subvert any propaganda messages that Goebbels may have wished to insert into the picture.  

Paracelsus was a 16th century Swiss alchemist and healer. Inadvertently he pioneered the scientific method with his laboratory experiments.  (He seems to have been primarily interested in occult studies such as astrology, divination, and the alchemical pursuit of quintessences).  The film portrays Paracelsus as a proto-scientist and humanist.  (Upon seeing a beautiful woman, he proclaims:  "The greatness of man... is man.")  Paracelsus is opposed by a cabal of nasty physicians, all clad in black and physically hideous -- they are led by a noxious doctor played by Fritz Rasp, a reliable heavy in German films from the silent era through the sixties.)  At the outset of the film, the leader of the town doctors plans to amputate the leg of Froben (the historical Frobenius).  The surgeon arrives with a terrifying saw and is about to cut off Froben's leg, something that will certainly kill him.  After a suspenseful interval, Paracelsus intervenes in the nick of time and heals Froben with his herbal remedies.  Froben, a book publisher, agrees to print Paracelsus' treatises on medicine and the natural sciences -- but, first, he has to cast type for German Fraktur or Gothic letters; this is because his type-faces are all designed for publishing books in Latin.  There is an academic debate between Paracelsus and the evil physician in which the alchemist shows that he knows Latin better than his opponent.  The plague is approaching and Paracelsus demands that the city's gates be closed and the place quarantined. A greedy merchant, however, bribes the sentries to allow a convoy of wagons carrying merchandise to enter the city.  The plague comes with the trade goods, only to be promptly quashed by Paracelsus (how he does this is not at all clear and the irresolute, even confusing, conclusion of this episode is one of the many narrative defects in the movie.)  The merchant's beautiful daughter is supposed to be married to a powerful aristocrat, but she falls in love with Paracelsus' famulus -- that is, his lab assistant.  When she is told that she must marry the old nobleman, she falls into a swoon.  Paracelsus heals her by having his famulus embrace her in her sickbed -- it's what might be called sexual healing and the episode is exploited for a sort of smarmy prurient interest.  The famulus, puffed up with pride, tries to heal Froben who has become dangerously ill again.  He uses an untested elixir on the man who promptly dies.  A hue and cry is raised for the arrest of Paracelsus who is blamed for Froben's death.  A sinister juggler, Fliegenbein (the name means "Fly-Leg) owes Paracelsus a favor -- the alchemist healed his case of the plague.  Fliegenbein appears out of nowhere to create a spectacular diversion so that the hero can be smuggled out of the City.  Fliegenbein pours money into the town square to create a riot -- he also performs a tight-rope act high over the city's streets.  In the film's final scene, Paracelsus is working in a sort of stable.  He is told that the people need him.  He walks out of his rustic laboratory to see a great crowd of the sick and crippled waiting for his ministrations.  Declaring that he "needs" the people (Volk) and that they need him, Paracelsus summons the halt and lame to him to be healed.  

The film is episodic and a bit incoherent.  Pabst was versatile and the movie operates within a wide range of situations and emotions -- there are grave scenes involving death and suffering, bawdy tavern sequences, weird instances of the uncanny, and broad comedy.  The casting, particularly of the minor characters, is brilliant -- the film presents an array of grotesques and "low" characters redolent of figures that one might see in a painting by Brueghel.  Many of the compositions involve images that are derived from from Albrecht Durer as well.  There are bizarre oddities:  after the handsome, if stiff and simpering, famulus has healed the wealthy merchant's daughter (apparently by having sex with the unconscious woman), Pabst cuts to a basement laboratory full of bubbling alembics that are highly suggestively shaped (they have phallic appendages or womb-like receptacles); there is a nipple shaped vessel prominently displayed in the foreground and low flames that boil fluids in the alembics.  When the heroine curiously approaches one of the alembics, it ejaculates, spraying a white, creamy froth all over.  Again and again, Pabst presents us with images or scenes that undercut any ideological message that the film might propose.  Most notably, there is a bravura sequences in which the incredibly agile Fliegenbein appears in a tavern, dances around everyone and performs various acrobatic or gymnastic exercises.  (The performer is the exceedingly slender and flexible, Harald Kreutzberg,, an exemplar of modern interpretive "free dance:  one wonders how he survived the regime, since the figure seems to be overtly homosexual and the practitioner of an Expressionist kind of dance -- he was trained by Mary Wigman -- that it is hard to imagine the Nazi's supporting in any way, shape or form.)  In the cellar tavern, Fliegenbaum suddenly begins to twitch and he, then, starts a dance that looks like some of the more outre moves in Michael Jackson's Thriller video.  It's obviously a Danse Macabre and, before long, everyone in the room is following Fliegenbein's lead, twitching and grimacing and staggering like zombies over the tavern floor.  Paracelsus, who struts around carrying a big broadsword, enters, descries the horrifying spectacle as a "mad house" and recognizes that this is the convulsive St. Vitus dance that carries off victims of the pestilence.  He diagnoses Fliegenbein as an asymptomatic carrier of the plague.  Fliegenbein collapses in Paracelsus arms, creating a statuesque limp Pieta formed from the healer and the juggler.  Then, Paracelsus hears a grinding sound, looks up with horror (Krauss was a superb mime) and sees a black clad, hooded figure sharpening a scythe.  In a huge close-up, we see the skeletal figure of Death.  Death swings his scythe and, in an indelible gesture of defense, Paracelsus parries the blade with his great broadsword.  It's one of the greatest sequences in film history, hidden inside a Nazi-era film that very few people will ever see.  In a final subversive gesture, Pabst has Paracelsus escape the city (as Fliegenbein creates a distraction) in a tiny cart that is draped with a fool's tassels and motley.  The cart is drawn by the smallest donkey that I've ever seen, a miniature donkey no larger than a big Labrador retriever.  The old woman, the tiny ass, the motley on the cart behind which Paracelsus hides, all combine into some kind of strange visual joke -- but who is the joke on:  the authorities or Paracelsus who makes  his escape in this profoundly unheroic way?

The film comes with an obtuse commentary by a woman named Samm Deighnam.  She's a Goth girl and, apparently, a fan of gore and horror movies.  About a third of what she says is completely wrong.  For instance, she notes that the historical Paracelsus spent much of his career trying to discover remedies for syphilis.  She says:  "Of course, this is theme that the film can't touch with a ten-foot pole."  This is untrue and, in fact, causes one to wonder if her print of the movie contains a major scene on this subject -- and, in fact, an episode that proves the assertion that Pabst is using the movie to undercut Nazi ideology.  Ulrich von Hutten was a German humanist and poet, as well as a prominent early supporter of German nationalism.  Von Hutten supported the Protestant Reformation and proclaimed the hegemony of the Deutsch language over Latin.  He also is frequently cited in the Romantic era as a proponent for the revolution of the peasants or farmer class.  Casper David Friedrich, the great landscape artist, painted his grave as an emblem of the defense of Germany against invading French armies.  In the movie, Ulrich von Hutten appears to Paracelsus and asks the great alchemist to heal him.  Ulrich's appearance is overtly based on the doughty Knight in Durer's engraving "The Knight, Death and the Devil."  Ulrich tells Paracelsus that he is suffering from Morbus Gallicus, a disease that is killing him painfully and that he acquired in "the Camp" two years earlier.  Paracelsus confirms the diagnosis and says that the popular 'quack' treatment, administering gum of Guaniac (a New World tree) has just driven the disease "deeper into him" -- he goes on to tell the heroic knight that he should have been treated with "mercurius" or sublimated mercury.  Of course, Morbus Gallicus is the "French disease" -- that is, syphilis  So Pabst is so bold as to show the great, redeemer knight of the German people as infected with syphilis that will surely kill him.  Somehow, Deighnam completely misses this point, something that should be integral to any theory that the movie is subversive of Nazi propaganda.