Word: poelzig
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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About fifteen minutes into the picture, a television set presents us with a sublime moment from Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, starring Karloff and Lugosi. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a tortured psychoanalyst imprisoned during WW I by the villainous General Poelzig (Karloff) who, in turn, married and murdered Werdegast's wife Karen. Werdegast, after fifteen years in the prison from which few men return ("I have returned," he says gravely at one point), journeys to Poelzig's house to investigate Karen's death and eventually kill the murderer. Through a nasty turn in the weather...
When Head cuts in, the young bride has gone into a strange trance as a result of a sedative Poelzig has given her, as well as the sensual psychic vibrations emanating from the house. Werdegast is explaining all this to the bewildered husband, who skeptically asserts, "Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me." Werdegast smiles calmly and explains, "Supernatural perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not." Definitely one of the great moments of the American screen...
...imparts a sense of total grandeur to the symphony, singling out groups of instruments without losing the greater visual scheme of their physical and musical relationship to the rest of the orchestra. This makes him ideal for that potentially pedestrian assignment, as well as for The Black Cat where Poelzig's house becomes an incredibly grand stage for the anguish displayed...
...later scenes Ulmer substitutes anticipated melodramatics with long and thoughtful camera journeys through the strange geographies. A guided tour of Poelzig's basement reveals his beautiful victims perfectly preserved in suspended glass coffins; Ulmer's camera explores the photographic potential of the situation: one shot has Poelzig screen left, the girl screen right; another Poelzig reflected in the glass, his face partly superimposed over the girl; a third the corpse, her own reflected image, and Poelzig in background...
...problem of the century is the problem of the city." Dismayed by blight and overcrowding, Kiyonori Kikutake designed a city over water consisting of a huge floating deck that would be pierced by great concrete cylinders lined with dwellings. Buckminster Fuller planned a dome to shelter Manhattan, and Hans Poelzig a towering, terraced metropolis reminiscent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon...