Word: ulmer
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Danger: Diabolik. So you've never heard of Danger: Diabolik, or for that matter anything else by Mario Bava, Italy's greatest hack (Black Friday, Planet of the Vampires, Kill Baby Kill). In the tradition of Edgar G. Ulmer and the more outlandishly-scripted Charbol melodramas, Bava films wretched nonsense with great style, color, and originality. Don't attempt to inject meaning into this tale of a Super-thief and his sexy girlfriend who inhabit a sumptuous underwater playground which makes Dr. No's look like Rindge Tech. It doesn't matter: film-making as slick and out-landish...
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...
...EDGAR ULMER'S films constitute a relatively unknown group of excellent low-budget pictures made during a period of more than 30 years. His art is in many respects highly pictorial, yet in the most developed films his complicated intellect adds dimension to the straightforward impact of the images. In The Black Cat and The Naked Dawn, initially simple confrontations are made ambiguous by Ulmer's elusive concept of morality. The camera often works against the script in directing audience sympathies, and should we feel secure in our assessment of character relationships, Ulmer will invariably undermine the status...
Like Lang's, Ulmer's work tends to combine shots in constant motion, the camera slowly dollying in or out. Godard says that the director's decision to move the camera is a political act; for these greater film-makers, Lang and Ulmer, it is perhaps applicable that moving shots represent decisions of morality in terms of the dynamic relationship between foreground and background. In addition to Ulmer's command of composition, lighting, and occasionally dazzling montage, is his ability to translate these subtle aspects of morality into cinematic spectacle...
...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...