The monthly film series
GERMAN CINEMA NOW! is curated by Goethe Pop Up Seattle. This year, the series explores themes of disruption and continuity to inspire public dialogue about the ways in which the past shapes our moment and can inform a radically different future.
The film screenings are presented in partnership with
Northwest Film Forum Seattle. All ticket purchases support Northwest Film Forum.
The screening of
The Hound of the Baskervilles will take place online. Please register in advance and pay what you can.
The film stream is available to viewers in the U.S. from August 25 at 5pm to August 26 at 5pm PDT.
The film will be accompanied by a recorded Q&A with
Rob Byrne, who restored the 2018 version of
Der Hund von Baskerville.
About the film:
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Der Hund von Baskerville)
Dir. Richard Oswald
Germany | 1929 (restored 2018) | 65 min.
“On the Devonshire moor, the ancient legend of a spectral hound still haunts the Baskerville family…”
A gloomy manor house on a winter’s night—gothic windows and arches, art directed to perfection—atmosphere seeping in from the moor without. Gentlemen drinking port and smoking, seen from various vantagepoints, through chinks and keyholes. Eyes behind a gargoyle. Who is watching whom? A dreadful howl: Lord Charles Baskerville takes to the moor to investigate—and is soon found dead, near the tracks of an enormous hound. The executor of his will comes down to London to plead for Sherlock Holmes’s help. Among troubling letters warning him to stay away from the moor, Sir Henry, the heir to the Baskerville estate, has returned from Canada to take possession. He must be protected from the curse, the Hound, or whatever force is behind the violence. Holmes sends off his trusty, phlegmatic companion Watson to look after Sir Henry, while he secretly launches an investigation of his own.
Traversing layers of secrecy and mood through dramatic landscape and setting—cave, cliff, moor, tor, a murderous bog—and unnerving effects, including the titular hound, a slavering killer that fairly bulges off of the screen, Der Hund von Baskerville animates all manner of interpretation. Does the generational curse of the ghostly dog suggest return of the repressed? Of the crimes of the past? Of the wildness of the id? Is there in fact a rational explanation for everything (or even anything)?
Richard Oswald (1880-1963), a Viennese Jew who pioneered queer filmmaking (
Anders als die Anderen, 1919) as well as the horror film (
Unheimliche Geschichten, 1919), produced bold, early works on then-taboo subjects like abortion and STDs. But throughout his career, he was haunted, not unlike the Baskerville family itself, by the Hound. Fourteen years after filming a three-part adaptation of
The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1914-1915, he created this sly, drippingly atmospheric 1929 German feature, the silent era’s final Holmes adaptation. With its international cast led by the American-British actor Carlyle Blackwell (who fairly glows with cultivated cogitation as the great detective),
Der Hund also offers a parting shot—a fire signal across the dank moor of time—of a lost era of transnational cinema, before sound and then the war changed everything.
Now in a beautiful new restoration overseen by film preservationist
Rob Byrne and produced by San Francisco Silent Film Festival in partnership with the Polish National Film Archive,
Der Hund lives again accompanied by a new ensemble score from the incomparable Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius, and Sascha Jacobsen. Turn off your AC this August and open up a browser window to this bracingly chill blast from the bog.
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