On Robert Wiene’s I.N.R.I. |

I already analysed in previous posts Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Genuine.

To keep up with the religious thread started yesterday, let’s briefly have a look at Robert Wiene’s I.N.R.I. (also known as I.N.R.I., ein Film der Menschlichkeit or Crown of Thorns, 1923).

Taken from the novel I.N.R.I. by Peter Rosegger and starring Grigori Chmara as Jesus Christus, Henny Porten as the Virgin Mary and Asta Nielsen as Mary Magdalene, the film belonged to the popular Christologic genre.

While Wiene's was a grand scale film on Jesus’ life, it couldn’t be compared to the spectacular Gospel-meets-Technicolor epic The King of Kings directed by Cecil B. DeMille (1927; this film actually deserves a post of its own…). Both films marked another trend in the Christologic genre, the arrival on the screen of secondary fictional characters whose life was deeply changed after they encountered Jesus. In Wiene's film the story of Jesus is indeed framed by the scenes about a murderer condemned to death.

Wiene’s film was also important since it featured set design and costumes by Ernö Metzner. Born in 1892, Metzner attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. From 1920 on he was the art director on many films in Germany, starting with Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun (1920; starring Pola Negri, another film/actress deserving a special post in future…). After leaving Germany with the rise of Nazism, he worked in the UK and the USA.

The image included in this post portrays Asta Nielsen and Henny Porten. I have chosen this picture since, apart from the fact that the two actresses look stunning in it, the two silent movie divas appeared together on the screen only in this occasion.

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