It may be hard to believe for those of us born in the digital age-when every embarrassing moment can potentially be uploaded to Youtube for posterity-but an estimated 70% of all films from the silent era are thought to be lost. Of the silent film directors whose works have largely vanished, perhaps the most intriguing, at least for me, is the German director Kai Winckelmann (1887-1926). Although influential in his own era, he has since been largely forgotten, for reasons which I believe will become readily apparent if you read further in this article.
Winckelmann was born on September 18th, 1887 in Offenbach am Main, the son of a butcher. He reportedly found the family business very distasteful and did not get along well with his father, who drank heavily. After serving on the Russian front in World War I-a period of Winckelmann's life which left him permanently traumatized-Winckelmann married a certain Greta Schulz, a nurse whom he had met at a veteran's hospital. He moved with her to her home city of Vienna, Austria, where he began making films for the pioneering producer Joe May. Winckelmann created many moderately successful films while working for May, several of which survive in whole or in part, but by far his most successful work was the Lord Lister serial.
The Lister series, based on a series of pulp stories concerning a gentleman thief named Lord Lister who goes by the nom de guerre Raffles in the criminal underworld, consists of six episodes, each about an hour in length. The films bear a somewhat superficial resemblance to their source material. In the original novels, as in the first two episodes of the Lister serial, Lord Lister is a somewhat sympathetic Robin Hood-like figure, à la Arsène Lupin, who rarely commits any particularly egregious misdeeds. In Winckelmann's Lister serials, however, he became a much more sinister figure: a seemingly omnipotent mastermind of crime who is not above rape and mass murder. In the serial, as in the novels, Lord Lister is pursued by a Scotland Yard detective named Baxter. In the early installments of the serial, Baxter is portrayed as a figure of fun, an incompetent drunkard who is always outwitted by the master thief, but in the later episodes, Baxter becomes a tragic figure, an honest lawman who is helpless to prevent the atrocities of his implacable persecutor, Lord Lister. Although Lord Lister was played by several different actors-the idea being that his true face was unknown-Detective Baxter was always played by Winckelmann's friend and confidant, actor Olaf Schneider.
Olaf Schneider became close friends with Winckelmann shortly after the latter began working with Joe May. The two could not be any more different in appearance or in temperament: Schneider was healthy, muscular, and a lover of fast cars and boxing, while Winckelmann was a recluse and often in poor health. Nevertheless, the two shared a close relationship, perhaps finding common ground over the tragedies in their respective pasts: Winckelmann had had an abusive childhood and was left mentally scarred by his service in World War I, while Schneider's wife had committed suicide in 1918, leaving him to raise their infant daughter alone.
The contents of the first five Lister films, insofar as they can safely be reconstructed at all-only one of them survives, and even then only in an incomplete print-are as follows:
1. Lister tritt ein (Enter Lister): The screenplay of this first episode was written by none other than legendary director-screenwriter Fritz Lang. In this installment, Lister, who is living under the assumed name Lord William Aberdeen, manages to steal a valuable painting during an art exhibition. The bumbling Detective Baxter eventually manages to arrest Lister, but the latter escapes, switching identities with a guard in a clever ruse. A spectacular chase scene ensues, during which Lister, of course, escapes.
2. Lister schlägt zurück (Lister Hits Back): The film opens with an elaborate scene where Lister steals the pearl necklace off of a duchess' neck at the opera house. Shortly thereafter, Lister boldly announces his next crime via a newspaper advertisement: he will still the family jewels of Lord Willmore at such-and-such an hour. Baxter and his fellow policeman stand guard at Lord Willmore's side at his mansion, waiting for Lister to appear-but he never does. Just when he is about to dismiss the incident as a hoax, Baxter hears muffled cries and discovers the real Lord Willmore bound and gagged in a wardrobe; Lister had been impersonating him the entire night, and the real jewels had already been replaced with identical duplicates. Baxter realizes that the mansion is rigged to explode and barely escapes with his life. This is the only surviving Lister film.
