Performative screening: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World) (Silent film, restored version, Germany, 1920, D: Paul Wegener and Carl Boese) w/ Sofia Borges, 90'

Prague in the early sixteenth century was marked by the emperor’s wants to expel the Jewish population from the city. Rabbi Löw creates the legendary clay figure golem to avert the impending disaster for the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto. Indeed, the figure defeats the evil emperor, but it also goes on to turn against its creator. Historically, the golem was a metaphor for the relationship between artist and creation, and a cautionary tale of artificial intelligence. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World) (1920) was Paul Wegener’s third film adaptation of the Jewish legend. The film was one of the greatest successes of German silent film production, both artistically and commercially, and its extraordinary expressionistic visual and set design has lost none of its suggestive effect to this day. In its blending of the mythology of the golem with avant-garde methods of early film architecture at the time of industrialization, The Golem: How He Came into the World is a contemporary document that appears no less urgent 100 years after its premiere. It questions the theological hope of machinic salvation as well as the dichotomies of organic and artificial life, or technologically-produced enemy ontologies. As an artificially created life that seeks to escape the binary of curse or blessing, the golem serves as an interrogation of dominant AI narratives and the myths of an AGI (artificial general intelligence). The film not only questions the origins of the motives of enmity, but also the notion of alterity as complete otherness. Can we learn to live with the golem, or has it long been part of the most diverse facets of our reality? 

The sonification of the silent film is realized by artist Sofia Borges through the layering of sonic textures and emotive depths using a complex arrangement of percussion instruments and electronics. In the performance, Borges crafts an immersive journey through the film's captivating narrative, assigning sonic personalities to the characters in the movie where the unseen colours of the narrative spring to life through the evocative power of sound. Through the embodied presence of Borges’s percussion work, the question of automation, of embodiment and collaboration with technology takes centre stage, and envelops the sonic into the quest to discover technologized notions of alterity and life beyond the binary.

A film from the collection of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden