Paracelsus

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Austrian-born director Georg Wilhelm Pabst was one of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers; among the many works of this period, Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera are probably the best known.  His later life and career, however, are clouded in controversy.  After spending the later thirties in France and America, he returned to Austria in 1939 and remained in the Reich for the remainder of the war—either by choice or authoritative force—and was the only great pre-war German director to work under the Nazi regime.  Of the two films he made under the eye of Josef Goebbels, this 1943 biographical treatment of Swiss physician, alchemist and philosopher Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim is the more notable, being one of a number of films the Nazi minister subsidized about legendary German heroes.  Theophrastus, who challenged traditional authority-based medicine in favor of observation and experience, in the process becoming the 'father of toxicology,' took the name Paracelsus ('beyond Celsus') to claim superiority to revered ancients like Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the first-century Roman who wrote a standard compendium on medicine.  Pabst concentrates on a single episode, when Paracelsus, who had earned the enmity of other doctors in Basel, led by their cadaverous chief (Fritz Rasp), with his unorthodox ways and charismatic self-confidence. He closed down the city to prevent plague from entering, infuriating the wealthy merchants as well; a subplot involves the infatuation of his student Johannes (Martin Urtel) with Renata (Annelies Reinhold), the daughter of one of them, Pfefferkorn (Harry Langewisch).  The film has long been dismissed as a piece of blatant Nazi propaganda that portrays Paracelsus as a prototype of the anti-establishment German genius embodied in Adolf Hitler; its 'official' status seemed confirmed by the casting of Werner Krauss, star of Veit Harlan’s notoriously  anti-Semitic Jud Süss, in the lead.  More recently scholars have suggested that in fact it is subtly subversive of the regime, depicting Paracelsus as a voice of Renaissance reason against both slavish obeisance to authority and mindless hysteria.  Whatever interpretation is embraced, it is certainly a handsomely mounted film, at times stilted and operatic but with some startlingly imaginative sequences, particularly one in which street entertainer Fliegenbein (Harald Kreutzberg) leads the townsfolk in an eerie St. Vitus Dance, or Dance of Death, interrupted by the sudden appearance of skeletal Death itself, and another in which the noble Imperial Knight Ulrich von Hutten (Mathias Wieman) consults with Paracelsus. While one can understand why Paracelsus was never released in the United States and remains relatively obscure, it is a historically significant work worth investigating, and although this Blu-ray issue lacks any extras, it at least makes Pabst’s intriguing film available in a good transfer.   A strong optional purchase.  (F. Swietek)