By Love Possessed

“In Kabbalah and European Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit, believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person.”

After drinking altogether too much bubbly, I passed a restful night on producer Angela Murray’s comfortable Glaswegian couch then, come morning, I quit the couch and caught the coach back to Edinburgh, nursing a hangover and perhaps unwisely determined to catch the one-off screening of THE DYBBUK, a supernatural yiddish musical from Poland in 1937. Well, it isn’t every day you get a chance to see something like that. 

Unfortunately, due to my depleted state I couldn’t really do justice to this two-hour-plus folkloric tragedy. When one is hungover, one’s heart sinks slightly when the film begins before the birth of the main characters. Director Michal Waszynksi has an interesting camera style, preferring to pan across from character to character, and often back again, rather than cut, which again helped lull me into a somnolent state but was pretty interesting as an approach. Perhaps because Polish cinema had been crushed by a punitive tax when sound came in, the industry was just recovering and so the film combines elements of late ’30s visual slickness with a few wobbly touches of early ’30s primitivism.

The last half of the film contains the most interesting stuff, including the Dance of Death, with a female figure in skull makeup dancing with the heroine, who has been possessed by the soul of a male Kabbalist — plenty there for the gender studies crowd to get their teeth into. The performances are often highly rhetorical and heightened, but still compel — at times there’s a real connection to the Jewish fairy-tale flavour of Polanski’s THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, particularly in the stylised body language.

The film was a German co-production and many German crew-members were employed. Due to intense anti-Semitism in Poland at the time, cast and crew often fought their way through mobs of thugs to get to the studio, and had to nurse their injuries before beginning work. Horribly, a few years later some of the same German technicians came back to Poland as soldiers, and with their inside knowledge they could point out those Polish film industry workers considered “dangerous”…

More happily, the two stars of the film travelled to New York for the US premier of the film in 1939 — and stayed. They survived the war, unlike many of their colleagues, and unlike the vanished world captured in the film.

Suggested Fever Dream Double Featurewith Julien Duvivier’s LE GOLEM, a visually stunning ’30s remake of the Paul Wegener classic, which borrows heavily from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN movies. It stars Harry Baur, a major star of French cinema, later murdered by the Nazis. These films contain ghosts. No, these films ARE ghosts.