Stephan Graf v. Bothmer: ALRAUNE

Stephan von Bothmer interprets the film on the CineTronium, a unique keyboard setup of enormous expressiveness, which he developed specifically for his live film score. In his music, the melodies and rhythms seem to grow ever larger, like the roots of the mandrake root, considered magical since ancient times. With his music, Bothmer reverses the perspective: he places the mandrake's individuality at the center and develops his music from her experience, instead of continuing to see her as a projection screen for male fantasies.

"Alraune" tells the story of an artificially created woman: a scientist inseminates a prostitute with the semen of an executed murderer, thus creating Alraune – a creature that is simultaneously child, experiment, and projection screen. Brigitte Helm plays this artificial figure as a dazzling mixture of innocence, seduction, and cruelty. The film combines scientific hubris with dark eroticism, transforming the laboratory into a modern-day alchemist's kitchen. [Henrik Galeen, Germany 1928]

Based on the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, the story is a cornerstone of German fantasy cinema. "Alraune" also reflects the anxieties of the interwar period regarding transgression and degeneration. The images are full of shadows, veils, and glimpses—a cinema of suggestion in which Eros and danger are inextricably intertwined.