THE MURDERER DIMITRI KARAMASOFF

Great cinema from the great days of the early German talkie – though the director is Russian: Fedor Ozep, former artistic director and leader of the famous “Rus”-Collective, works with two of the most important German actors - Fritz Kortner and Bernhard Minetti – in this film of which master critic Herbert Ihering wrote: “Everybody has to see this film...“ In this atmospherically dense film adaptation which is based on several episodes in the novel, the emphasis is put on Dimitri Karamasoff. He falls in love with his father’s lover Grušenka. In a fit of jealousy he writes a letter in which he announces that he will kill his father if he doesn’t let go of Grušenka. When the old Karamasoff gets killed soon after, Dimitri is sentenced as his father’s murderer. Like a decade before under Carl Froelich, Fritz Kortner portrays Dimitri. Ozep presents the Karamasoff-story as a rational case, a miscarriage of justice. The film still relies on the visual laws of the silent movie but that doesn’t weaken its effect.