Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man

USA 2008
produced by
Terminal Pictures
directed by Andre Perkowski
starring exclusively in archive footage: Jack Pickford, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Olga Baclanova, George Beranger, J. Carrol Naish, Louise Fazenda
written and edited by Andre Perkowski, based on characters created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Batman published by DC Comics, music by Kristin Palker, Andre Perkowski

short
Batman, Andre Perkowski's Batman, Joker

review by
Mike Haberfelner

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The story might be familiar: Young Bruce Wayne sees his parents being killed, vows to dedicate his life to fighting evil, and soon, disguised as a bat, he has to go up against quite a gallery of rugues including the Penguin, Catwoman, R'as Al Ghul, the Scarecrow and the like, but first and foremost ... against the Joker, a maniac who uses every dirty trick in the book to trap the Bat-Man, but ultimately it is the Bat-Man who lures him into a trap ...

No doubt this story has been told countless times, first and foremost of course in Comics, but later also on film and television. Andre Perkowski though does something ingenious to give a new spin to an old story ... by not filming a single new scenes but relying totally on footage from silent films (and one Batman-serial from the sound era, actually) that have been influencing the creation of Batman and his rogue gallery. Films used include:

The Bat (1926, Roland West) - the film that was instrumental in Batman's own creation -, The Man Who Laughs (1928, Paul Leni) - obviously the inspiration for the Joker -, Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene), Edison's Frankenstein (1910, J. Searle Dawley), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910, Otis Turner) and Batman (1943, Lambert Hillyer).

However, tracking those films down would not be too much of a feat, the real accomplishement of Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man is that Perkowski has skillfully re-arranged scenes from above mentioned films, equipped the finished result with new title cards and thus made an actual, coherent story out of the very diverse film clips, and a pretty amusing and interesting short (circa 12 minutes) film.

By the way, this film has not been released commercially, but you can see it by clicking here. Enjoy!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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