Paul Leni’s Waxworks: Writing Images from Silence, through Media and Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract The so-called German Weimar Cinema encompasses a profusion of films that used frame narratives. In the case of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924), as the framing stems from a literary act (the stories are framed by the act of narration), the film proposes the mise-en-abyme technique as a sort of immersion into the intermedial when it deals with notions like speaking, writing, silence, image and cinema. In the case of silent cinema, and especially in Waxworks, the presence of a perverse relation with the medium of writing becomes noticeable (producing a fantasy of writing), since every effort to represent the literary act on film results in an infinite production of silent images, creating a parody effect and even postulating an act of aggression against writing. This confrontational relation between the writing code and the code of the mute image in silent cinema allows us to suggest that there is an inherent inflexibility in the language of silent cinema which does not allow the coexistence of written and spoken word as complementary codes. On the contrary, in silent cinema, the image and the silence of the film seem to work against the word, the spoken word being set forth against silence, and the written word against images.