“The rediscovery of a film by Ernst Lubitsch is always an event. Als ich tot war is no exception. As Enno Patalas records in his booklet published for the occasion, this short feature produced by PAGU was released in Berlin on 25 February 1916. Subsequently rediscovered by the collector Stefan Stekar (1899­1986), it is today preserved in the Slovenska Kinoteka of Lubljana, in an excellent print, lightly tinted and apparently almost complete. In Als ich tot war, Lubitsch himself incarnates a bon vivant who has problems with his wife Paula (played by Louise Schenrich) and above all with his mother-in-law (Lanchen Voss). Some scenes of the film are surprising – particularly that of the chess game which gives rise to the central misunderstanding of the story. The exactness of the play of expressions, the mastery of the alternating cutting, makes the scene a great moment of cinema (and remember we are still only in 1916). Most striking is the playing of Lubitsch himself, exasperated as always, but so “Deedian” that we might readily imagine a link (till now too little noticed), between the French comic actor and the German-Russian man-orchestra. Once more the question of influence presents itself inescapably. Might not Lubitsch’s “Yiddish comedy”, so often remarked by critics, also be cross-fertilized with a black humour of French origin? Conversely, might Deed’s comedy have drawn some essence of its own inspiration from discoveries of the Yiddish stage? In short, might Lubitsch, in his beginnings, be following the experimental recipes of some Boireau and Cretinetti comedies? A more precise comparative analysis would no doubt permit future development of hypotheses in this sense”.

Thierry Lefebvre, L’événement: Als ich tot war (Ernst Lubitsch, 1916), in “1895”, no.19, Paris, dicembre 1995