In just two years, 1916 and 1917, the director and filmmaker Max Mack shot no less than six films with Maria Orska in the lead role. This legendary actress, of Russian-Jewish origin, was one of the great stars of the theatre in Germany and Austria in the 1910s and 1920s, topping the bill in all the most ‘modern’ plays by Oscar Wilde, Frank Wedekind, Luigi Pirandello, Arthur Schnitzler and August Strindberg. As anyone studying her work today will realise, Orska possessed a genuine erotic charisma which she used to great effect in her notoriously risqué performances. An eccentric of her times, Orska became the darling of the Berlin and Viennese art worlds – a fact which can be proven not only through the number of fashionable directors who wanted to work with her (Max Reinhardt, for example), but in her capacity as Muse for the great painter Oskar Kokoschka. The presentation of Die schwarze Loo gives us a rare opportunity to experience this extraordinary actress, who was so fascinating in her day, on the big screen. Follow her on her journey into the pulsating Berlin underworld, and you’ll see an expressionist performance which has lost none of its immediacy a hundred years later. You’ll also understand why this formidable woman seemed like such a threat to the strict morality of the Wilhelminian era. What you might not notice is anyone else. As a contemporary film critic wrote: “Maria Orska, the brilliant, spirited, actress manages her role with such verve and, at the same time, diligence and power, that everything else around her fades” (“Neues Kino-Rundschau”, May 18, 1918). Alas, for all its limelight-stealing lustre, her own star soon faded. Just twelve years later, as if reality was imitating the roles she had too often played on screen, she suffered the same fate as the heroine in Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Fräulein Else: snuffed out by an overdose of Veronal in Vienna when she was just thirty-seven years old.

Karl Wratschko