Blu-ray: The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände)
A little-known masterpiece of Austrian expressionist cinema
The German director Robert Wiene is best known for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), perhaps the most influential piece of expressionist cinema. He's not as well known as F. W. Murnau or Fritz Lang, but he deserves to be in the same league. The Hands of Orlac (1924), made in Austria rather than Germany, is a very fine example of a cinema haunted by the violence and death of the First World War, and containing within it both seeds of fascist aesthetics and the darkness that characterises film noir.