From Morning to Midnight

Karl Heinz Martin's hallucinatory adaptation of Georg Kaiser's Expressionist stage hit follows a mild-mannered bank cashier who, electrified by a fleeting encounter with a beautiful woman, embezzles a fortune and plunges into a single night of frenzied spending. Each stop on his odyssey — a bicycle race, a nightclub, a Salvation Army meeting — grows more stylized and surreal, the sets stripped to jagged lines and pools of shadow. Shot almost entirely on painted black backdrops with no naturalistic scenery whatsoever, the film is one of the most radical visual experiments of the Weimar era, pushing the aesthetic of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari even further into pure abstraction. It was considered so uncommercial that it was barely released in its own time, making its survival something of a miracle.