
28 January 2021
I Walked with a Zombie
Legacies of violence and atrocity haunt Val Lewton's 1943 zombie film take on Jane Eyre set in the Caribbean.
A special edition of our LAYKA Lens series in partnership with the Thomas Mann House, this month we look at Ernst Lubitsch’s 1920 silent feature Sumurun. The LAYKA panel will take on this film, whose appearance in Thomas Mann’s 1924 masterpiece The Magic Mountain, provides an early example of cross-pollination between the arts.
Based on an “Orientalist pantomime,” Sumurun has been often criticized for its heavy use of stereotypes and historical distortion, yet the film’s orientalism is also a European projection that tells us much about the social order in the aftermath of the First World War and in the early Weimar Republic.