영화 ≪골렘, 그는 어떻게 세상에 나왔는가≫(1920)에 재현된 낯선 타자의 이미지

The Image of the unfamiliar Other represented in the film Golem: How He Came into the World(1920)

In the early twentieth century, Paul Wegener, a modernist film-director, translated three times the legend of Golem which had descended up to that time in Prague into cinemas. The third Golem cinema, The Golem: How He Came into the World(1920) belonged to the expressionist film, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919) and Nosferatu(1922) etc. It was also the horror film which took a monster of Golem as a motif, so it has been considered as a legendary film of the modern horror movie. In the mass media of today, Golem has represented to be a kind of humanoid robot invented in response of the human needs like Frankenstein. They has increasingly evolved into something causing the fear in these films. However, according to the original legend, golem was the creation that Rabbi Löw had invented for the protection of Jews with a help of Astaroth. Wegener s Golem in his own film, also, took the motif from the original legend. In the film, Rabbi Löw invented the Golem for the purpose of the protection of Jews, but Golem transformed into a monster protesting against human who wished to kill it when it coveted the boundary between human and it. In this respect, Golem as a monster threatening the human life was the strange Other who menaced the Germans lives in that Weimar society, and thus it was the metaphor of Jews. Wegener s film, The Golem:: How He Came into the World represented the Antisemitism metaphorically, a cultural code of German society of that time, in a prominent film-art.