The first German film to excite art critics across the board was simultaneously a milestone in the history of special effects. Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913) was co-created by some of Germany's most ardent early cinephiles, actor Paul Wegener, author Hanns Heinz Ewers, director Stellan Rye, and cinematographer Guido Seeber. Their goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of film art, and special effects played a central role in this endeavour. Der Student von Prag emerged from an art film movement that dominated German production between the fall of 1912 and the summer of 1914. Encouraged by new commercial opportunities arising in the wake of the feature-length film, ambitious producers engaged in the creation of “artistic” premium films. Specifically, they aspired to mitigating concerns about cinema's negative social and aesthetic implications and improving the medium's reputation with elite opinion leaders.

As I have shown in Chapter 1, aesthetic theory considered medium specificity as a prerequisite for art. Cinema's first critics identified two types of subject matter as cinema's proper areas of competence: nature cinematography and fantastic or mental imagery, realized by means of special effects. In line with this and proceeding from fundamentally techno-romantic premises, the creators of Der Student von Prag sought to devise an art film by capturing the intangible through cinema's unique technological assets. Their tale about a man haunted by his mirror image featured scenic shots of romantic Prague and the eerie figure of the doppelganger, created by means of split screen composites.