Esperanto and Cinema Part Three. Jean Forge: conclusion

It is often very difficult to get your facts straight if you have to rely only on whatever printed sources happen to be available. At such times the WWW can be a great help. Here is a case in point.

Jean Forge died in December 1980 and an obituary tribute appeared in the January 1981 issue of Esperanto, the official journal of the International Esperanto Association (Universala Esperanto Asocio). http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/esperanto/o... Part of it reads as follows.

"Jean Forge owes his reputation mainly to three novels...Abismoj (1923) is a love-story the structure of which is better than the content. (See the previous Topic article for more details. Ed.) In the farcical Saltego Trans Jarmiloj , (1924) various people from our own time travel back to the days of the ancient Roman Empire in a time-machine. His most successful novel was Mr Tot Ac^etas Mil Okulojn, (1931) and the subject of that novel - the invasion of personal privacy as a result of hidden TV cameras installed in a large hotel - has not lost any of its topicality. It inspired the film The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) by the internationally famous film director, Fritz Lang."

(See http://www.jscheuer.com/lang.htm and http://www.thegrid.net/knight/lang/films... for more information about Fritz Lang).

A very interesting comment about the film! But a year later, a good and informative essay on film in the history of Esperanto (to which I am much indebted), written by Arpad Abonyi-Nagy, appeared in the journal, Monato (more recent issues of which cam be found here) http://www.esperanto.be/monato/index.html and said this.

"Certainly few people now remember that Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou made a serious effort to film Jean Forge's novel Mr Tot ac^etas mil okulojn,. But after Lang's famous film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse was banned in Germany, the other film was never finished."

There is no mention of any film made in 1960 and so I was uncertain as to what exactly happened.

To get more information I consulted one of the best reference resources on the WWW - something which deserves a place in anybody's top 100 sites. It is the Internet Movie Database, http://uk.imdb.com/search , which contains copious information on more than 150,000 films. (The day after I wrote the previous sentence, I received in my mailbox PC Magazine Online's newly-revised list, "The Top 100 Web Sites", http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/special/web100 , and, sure enough, it includes the IMDB).

A search on Fritz Lang quickly confirmed that he did indeed make a film called The Thousand Eyes of Dr Marbuse . In fact it was his last film, made after he had returned to Germany after spending 20 years in Hollywood. It is interesting to see that Lang kept this particular pot on the boil for about 25 years: Jean Forge must have been pleased!

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