Paul Wegener, an actor turned film director, was one of the earliest exponents of pure cinema-that is, cinema as an art of the image, free from the implied relationship to the theater and the novel. "When The Student of Prague came out," Lotte Eisner writes in The Haunted Screen, "it was immediately realized that the cinema could become the perfect medium for Romantic anguish, dream-states, and those hazy imaginings which shade so easily into the infinite depths of that fragment of space-outside-time, the screen." Germany's first known horror/fantasy film, The Student of Prague draws on Faust and the bewitched world of E.T.A. Hoffmann-in particular, the theme of the Doppelgänger-to tell of an impoverished young student, Baldwin (Wegener) in medieval Prague who sells, not his soul, but his reflection to a sorcerer in exchange for wealth and the love of a beautiful countess. The wizard then lures the reflection out of its mirror and gives it human qualities of greed and cruelty. The image of young Baldwin sets about frustrating the real Baldwin at every turn-but when in desperation the student finally "kills" his reflection, he only kills himself. Wegener worked in close collaboration with director Stellan Rye, shooting the film on location in Prague, whose old town still retained a dark, medieval mystery.