'From Morning to Midnight' (1920) speaks volumes- when accompanied by Alloy Orchestra

The 2011 Three Rivers Film Festival's closing-night event is a humdinger, and Boston's acclaimed Alloy Orchestra will be here to help with the humming at the premiere of a bizarre and brand new silent film.

That oxymoronic "new" silent is the recently rediscovered and restored German expressionist masterpiece "From Morning to Midnight" ("Von Morgens bis Mitternachts") of 1920. Alloy Orchestra will perform a live soundtrack for a single screening of it -- Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Regent Square Theater. It's the most visually astonishing pre-sound film I've seen since, roughly, the Eisenhower administration.

Based on Georg Kaiser's controversial stage play of 1919, the story concerns a mild-mannered Mitty-esque bank cashier, seduced by the bewitching appearance of a rich Italian lady at his teller window. To pursue her (and escape his petti-bourgeois family life), he embezzles 60,000 marks and heads for Berlin, where he savors the corrupt aristocratic joys of sex, sports and politics -- from morning to midnight. Less delectable is the corruption of his own soul.

When there's crime, can punishment be far behind?

The morality tale itself is not unusual. What's extraordinary are the sets, photography and imagery -- far more radically stylized and avant-garde than those of the famous "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" just one year earlier.

Stage director Karlheinz Martin was hired to do the filming, and both his mind-blowing production design and camera techniques augment the oneiric experience. Martin employs every state-of-the-art F/X trick in 1920 captivity: double exposures, superimpositions, split screen, stop action, animation, lens-distortions -- you name it.

The resulting hallucinatory experience may be the purest example of film as graphic art I've ever seen, avoiding all three-dimensional pretenses in favor of stark two-dimensional black-and-white lines, with total attention to detail: Grotesque exaggerations include a gigantic angular telephone, banknotes and newspapers and even sheet music with expressionist type-fonts, trapezoidal windows and doors, zigzag sidewalks -- all jarringly angled and unstable, just like the characters' mental states.

With acting to match. Ernst Deutsch (as the cashier) was a kind of Weimar version of Lon Chaney and the Brando/De Niro of his day -- a master of all makeups, aging backward and forward with ease. He looks like a walking woodcut. Roma Bahn is terrific in the quadruple roles of his daughter, his beggar-girlfriend, his Salvation Army savior, and his personal Grim Reaper -- all so wonderfully attentive to him. What's more important to one's ego, after all? Nothing -- until boredom sets in.

The wayward cashier wants unbridled passion for his money -- but money buys sex, not passion. Forget love! This film makes Caligari's cabinet look like Rebecca's sunnybrook farm. Much more overtly anti-establishment than "Caligari," there's no big mystery why its producers refused to release it just a year after the leftist Spartacist uprising freaked out post-World War I Germans. But somehow, thank God, it got to Japan for its sole contemporary release in 1922 -- and then disappeared. Seeing the virtually flawless restoration at hand is like discovering a perfectly preserved wooly mammoth in the Siberian ice.

Take it from me, kids: You'll never see another 75 minutes quite like these, with the Alloy Orchestra's musical accompaniment to heighten the one-of-a-kind experience of a one-of-a-kind work.