Thursday, September 29, 2016

September 29: Destiny/Der müde Tod (1921 - Fritz Lang)

★★★★

In Destiny, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou finally give up convoluted storytelling and settle for a plot that starts at the beginning and goes to the end.  They remove confusing references whose explanations await a flashback and instead give us a clear, direct story here.  And rather than engaging us with cleverness, Lang creates a deeply atmospheric film here that touches its audience though mood rather than narrative showmanship.

Much of Destiny’s evocative atmosphere comes from the figure of Death.  Instead of a dark, pitiless, inescapable Grim Reaper, Lang’s Death is a figure who regrets the suffering he presides over but who nonetheless performs his duties.  As created by Bernhard Goetzke, Death is sad about what he does, but as a part of the order of things, it's the only thing he can do.  In this portrayal, Death’s black robes and wide-brimmed hat are as much about his own mourning as the grief he must inflict.  This Death, echoing a similar portrayal in Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage of the same year, gives Destiny an eerie tone, both repulsive and attractive.

Art design contributes to the mood, too.  The Apothecary’s crow, which we initially see standing on a skeleton, is unnerving as it hops among the Apothecary’s bottles while the man is looking for ingredients.  And low-angle expressionist shots distort and disturb, too.  For example, the wall around Death’s domain, which has no door, appears huge when Lang shoots it from below with the Young Woman standing outside it.  Similarly, the figural lamp in the bar takes on a macabre life as our attention is directed up to it and its candles from below.  Grotesque close-ups also bring us too close to people who we don’t want that proximity to, and Lang uses Expressionist low lighting to project threatening shadows when figures pass, as in the Carnival section of this film.  Some of the décor also evokes the darkly mystical.  Death, for example, follows the length of people’s lives in a vast room filled with candles, each candle representing a human life.  It’s a beautiful, if chilling, scene.

Another important element of the atmosphere is Lang’s use of special effects.  One tour de force moment is when Death goes to a candle, opens his hands above it as the candle flickers out, and a baby fades into his hands.  Effective as that moment is, Lang shows greater creativity when the scene dissolves into a mother grieving over the death of her baby.  With that one effects-laden sequence, Lang shows us Death’s terrible job and the burden he carries in doing it.  Lang uses this same dissolve technique effectively elsewhere in Destiny.  Death fades in to meet the coach at a crossroads, establishing his other-worldliness early on, and the Young Woman fades into Death’s lair when she poisons herself and then fades into the Apothecary’s lodgings when Death sends her back among the living.  The otherworldly procession of the dead into Death’s kingdom uses a similar in-camera effect, as does the poignant reunion of the Young Woman and the Young Man as the latter rises to meet her and the two are led off by Death.  Other effects – like the stop-motion moving letter, the flying carpet and the crying statue – also maintain the unnatural tone in the film.

Destiny is the first film to show Lang’s ability to create and maintain such a compelling mood, but even in doing so, he builds on strengths from his preceding work.  Most conspicuously, Lang keeps the frame filled with opulence and décor, and he did as early as Spiders.  From Persia to Carnival to China and the village where Death has taken up habitation, Lang stuffs Destiny full of showy costumes and decoration.  The Third Light, the Middle Kingdom in China, is especially rich in these, climaxing with a pagoda turning into an elephant that has a pagoda on its back.  There are fascinating details throughout the film.  Another carryover from Lang's movie-making include using the same actors to play different roles in the film and Lang’s attraction to showmanship.  The conflagration at the end of Destiny is compelling even today in its size and reality.

While Destiny certainly succeeds, it still has some rough edges.  The frame of Death and the Young Woman works well, but the three interposed stories don’t engage us.  Their small run time barely lets Lang tell the story, much less develop characters.  Five years earlier, DW Griffith had likewise tried to portray one idea as manifest in different eras with Intolerance, and he achieved some success.  But Intolerance runs more than double the time of Destiny.  Another odd Lang choice in Destiny is to make the Chinese section a comedy, thereby misaligning it with the other segments.  After the dark moodiness of the first 2/3 of the film, it’s jarring to have a fat, petulant, immature Emperor as the Son of Heaven with fingernails longer than his hands groping at the heroine.  What problems there are in Destiny arise in the interposed tales.

Destiny shows us a director who has made genuine progress and produced a noteworthy film.  He’s learned to tell a story in a way that the audience can follow, and he can control tone to engage us.  And Destiny points in the direction of Lang’s next project when Death looks at a group of quarreling burghers and apparently uses mind control to calm and manipulate them.  Lang’s next works will demonstrate further consolidation of the silent film language he's most clearly developed here.

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