December 4: The Wandering Shadow/Das wandernde Bild (1920 -- Fritz Lang)

★

The Wandering Shadow isn’t a promising start to the collaboration that would soon bring us Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, M and The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse.  Fritz Land and Thea von Harbou worked together to create a plot here that unexpectedly lurches from one event to the next, throwing in an occasional surprise and reversal.  A character like Wil Brandt can play a significant role early and then vanish for much of the rest of film until re-emerging at the end.  And there are numerous unmotivated character elements like Georg Vanderheit vowing for no apparent reason to remain isolated from society until the stone Madonna walks.  A full third of this film has been lost, but it’s hard to imagine that the missing third would have given lots more cohesion to this muddle.

That said, some elements here point to better things to come.  For one, the intercutting between the cabin and the burning dynamite fuse shows Lang remembers how to create suspense by editing instead of simply showing simultaneous action.  There’s also a good deal of Germanic folklore, from the decorated wedding canoes to the rustic mountain cabins and the bells that are associated with death.  There’s even a hint of the supernatural that includes a fade-in of a skeletal arm ringing a bell.  As in Spiders, a claustrophobic, underground chamber hosts some of the suspenseful action when the cabin is covered in a landslide, an image that recurs in Lang’s work.  And his eye for composition again dominates Lang's frame, as does his skillful use of depth of field.

And for all its problems, Lang and Harbou’s story creates suspense and engagement with the audience.  Early in the film, we have to wonder why John is pursuing Irmgard so relentlessly and calling her his wife; all the while, Wil Brandt is called George’s rightful heir although Irmgard is George’s widow.  All this early confusion for the viewer in the film – and made more confusing by the same actor playing the role of both George and John – lasts until a flashback explains the mysteries.  But no sooner do we understand these mysteries than the writers add new narrative questions to engage the audience.  The complexity of some of the narrative mysteries here overly confuses, but Wandering Shadow shows the screenwriters honing their skills.

With a third of Wandering Shadows lost, it's hard to judge precisely what the complete film looked like in 1920, but based on what we have here, it might have been an overly ambitious first collaboration between the two writers, While this film is really of interest only to dedicated fans, history shows us that these collaborators would soon meld their respective talents into a formidable cinematic team.

December 3: Harakiri (1919 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

With Harakiri wedged between the first and second Spiders films, Lang goes to a similar toolkit in it.  The camera hardly moves, and while the director uses editing to show simultaneous time, he doesn't create suspense by intercutting here as much as in the other two films.  These characters pose in each episodic scene, and we don’t learn enough to sympathize with any of .  And unlike in the Spiders films, where space and time are very logical and clear, this story has gaps, inconsistencies and unclear points.  It takes some time to figure out the setting of the opening part of the film (shrine or official’s home?), and character motivations are elusive throughout.  At one moment Olaf Anderson loves O-Take-San, and although we don't see the psychology behind the change, he's soon home with his European wife ignoring his abandoned love's pleas for support.  When Olaf returns to Japan, he takes his European wife with him for reasons that are never clear, and he resists claiming his own biracial son until his European wife goes to meet O-Take-San.  Even O-Take-San herself elicits little character sympathy.  Her situation is sad because of its melodramatic circumstances, but rather than taking on any agency in her own life, she simply responds to those around her, from her father to the High Priest to Olaf to Prince Matahari.  Her sole effort at using her own will is to refuse when she’s offered a way out of her problems.  Neither of the two principals engages.

With so little happening technically or narratively, Lang still grabs us to some extent here with exotic visuals.  As in The Golden Sea, every scene of Harakiri is packed with interesting visuals.  Here, Oriental art and furniture decorate the frame, and the gardens have a distinctly Japanese quality to them with overgrown pines framing figures.  Some of Lang’s exterior shots trade in East Asian art composition, too, with small figures in a confined space placed on a larger landscape.  To better show off all this engaging detail, Lang again uses depth of field effectively.  One tour de force moment of his using depth is when O-Take-San comes towards us in the foreground as her father ominously says goodby in the midground against a background of elaborate Japanese decoration.  Likewise, Lang uses depth of field symbolically when the tender of the shrine walks in the foreground past a large midground urn to then head into the background to sleep in the bushes.  All these show off Lang's already thorough grasp of space in the frame.  And in a more cinematic sphere, as Olaf and his naval mates head to the red light district, a subject Lang often turns to, Lang uses red tint rather than a typical blue for the night,.  This little gesture is a hint of the boldness he’ll soon employ in larger, expressionist works.

The short story “Madame Butterfly” inherently lends itself to melodrama given the basic narrative, and Lang combines that with some visual flourish to create a worthwhile film.  But this rendition doesn’t engage us with full characters or involve us in the story, so we’re left with a sequence of episodes that lack a rich unifying unity.  Better films were to come.

November 23: The Spiders/Die Spinnen (1919-20 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

There’s a giddiness in Spiders that makes this film and sequal worthwhile.   Just as the erstwhile hero,  Kay Hoog, dashes from San Francisco to South America to an underground metropolitan Chinatown with little or tenuous reason, Spiders blasts forward in an orgy of décor, adventure and stunts that often lack a motive other than to pleasure the audience.  Keying on this excess is the way to enjoy the film.

As early as the first scenes of Part 1: The Golden Sea, the viewer knows how the rest of the series will work.  There’s a close-up of a scruffy, tattered sailor hurriedly putting a message in an ornate bottle.  Soon, we cut to a native American dressed as though from a Mayan stele.  The Indian spears the sailor just he throws the bottle into the sea, and the story is begun.

And Spiders gets more elaborate from there.  The sets in San Francisco are stuffed with orientalia: Chinese screens, Persian tapestries, Buddha statues, ornate doorways, Chinese robes and hats, large urns, Moroccan décor.  In the action itself, Kay and the Spiders vie to find a gold treasure hidden under a lost lake that human eyes have never seen and that is in the country of a lost Incan tribe that lives among Mayan ruins.  The Inca sport grand, feathered headdresses and plan human sacrifices to their gods.  Meanwhile, the Spiders are led by a foxy lady in jodhpurs and a Teddy Roosevelt tie, Lio Sha.  

And a lot of the action is as outrageous as the visuals.  At one point, somewhere in South America, Kay spies Lio with some of the gangsters recruiting local cowboys for their expedition to beat Kay at finding the treasure.  Seeing this horde in the saloon, Kay goes in, has a drink, starts a fight and is soon in a standoff with the whole gang.  In realistic terms, it’s hard to see why Kay would've gone in, but in cinematic terms, Kay’s action sets up a great fight scene followed by a cowboy-on-horseback pursuit across the countryside so he can leap into the basket of a hot air balloon that is just taking off.

Part 2: The Diamond Ship is no less over-the-top.  A police raid on an illegal diamond auction leads to the search for a Buddha diamond that will liberate all of Asia, and that search takes Kay and the Spiders first to England and then to the Falkands in search of a pirate treasure there.  The Spiders hypnotize a yogi to get him to divine the location of the jewel, but a crater that spews poisonous gas at night complicates the salvage of the treasure.  There are even Indian spies in turbans in this episode.  Like The Golden Sea, The Diamond Ship is beside itself with outrageousness.

It’s hard not to think of Louis Feuillade’s Les vampires while watching Spiders.  Kay Hoog’s struggle with the Spiders certainly calls to mind Philipe Guérande’s with the Vampires, and character of Spider leader Lio Sha resembles that of Irma Vep.  Robbers wear tight black outfits in both, and there are WW I worries in both.  But the comparison pretty much ends there.  At this point in his career, Lang’s direction is't nearly as controlled or fluid as Feuillade’s, and the stasis that characterizes Spiders despite its excess would make it hard to enjoy 6-1/2 hours of it.

But in Spiders, we can already see some of the techniques and images that will recur in  Lang's work later.  Close-ups abound here, starting with the very first shot, and there is also intercutting to maintain two story lines and, occasionally, create suspense.  We watch the action of cowboys chasing Kay alternate with his acquaintance trying to decide whether to take off in the balloon; later, we switch between Lio being prepared for sacrifice and the troop of cowboys looking for her.  Another typical Langian technique here is use of depth of field.  For instance, the background space is important as Kay stands beside the window of the cantina and we see Lio conspiring in the background; in a later example, we watch Kay as he passes some caged tigers in the background menacing him.  There is also some of Lang's love for flashback in Spiders.  A clear example starts Part 2 as the story flashes back to Kay's discovery of his wife's body and the plastic spider the gang has left as its calling card.

Some of the imagery of Spiders also prefigures that in other Lang films.  The underground Chinese city here calls strongly to mind the underground city of Metropolis, and the menace of water is also strong in both films.  Spider’s cowboys are threatened with drowning when they steal the treasure, just as the workers’ children are in Metropolis.  And caves and catacombs occur in a lot of early Lang.

Spiders is a particular kind of cinematic fun.  Many of the Lang's images have descendents in more recent films.  Kay's adventurous dashing around establishes him as a forebear of Indiana Jones, and the scene with Kay risking death in a compacting shaft has many future echoes, including a very similar scene in Star Wars.  And from an auteur perspective, it’s interesting to pick out elements here that Lang will develop more in the future.  But the strongest pleasure here is the sheer delirium of story and image that rushes onto the screen here.  There’s fun to be had in sitting back and waiting for whatever outrageousness happens next in this film.

November 9: Interstellar (2014 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★

What a disappointment this latest Christopher Nolan film is.  The film creaks with movie clichés and unconcealed pandering to the audience.  From a struggling farm family to several heroic rescues and an evil betrayal, Interstellar tugs at our heartstrings a little too firmly.  The ending could have come out of a 40s melodrama.

Unfortunately, the dialog isn’t much better.  It’s rare that the language of a film takes me out of the movie and brings home to me that that I'm watching actors reading lines, but in Interstellar, that’s exactly what happened.  The stilted language that Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine have to speak feels more like that of a sophomore physics lab report than a conversation.  And while the script mostly avoids the narrative gimmicks that Nolan can employ (though there’s an echo of Inception when we learn that an hour near the black hole is seven years in earth time), the sprawl of the The Dark Knight Rises is much in evidence here.  But while it’s hard to stay engaged in this film for its nearly three-hour run time, at least the score by Hans Zimmer cues us in on how you should respond to a character or event when we're uncertain.

Interstellar has wonderful production values and a lot of good acting that remains firm in the face of some terrible writing.  And it’s pleasant to watch the echoes of other sci fi touchstones like 2001 and its reflections on helmet faceplates.  But there’s nothing much at the core of all this technique in Interstellar, which makes the movie's thee-hour length seem like 21 earth years.

November 4: TBA (2014 -- tba)

October 31: TBA (1944 -- tba)

October 29: TBA (1961 -- tba)