There are many things to enjoy in this great Weimer silent. One of Lang’s smartest strategies for keeping us in this 2-1/2 hour film is to put images of great beauty on the screen. One of the most compelling occurs early as we see Siegfried walking around a forest of immense trees and, shortly after, riding though the same trees bare chested on a white horse with his big flow of blonde hair pulled back. Later, we’re treated to the Alberich’s cave, whose interior looks like that of a fantasy Byzantine cathedral with its bulbous, fluted columns. Too, we scenes of staged, formal beauty. As the royal couples are walking to the altar to be married, Lang puts the camera behind a line of guardsmen so we see the royalty only as they cross the well-lit gaps between the dark backs of the guardsmen. Throughout Siegfried, Lang aims to keep beauty on the screen.
And he enhances this beauty with effective lighting. Throughout the introductory parts of the film, Lang uses low-key light on Siegfried to bring out the muscular definition of the actor, Paul Richter. When Siegfried casts his sword, he stands aside from the forge and rotates his work in his extended right hand, the light bringing out the details of the musculature of that arm as the muscles shift from one configuration to another. We see similar lighting soon afterwards as Siegfried approaches the dragon and again when he bathes in the dragon’s blood. Later, as the hero approaches the cave, his white figure is silhouetted against the dark of a rock wall, and when he enters the light, an overhead light creates an aura around him that makes him stand out from the white background. Lang’s lighting enhances the image throughout.
Lang also draws us with his cinematic special effects. Among the most outstanding is the compelling dragon who, though his feet might not entirely touch the ground, can cut his eyes to the side with the best of silent actors. His fire almost seems to singe Richter’s blonde hair at points, and deep in the background, the dragon adds to the beauty of many of the images he’s in. Lang could also thrill his 1924 audience by having Alberich’s invisibility helmet make a figure vanish and transforming a boulder in the cave into a window that shows dwarves working on a crown for the Giant king. Another type of special effect is Kriemhild’s animated dream of a white bird attacked by black ones, a premonition of Siegfried’s fate. We also see Alberich and his dwarves turn to stone, and we see the fiery lake surrounding Brunhild’s castle cool down before Siegfried. And though invisible, Siegfried is visible to us in glances as he uses the invisibility helmet to win Brunhild. A chilling tour-de-force effect is when we watch Kriemhild’s memory of Siegfried’s last goodbye and see the tree beside him first whither, then die, and finally transform into a skull. All these visual elements in Siegfried help keep us involved in the film.
The standard vocabulary of silent film keeps us invested, too. We see intercutting throughout, starting early as one of the villagers tells the story of the Burgundian kings and the image cuts between the village and the kings’ palace. Another outstanding use of the technique is when Lang cuts between the relationship of Siegfried/Kriemhild and Gunther/Brunhild to show the contrast between them. Lang also uses the silents' love of scale in Siegfried. Battle and hunt scenes flow with hundreds of extras, and the arrival of Gunther’s party from Brunhild’s castle is replete with the majesty of triumphant processional.
But it’s in Lang’s use of melodrama that we feel Siegfried most wed to a silent aesthetic. The fight with the dragon and the excessive posing in the competition with Brunhild both draw on melodrama, and by the end of the film, melodrama has moved to center stage. Capping all the foreshadowing, Kriemhild repeatedly begs Siegfried not to go on the hunt, and with excessive insouciance, Siegfried skips off anyway. Soon we watch Gunter changing his mind repeatedly on whether or not to allow Hagan to kill the hero, drawing out the final decision, and when Siegfried is dead, the others on the hunt loudly lament their loss before painfully coming to the side of the murderers. There’s even more emotional excess when Siegfried’s body is returned to the castle in a dark, windy night, and teh corpse is laid directly outside the widow’s door. She’s dramatically horrified, and one member of her family after another refuses her impassioned entreaties for vengeance. While engaging us, the melodrama in these scenes has an especially important function in the larger Die Nibelungen: The emotional intensity here has to serve as the motivation for the Kriemhild’s unflinching desire for vengeance in the next film. And the compelling, melodramatic ending of Siegfried does just that. By the end of this film, we want vengeance for Siegfried’s murder as much as Kriemhild does.
While all these efforts by Lang pay off and keep us in Siegfried, it’s the titular character and the performance of Richter that make it such a powerful film. Richter’s Siegfried is a paragon of energy, always on the move, smiling and engaging people directly and sincerely. Even when threaten by Alberich, it almost seems that the invincible Siegfried would rather just get along than do battle. Siegfried is friendly, warm and loving, but he’s nobody’s fool and fights when it’s right. He both attracts and inspires us.
Thea von Harbou’s Siegfried goes beyond these conventions, though, to become a compelling existential tragic hero. In Siegfried, we have someone who does only what’s good, virtuous and right, but in a tragic irony of life that goes back to Golden Age Greece, Siegfried is undone by that very characteristic. Sworn as a brother to Gunther, the noble Siegfried helps his "brother" to woo and win Brunhild, even when he doesn't want to. To Siegfried, a vow must be honored. However, angry at Siegfried’s duplicitous role in her seduction, Brunhild manipulates Gunther into betraying and killing Siegfried precisely because th noble hero has done as Gunther asked. This tragic aspect of the hero – brought down by the very virtue he embraces—puts moral tragedy at the center of Siegfried and raises this film far above most of its silent contemporaries. It shows us that honor and virtue aren't a guarantee of success in the world. And the film gives us a way to channel our frustration and anger at living in a world where morality doesn't win: Revenge. It’s not only the melodrama outside of Kriemhild’s door that angers us at the end of Siegfried; we also feel an existential anger that goodness and virtue aren't rewarded in the world.
Good silent film-making keeps us invested in a movie. Lang engages us with beauty and melodrama in Siegfried, and he increases our involvement by giving us an existential hero brought down by a world that has little regard for the good. The existential disappointment and anger that we feel at the conclusion of Siegfried launches us fully invested into the second part of Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge.
