December 8: Die Nibelungen: Pt. 2: Kriemhild's Revenge/Kriemhilds Rache (1924 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

By the end of Siegfried, we’re ready to say goodbye to Judeo-Christian forgiveness and root for a bitter, bloody vengeance on those who brought our hero down.  But even though we come to the film fully engaged, the second part of Die Nibelungen, Kriemhild’s Revenge, never quite rises to the level of Siegfried.  With our heroic paragon gone, we don’t have Paul Richter lighting up the screen, and the film doesn’t carry the wider moral significance of the earlier one.  Even more, compared to Siegfried, Kriemhild’s Revenge feels tired, as though Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou had put so much excited energy into Siegfried that there wasn’t much left for Part II.

Which is not to say that Kriemhild’s Revenge is a bad movie.  There are the same epic action sequences that we see in Siegfried. Hundreds of horsemen surge over a ridge and gallop toward the camera at one point, and later the same number assault first the door and then the walls of Attila’s palace as the Huns try to retake the hall from the Burgundian kings.  The subsequent burning of Attila’s hall is the high point of epic action in the film.  Kriemhild’s Revenge also uses epic scale we in non-action sequences.  Attila’s throne room is a mass of decoration, and the Burgundian festivities in the caverns are just as elaborate.

And the melodrama of the film also aims to engage us in Kriemhild’s Revenge.  Kriemhild refuses to say good bye to her family as she leaves her home to marry Attila; von Harbou’s script subjects the queen to multiple entreaties for reconciliation and dwells on the extravagant emotional suffering of her family as Kriemhild rides stiffly away.  The extended assault on the Burgundians also offers many melodramatic moments.  Kriemhild repeatedly has the Huns attack the hall, all the while asking her brothers to give Hagen to her so she can spare the rest.  The kings, though, rally to Hagen and refuse to surrender in an emotional moment.  She also forces Ruediger to obey his oath to her, and the torn knight must kill the beloved husband of his own daughter to do so.  Meanwhile, all the Burgundians die, with the exception of the one Kriemhild wants dead, Hagen.  And in a final melodramatic twist, Kriemhild kills Hagen and is herself slain.  And Attila has her sent to be buried with Siegfried, the only man she’s ever loved.

But while Kriemhild’s Revenge has many of the same elements as Siegfried, the story here is far more monotonous.  Siegfried is a series of one interesting event after another, but in Kriemhild's Revenge, we know far ahead of time what's going to happen.  In fact, from the time Auberich curses the treasure in Siegfried and it ultimately passes into the hands of Gunther, it’s pretty clear that Gunther’s days are numbered and that we have only to wait to learn the vehicle.  And if that weren’t enough, Gunther’s breaking of his vow of brotherhood also sealed his fate.  And even Kriemhild vows vengeance in the end of Siegfried, meaning that Kriemhild’s Revenge is only the unveiling of how this will happen.  With all this destiny in the air, Kriemhild’s Revenge does little to interrupt the clear course of events.  While Siegfried fights a dragon, visits Auberich’s cave, bests Brunhild in trials and engages in court intrigue, Kriemhild is left to marry Attila and kill her family.  This short course of obvious events doesn’t make for a story nearly as engaging in Kriemhild’s Revenge as that in Siegfried.  

There’s much to enjoy in the visuals in Kriemhild’s Revenge, but with its clearly telegraphed story and unambiguous moral direction, Part Two of The Nibelungen falls short of the achievement of Part One.  It’s certainly an enjoyable cinematic experience, but Kriemhild’s Revenge is somewhat flat compared to the drama and stakes of its predecessor

December 7: Die Nibelungen: Pt. 1: Siegfried (1924 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★★★

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.

December 6: Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler/Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit (1922 -- Fritz Lang)

December 5: Four around the Woman/Vier um die Frau (1921 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

In this second writing collaboration between Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, the two again overreach.   As in The Wandering Woman, we’re not given enough background to understand who the many characters are and why they are acting the way they do, and we have another pair of twins to complicate our understanding of the story.  We also have a minor character, Meunier, who suddenly becomes important and acts with little motivation, while another character, one of the Krafft brothers, should be more important than he is.  And the story has some large holes.  How, for examples, do the jewelry thieves know that Yqeum has paid them with counterfeit money when he was in disguise when he bought it?

But as in The Wandering Woman, viewers who don’t give up on the film eventually learn most of the information they need to make sense of things.  After a long beginning of confusing information, the film goes to a flashback that explains the origin of all these relationships and the motivations animating the primary characters.  It’s the same device the writing team uses in The Wandering Woman, but it’s done earlier and more neatly here.  In addition, Four around the Woman sees Lang and Harbou experiment with a new, complicated, suspenseful ending as four storylines in the film converge on 47 Tiergarten at the climax of the film.  Since the writers were clearly aiming at this ending, it’s not hard to imagine that Lang and Harbou needed both Meunier’s sudden, unmotivated interest in Florence and the thieves’ knowledge of Yquem’s trick so the story would have two of the four ending narrative threads.  While the addition of these lines damages the film’s continuity, the weaving of four stories and the intercutting that brings them along is more sure than in much of Lang’s previous work after The Golden Sea.  The complicated climax is overly drawn out and has lost its steam by the time it ends, it’s still more complex and surely-executed than Lang’s work to date.  Four around the Woman represents a strong step forward in storytelling if not yet the narrative mastery of a complex plot that was to develop later.

And the film has some classic Lang elements.  There are psychological cuts that show us what is in a character’s mind, as when the film cuts to an image of the working husband of one of Florence's society friends.  There’s also the strong low key interior lighting that figures in so many of Lang’s later films.  And Lang continues to use depth of field intentionally, both for narrative purposes and to keep his viewer’s eyes on the screen.  For example, a foregrounded Florence spots her husband changing disguise in the mid-ground in a shot whose composition spares Lang a cut.  One of the more interesting elements here is the hefty presence of a poor, criminal underworld.  From an early scene with a blind beggar that calls to mind M, Four around the Woman features a collection of thieves, drunkards, pimps and prostitutes.  And a similarly libertine upper class.  These are characters who make many appearances in Lang’s later work.  From The Wandering Woman, Lang uses close-ups for character development and to highlight the sinister and macabre among his more sinister figures.  And there’s even a pan in the opening of the film as Lang’s camera surveys the faces ranged along a bar.

Four around the Woman shows Lang’s increasing cinematic control.  It only remains for him and Harbou to get a firmer grasp on a narrative form that works well in film for their collaboration is soar.

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.