It’s one of the sad facts of our miserable climate of miserable prognostications about the state of the cinema that it continually obscures a simple truth: movies are very young. Compared to most artforms, the cinema is still in its infancy. Yet since Louis le Prince’s ultra-brief Roundhay Garden in 1888, cinematic innovation has progressed at a remarkable speed. And perhaps due to a widespread lack of interest in older films (I have heard people refer to films of the Nineties as “old” and met those who refuse to watch anything in black and white), modern audiences accustomed to an enormous repertoire of filmic tricks and techniques are rarely aware of just where these came from, or why.
Yet as even a brief confrontation with the classics of silent cinema will show, certain ideas and “moves” which we now take for granted (e.g. insert shots, cross-cutting, alternation between close-up and wide) were already present then, developing out of a real necessity and a growing sense of the adaptivity of the audience. That is, as silent cinema grew into its great flourishing of the 1910s and Twenties, it was fast becoming a medium unparalleled in its ability to shape the expectations and attentions of its viewers. And among the giant innovators of the era, there remain a small handful of names whose enormous reputations have stayed essentially intact a century later: D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton — and Fritz Lang, whose landmark fantasy epic Die Nibelungen marks its centenary this year. The film (and its director) has ultimately had an inescapable influence on everything that came after — not only in cinema, but in the whole of European and American popular culture.
Born to a converted-Catholic Jewish mother and a Moravian father in Austria, in 1890, Lang’s life conformed remarkably to the trajectory of the early 20th century. The stories of his early career have been told and retold over the years: there was his youthful sojourn to Paris to study painting, his enlistment in the Austrian army during the First World War, then a move to Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Next came his first great period as a director, at the behemoth German UFA studios (then the largest outside of Hollywood), a series of masterpieces spanning the 15 years between his initial films in 1919, and the classic sound pictures M (1931) and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933).
The Nazis would ban The Testament for being plainly critical of the party, which led Joseph Goebbels himself to reach out to Lang in conciliation, offering him a place in the newly consolidated studios under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Lang never took the offer, eventually fleeing Germany via Paris for Hollywood, where he would remain a successful director for two decades. In the midst of this, he managed to either perfect or outright pioneer entire genres, including film noir (in his earlier Mabuse film of 1922), utopian science fiction (Metropolis, 1927), espionage films (Spies, 1928), serial killer movies (M), and of course, epic fantasy in 1924’s Die Nibelungen.
What makes Die Nibelungen so powerful all these years later? For modern viewers, the first and most obvious thing is surely its sheer scale. Filmed over nine months on gigantic exteriors and in cavernous indoor studios, Lang had almost completely free reign to shoot as much and as long as he liked, against mattes, projections, and sets the size of which few films have managed since. The later French auteur theories of the Cahiers du Cinéma posited any director as primary author of a given film, and Lang was often cited as one of the perfect exemplars of the paradigm. Yet reports from the sets of his great UFA films suggest he might better be referred to as a general: at the head of a small army of technicians and designers, he had more or less total authority over the building, filming, and post-production processes.
The entire project was pitched at a mythic scale. The two halves of the film, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, total close to five hours long — epic by any era’s standards. Woven by Lang’s then-wife Thea von Harbou out of the traditional myth, Richard Wagner’s opera and a 19th-century theatrical version of the story, the two films tell the tale of the great Nordic/Germanic hero and symbol of Teutonic pride, Siegfried. The first recounts his battle against a dragon, his feats on behalf of the Burgundian King Gunther, his marriage to Kriemhild, and his final betrayal. In the second half, the despairing widow Kriemhild uses a strategic marriage to Atilla the Hun to destroy the Burgundians entirely.
Much has been made of the film’s relationship with German Expressionism, which was as defining to the art and culture of the time as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the German cinema dealt intimately with the emerging theories of art the Expressionists were espousing. The great film historian Lotte Eisner lays this out best in her influential book The Haunted Screen (1952), defining the goals of Expressionism as a pure abstraction almost at war with nature. The Expressionists sought — often in those weighty, untranslatable terms of German philosophy — to apocalyptically repudiate everything that had come before, whether it be Impressionism, Naturalism, or Romanticism. In Eisner’s words, what they were ultimately expressing was “that the world has become so ‘permeable’ that, at any one moment, Mind, Spirit, Vision & Ghosts seem to gush forth, exterior facts are continuously being transformed into interior elements & psychic events are exteriorized”. This, Eisner argued, was the same atmosphere evoked in the classic films of the German cinema.
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SubscribeNever seen Die Nibelungen but have seen M and wonder if any film studio would have the nerve to commission the work today?
Perhaps not a studio per se, but a writer/director/producer: Francis Ford Coppola.
His new film, Megalopolis, was released in the US on September 27th.
There seems to be some myth take.
“The influence of Die Nibelungen is still palpable wherever cinema engages in high fantasy. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, even Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies would be largely impossible without Lang’s accomplishment.”
That’s a bold statement. If there was no Die Nibelungen there would likely be no Star Wars, etc? I would need to see opinions from the directors of those movies before accepting it as fact. I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or Dune, but I’m guessing some suggestion of drama,tone and landscape is present in the text. Unless the the author is suggesting they too would be largely impossible without Lange’s accomplishment,
The author is doing the usual thing. He is starting with a hypothesis and making all the evidence point in that direction.
A lot of film work was done outside in the absence of big studios. The actors had to do real, dangerous things – not computer simulations. They had to do everything to draw in the viewers and if they failed, the film was poor. This is why people don’t like old black and white films – because on many occasions the actors don’t do a good job and let everybody down. But the film work was often brilliant for the time – see Die Blaue Licht from Leni Riefenstahl.
The French fantasy school of Jean Cocteau is ignored here with its debt to Surrealism rather than Expressionism. As is the British contribution made by Powell and Pressburger; their contemporary being Hitchcock who had more than a little to say about modern urban gothic.
Perhaps because the subject of the essay is not Cocteau but Lang.