|
The implacable force lurking in Fritz Lang's deterministic traps, Death in this early masterpiece is a melancholy executioner, as much of a cosmically entrapped pawn as his victims. The "town lost in memory" is a storybook burg, at its crossroads materializes a visitor (Bernhard Goetzke), "strangely familiar." At the Inn he casts a ghastly shadow, newlyweds share his table and when the maiden (Lil Dagover) next sees her fiancé (Walter Janssen) he's part of a spectral procession vanishing behind an endless wall. The intermittence of a gesture (the bereft heroine brings a vial of poison to her lips) propels the journey into the beyond, the Song of Solomon has magic words: "For love is as strong as death." A bold vertical is something of value, says Dreyer, Lang has the obelisk-shaped portal and a chamber with flickering candles representing human lives. (Death levitates one of the flames, which dissolves into a newborn child and then into nothing as somewhere a mother weeps.) Three embedded fables, three chances to save one's beloved, three reincarnations of doom. One Thousand and One Nights for the Caliphate, a sumptuous moving manuscript with a corpse in the garden. Venice during the Renaissance is a carnival of masks and poisoned daggers, a burlesque of expressionism has the tetchy wizard in Imperial China morphing into the prickly diagonal of a cactus, it ends with skewered tiger and weeping statue. The chill of fate continuously unsettles exoticism, the folly of trying to outpace the Reaper builds to an epiphany during a conflagration. Dürer redivivus, plus Fra Angelico icons throughout (Dagover with hands folded in prayer in iris-encircled close-up), a mark carried by The Seventh Seal. The pastoral ascension beautifully reverses Poe's Sphinx going down "the naked face of the hill," Heaven is lovers reunited at last. With Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Max Adalbert, and Paul Biensfeldt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |