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Fritz Lang's early works are premonitions done up like serials, here's an ancient sacred text played as science-fiction. (Metropolis, by contrast, ponders futurism with a Babylonian eye.) Out of the cave and into the woods for the vorspiel, where Siegfried (Paul Richter) tests his new blade and bathes in dragon blood. The road to Burgundy on the Rhine finds Alberich (Georg John) petrified along with his treasure, Gunther (Theodor Loos) is the feeble king in need of help conquering Brunhild (Hanna Ralph). Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) and Hagen Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) watch from the palatial sidelines, she plagued by foreboding visions and he always ready to become a human hatchet for treacherous court intrigue. "Damned be the deed half-done," Lang the zeitgeist falcon pushes these national myths to their darkening limits and then dedicates the baleful spectacle "to the German people." Friedrich and Böcklin are the visual modalities, with Grünewald for the fire-breathing creature. (The demise of this steam-powered salamander segues into the call of the robotic robin, as befits a fable about totemic mechanisms.) The possibilities of the primeval outdoors, with their giant cement sequoias, versus the suffocation of the kingdom's crisscross patterns, a mix of medieval tapestry and modernist chess set. Blossom trees morphing into grimacing skulls adduce a note from Poe, the telltale mark on Siegfried's tunic points to the chalky sign on the child-killer's coat in M. "Babbling worse than murder," Kriemhild's nightmare (a superb Walter Ruttmann short), an unshakable bedrock for Kurosawa (Throne of Blood, Kagemusha, Ran). All of Ufa's resources, therefore cinema's every cog and wheel, marshaled into a mammoth production that's also a personal blend of fantasy and politics. A pair of lifeless demigods adorn the altar in the last image, just the tip of horrors still ahead. Cinematography by Carl Hoffmann and Günther Rittau. With Gertrud Arnold, Hans Carl Mueller, Erwin Biswanger, and Bernhard Goetzke. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |