(THE NIBELUNGEN SAGA: SIEGFRIED)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Paul Richter, Theodor Loos, Margarete Schon, Hanna Ralph, Gertrud Arnold, and Hans Adalbert Schlettow
Directed by Fritz Lang & written by Lang and Thea von Harbou
1924
143 min NR
In the hands of silent master Fritz Lang (“M,” “Metropolis,” and “Between Two Worlds,” that one vampire movie said to be Hitchcock’s favorite), the silent film can be truly otherworldly. It’s not just that we can’t hear anybody talking, it’s the look of old movies themselves: all scratched, flickering, with missing frames, populated by strange human-esque figures who wear too much makeup and who emote like Shatner on crack. I ADORE scratches, dust, hair, crud, and lighting that seems to pulsate. Contemporary Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin reminds us of this with his retro-silent pieces like “Cowards Bend the Knee,” “The Heart of the World,” and “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.”
“Die Nibelungen” is “Lord of the Rings” for the silent era, except with fewer pretensions and a better pedigree (a 13th century epic poem versus some book from the—snicker—1940s). It is the largest and most magnificent feature-length, non-racist silent I’ve ever seen, ablaze with energy, sporting rows of men-at-arms, castles blackened by sunrises, clouds of incense set sparkling in the light of church windows, a shirtless hero always ready for the fight, Viking-style landers dwarfed by menacing cliffs, and enough caves, crags, and crevices to call to remind you of the dawn of the world. Lang’s compositions are flawless and his vibrancy is infectious. This is a fantastic film, a masterpiece, and why its name hasn’t popped up on any of the recent glut of Top 100 lists is baffling.
Many of “Die Nibelungen’s” effects are the simplest and most ancient of all camera tricks: the double exposure. The longevity of the double exposure comes from it being as convincing as anything else put on film, and has a ghostly quality that perfectly suits Lang’s land of legends. It is used when Siegfried uses his magic hat to become invisible or the king’s double, or when the dwarf smith’s slaves turn to stone, or when a magic orb makes a cave wall disappear. The dragon that Siegfried ambushes is not what you’d call convincing, but with his turtle’s gait and neck stretching for water, he isn’t boring, and is enough of a character to elicit some of the same sympathy we feel for King Kong nine years later (part of what makes Kong more believable and likeable is that he blinks).
The silent film seems especially suited for the epic. Part of the difficulty with Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” is that a movie in sound and color, almost by necessity, must be populated by beings who are basically like us. But Herakles, Beuwolf, and Siegfried are not quite human, not as we understand the term. The desires that drive them are at once universal to all men, yet too simple and unexamined to be called real. Things happen to these heroes that any sane person would question, yet no one ever does. Only the dreamy, alien landscape of the silent seems capable of doing the epic hero justice.
So this past weekend the expensive private university in my city showed “Siegfried,” that is the first seven cantos (2 ½ hours) of Lang’s five-hour epic. It’ll be off to Netflix for me to get “Kriemhild’s Revenge” and finish this sucker off. You’d think that kids rich and smart enough to go there would be intrigued by the soundless adventure. But no, they responded to everything they weren’t used to in the way all children do: snickering. We meet everything we do not understand with fear or ridicule. Much worse than the laughing was that the kids felt it was okay to leave noisily in the course of the film, as if they everyone within earshot to hear their immediate disapproval. Oh well. I still had a great time.
In the kids’ defense, silent acting is an acquired taste and does often incorporate a lot of humor. Bordering on kabuki, silent acting is all oversized gestures and huge expressions, made by faces caked beneath makeup that produces the hard lines of a comic book. Death is a drawn out, gesticulating, stiff-armed affair. To hear the kids laughing you’d think that silent moviemakers just didn’t know any better. To try to explain to them that, just maybe, these early filmmakers were intrigued and delighted by the abstraction, by how far it got them from reality instead of just recreating it—that would be too much to ask.
Page two of “Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.” Back to home.