So we meet Siegfried (Paul Richter) of the windblown hair, whom Lang portrays as a violent, Teutonic Homestar Runner. He is forever dashing off after another adventure and joyously bounding from one danger to another. Laughing off his wife’s premonitions of his demise, Siegfried is endlessly heroic and endlessly gullible. No sooner has he heard tell of Princess Kriemhild (Margarete Schon) of the impossible braids than has he declared that he will win her. No sooner has he been given a sword sharp enough to cut feathers than he is threatening the neighbors of the man who made it for him. No sooner does he see a dragon does than he stabs it in the eye. Siegfried is precisely whom Jung had in mind when he described the archetype of the “hero:” honest, brave, always in motion, and dumb as a box of hammers.
The fame of slaying the dragon wins him the wary admiration of King Gunther (Theodor Loos). The two men strike a bargain: if Siegfried will win the Icelandic Amazon Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) for Gunther, Gunther will give Siegfried his sister Kriemhild’s hand in marriage. But Gunther is weak and easily swayed—the one ordinary man trapped in this world of towering superhumans—and his one-eyed advisor Hagen Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) looks upon Siegfried with suspicion. Winning Brunhilde is no bargain either: surrounded by a lake of fire, any man who hopes to win her hand must beat her in three tests of strength. Losers die. Winning might be worse.
The movie’s score, by Gottfried Huppertz, is as close to Wagner as you can get without actually using Wagner. Many of Lang’s visuals create a strange impression that “Die Nibelungen” is taking place a generation or two after the dawn of the world, or at least the dawn of homo sapiens. The Dark Ages collide with pre-history. Of course we see two castles populated by upright Aryans, but we see no farms, towns, fields, herds, or much else. The Nibelungen—or dwarves—who fashion the crowns and weapons coveted by Siegfried and Gunther are as primitive and apelike as Neanderthals. In a dreamy sort of way that defies exact interpretation, the castles seem to exist as a way for our earliest frontal lobed ancestors to coalesce, fend off, and perhaps enslave the lower species. The presence of armor and clothing only obscures this.
I pray for the day that Guy Maddin makes a huge scale silent epic (although his 1990 film “Archangel,” unseen by me, may qualify). Well into the sound era and even today, filmmakers have often admired the mysterious pull and abstraction of the silent film. George Lucas refers to his “Star Wars” movies as essentially silent. Hitchcock mourned the death of the silent and was interested in dialogue only when keeping it to a minimum; think of that scene in “Topaz” when he decides we don’t need to hear what the two spies are discussing. In his Great Movies review of “2001,” Roger Ebert writes that Kubrick’s dialogue is so spartan that it could be replaced with title cards. Speaking of “Spartan,” the David Mamet of late achieves bizarre results with his dialogue by never letting any of his characters say anything that we can see. No one says a word for the first 10 ½ minutes of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Brian De Palma always makes it his business to have one wordless stretch per movie, always lasting several minutes. It’s no accident that the man vs. beast finale of “Predator,” in which Ah-nold and the ugly mother sink into pre-historic mud-covered depravity, is largely wordless. A talking picture, to some extent, is a movie that doesn’t believe that film is an art and wants to borrow the credibility of novels and the theater. We talk in real life so we don’t need to see it in art. But, then again, I am a guy, and men hate talking.
Finished Monday, August 29th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of “Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.” Back to home.