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- Fritz Lang
- Germany
- Drama
- Silent Film
- Lil Dagover
- Walter Janssen
- Bernhard Goetzke
- Erich Pommer
- Decla-Bioscoop AG
- Fritz Arno Wagner
- Erich Nitzschmann
- Hermann Saalfrank
- Fritz Lang
“The childhood dream which most influenced my life and work was concerned neither with friendship nor with love. Yet it awakened in me an emotion of fear, growing into love of such force, that I have never since been able to free myself from its almost mystic force.
I was ill, on the threshold of boyhood and adolescence, and it happened on a night when I was very close to the fulfillment of the saying that whom the gods love, die young. I felt the closeness of death with a kind of drowsy lucidity, yet I was too exhausted by fever to fight the approach of a dark stranger. I was slipping away on my faint breath, which got weaker and weaker, and the tear-strained face of my adored mother was disappearing from my view.
I slept and dreamed - or was I awake? With undimmed eyes, almost too clearly, I saw the familiar room in which I was lying. the shutters of the window were half open - the moonlight was streaming into the room. And I saw myself face to face, not terrifying, but unmistakable, with Death. Made of black and white, light and shade, the rib cage, the naked bones. On top of it the head, barely recognizable, shaded by the wide-brimmed hat.
Death and I gazed at each other. I don't know whether I should call the feeling I experienced at that moment one of fear. It was horror, but without panic. And even the horror made way for a kind of mystical ecstasy which gave me, boy though I still was, the complete understanding of the ecstasy which made martyrs and saints embrace death.
I raised myself in order to accompany him. In my weak state I collapsed. People came and lifted me up. Death had disappeared.
I recovered quickly. But the love of death, compounded by horror and affection, which the Gothic master depicted, stayed with me and became part of my films: humanized in Destiny [1921], symbolic in Die Nibelungen [1924], living Gothic in Metropolis [1927].”
Folk Tale and Ballad
In Destiny, Fritz Lang interrelates three very different spaces and times - a Baghdad inspired by the Arabian Nights (1706-1721), an imagining of 15th century Venice filtered through the style of Max Reinhardt, and a fantasia of ancient China. Each is seen as an echo of the other, with the travails of the lovers continuously juxtaposed against the implacable fate that separates them. On the model of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), each separate story is linked through the unifying encounter of the woman mourning the loss of her beloved and death (Lang's equivalent of the "cradle, endlessly rocking" that Griffith took from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855).
That Lang is able to create the impression of unity out of such disparate elements speaks both to his talent as a storyteller and his understanding of archetypal imagery and patterns. The literary roots of these structures have been interpreted in different ways. Lotte Eisner pointed to lyrical ballads (especially the Viennese songs that Lang described as embodying "intimacy with death"), the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and the Romantic fictions of Jean Paul [1]. Tom Gunning focuses on the Trauerspiel (mourning play) and Walter Benjamin's interpretation of Baroque allegory [2]. Lang seems to have seamlessly melded all of these models in his evocation of small town life in the "land of poets and thinkers" (a popular German self-conception that originates in Madame de Staël's 1813 book On Germany).
Lang's training was, however, as a painter and architect, and his visual approach equally reflects the ideas of pioneering German art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965). Worringer's Abstarction and Empathy (1908) characterized a fundamental tension in art between abstraction - an "inorganic crystallization" of the spiritual world that connotes fixity and enclosure - and empathy, which is related to organic rhythms [3]. Alois Riegl (1858-1905) had earlier introduced the term kunstwollen to describe the summoning up of the artistic will of an era. Worringer psychologized this idea of kunstwollen, and he tellingly saw the tension between abstraction and empathy embodied most fully in the form of the Gothic cathedral.
In Lang's film, the abstract realm of the dead is represented as an enclosed Gothic cathedral whose opening can only be seen by someone with visionary capabilities, like the central woman whose experiences are reflected in all the fantastic narratives that follow. As with Nosferatu (which followed a year later), one of the greatest achievements of the film is to connect metaphysical concerns and the transition between life and death to the most basic of cinematic devices. In the clip below, superimposition allows the woman and the viewers to see the invisible phantoms that surround them.
Song of Songs
The journey into the Realm of the Dead is initiated by the reading of a passage from Song of Solomon (8:6):
Set me as a seal upon thine heart,
as a seal upon thine arm:
for love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame.
Over the course of his career, Lang repeatedly returns to the Song of Solomon, one of the most mystical, mysterious, and poetic of Biblical books. With his Moravian Catholic childhood, Lang would have known that the book is usually understood allegorically and that parts of the 2nd chapter are traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary and read at Advent. He turns instead to passages from chapter 8 that vividly express an abiding yearning for higher love and greater meaning.
In The Woman in the Window, the middle-aged professor (Edward G. Robinson), who is told he is "too old" to gallivant around town, reads from the Song of Solomon just before he becomes enamored with a woman represented by her own painted image. The idea of deep yearning being misdirected as foolhardy desire recurs over and over again in Lang's work.
Lang and his novelist-screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou had a pronounced interest in the "East," as demonstrated by the last section of Destiny, by films such as The Wandering Image (1920), and by both versions of The Indian Tomb (1919 and 1959), not to mention the artworks decorating their home. It is therefore surely relevant that the resolution of Destiny has many similarities with the "Parable of the Burning House" in the Mahayana Buddhist Lotus Sutra (Chapter 3), in which movement towards Nirvana is figured as an escape from the Burning House of suffering and death. These echoes in Destiny reflect the syncretic approach of the German Orientalists of Lang's generation as well as his own interest in mapping out the movements of spiritual essences.
It is nevertheless Christian self-sacrifice that is presented as the way out of the intractable patterns of destruction shared by all the narratives. Death himself observes, "He who gives up his life will gain it" (Matthew 16:25). As elsewhere in Lang's cinema, it is only in intense moments of genuine love that one can begin to perceive the possibility of freedom from the abstract geometries that determine our fates.
Restoration Credits
DER MÜDE TOD (DESTINY)
Germany 1921
Director & Script Fritz Lang
Photography Erich Nitzschmann
Hermann Saalfrank
Fritz Arno Wagner
Set design Walter Röhrig
Hermann Warm
Robert Herlth
Lighting Robert Hegewald
Production Decla-Bioscop AG
Cast
Lil Dagover The lovers
Walter Janssen The lovers
Bernhard Goetzke Death
Hans Sternberg The mayor
Carl Rückert The pastor
Max Adalbert The notary
Wilhelm Diegelmann The doctor
Erich Pabst The teacher
Karl Platen The pharmacist
Hermann Picha The tailor
Paul Rehkopf The gravedigger
Max Pfeiffer The night watchman
Georg John The beggar
Lydia Potechina The landlady
Grete Berger The mother
Restoration (2014) Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung
Funding Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
Freunde und Förderer des deutschen Filmerbes e.V.
Material Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gosfilmofond of Russia
Filmmuseum München
Národní filmový archiv
Cinémathèque de Toulouse
Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique
Scan L`Immagine Ritrovata
& digital image restoration
Reconstruction Rudolf Pfenninger commissioned by the Filmmuseum München
& facsimile intertitles L`Immagine Ritrovata
Colormap Anke Wilkening
Score Cornelius Schwehr
(2015 p.p. ZDF/ARTE)
Recording Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB)
Conductor Frank Strobel
Recording manager Wolfram Nehls
Recording studio Teldex Studio Berlin
Mixing Wolfgang Schiefermair
Sebastian Nattkemper
Production manager Christian Schwalbe
Editors Nina Goslar (ZDF/ARTE)
Stefan Lang (DLR)
A coproduction of: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, RSB & ROC GmbH, Deutschlandradio Kultur and ZDF in collaboration with ARTE.
© 2016
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John Boorman
