Apologies yet again for not having posted anything of late but the whole lockdown thing has been corrosive of my equilibrium. The depression and anxiety have returned. It has only served to further my mistrust of the msm; their coverage has been at times alarmist. I'm thinking of yesterday's front cover of 'The Daily Telegraph'. So much so I have given up watching and listening to the news, the better to protect my mental health. There really has to be a better way of managing this crisis.
Over this last week the bf and I have been making our way through the immense, the epic 'Die Nibelungen' and what a gargantuan piece of cinema it is. All four hours and forty five minutes of it. (But no where near the length of Jacques Rivette's 'Out 1; Noli me Tangere' which weighs in at a staggering 13 hrs. I barely got past the grunting.) A brave undertaking, none the less, by one of the masters of German cinema, Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who with his wife, Thea von Barbou , wrote the script. Lang was a leading exponent of Expressionism, and here that heightened language is blended with an Secessionist aesthetic; Lang being directly inspired the illustrations, by Carl Otto Czeschka, in an abridged children's version of 'Die Nibelungen', even it appears borrowing the title. Both film and book, and Wagner's Ring Cycle, are based on the 12th century German epic, the 'Nibelungenleid', which itself has deep origins in the Germanic oral tradition, and in real events in Late Antiquity.
The film, unlike the Ring Cycle, stays pretty faithful to the original. It is essentially a story of love and revenge. The film is divided into parts 'Siegfried' and 'Kemhilds Rache'. 'Siegfried' is the story of the the eponymous hero, his love for Kremhild the sister of the Burgundian King Hagen, and his betrayal and murder. The second part is the story of Kremhid's revenge upon his murders. And a thorough job she makes of it. I should add here that each part is sub-divided into Cantos - reflecting, I suppose, the structure of the original text. (It does make it easier watching at home. You can watch it in instalments as we did.) I suppose those divisions to make for a 'literary' film, but don't be put off; they have little, if any, effect on the narrative drive which reaches a suitable dramatic and compelling climax as the bodies pile up. This is a visually stunning film, beautifully shot. Sometimes rich and complex, sometimes austere. There is a strong hieratic quality to scene after scene - very often the camera is static and the actors compose themselves like those in Czescka's illustrations. Though, I suspect, that isn't the only artistic influence; Kremhild, played by Margarete Schon, looks as though she has stepped out of a painting by the Belgian Symbolist Ferdinand Knopf. Scenes are often framed with architecture or members of the cast. Costumes are eclectic - part Byzantine, part Gothic, reflecting the cultural interplay of a 12th century text and a narrative set in the collapsing Roman Empire. Eclecticism, too, in a setting that has dragons, magic, Germanic paganism and Christianity. At times a fairy-tale world of wonders - and horrors.
Die Neblungen
1924
Director: Fritz Lang
Cinematographer: Carl Hoffman, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann
