British Transport Films: 'Blue Pullman'

     I suppose you could call this an example of British Transport Films heroic approach to documentary film making. Not that it was in anyway as objective as the term 'documentary film' might imply. 'Blue Pullman', 1960, had a job to do: sell a new, fast and luxurious British Rail service that linked the cities of the industrial North and Midlands to London. Questions always arise with a film such as this: what is the balance between reality and fiction? What is real and what is staged? Are they real staff/passengers or actors? However the lack of objectiveness is no barrier, thankfully, when it comes to aesthetics, or nostalgia. It is a film I take a lot of delight in.

     There is no spoken narration, the cinematography by David Watkin & Jack West and the score, by Clifton Parker (who also composed the score for that wonderous film 'Elizabethan Express'), do all the work. And an excellent job they do of it. The audience follows the establishment of this new service through from the testing of the first train to that inaugural journey of the 'Midland Pullman' service from the now closed Manchester Central to London St Pancras. A film concerned with materiality (is that a word? - if it is, like heteronormality, it is an awkward, ungainly thing) for we see nothing of the design process. From a mysterious beginning - are we about to find a dead body in the buffet car? Well, the body of an engineer busy at work - we reach a triumphant conclusion in beneath the gothic engine shed at St Pancras. The influence of 'Elizabethan Express' made only six years before is obvious. Though, I suppose, there is only a limited way you can film a train. 

     It is instructive to see, in all these BTF films, how the aesthetics of totalitarian cinematography got re-used in a liberal, social-democratic-leaning democracy, and there I suppose lies the almost inherent contradiction, for do you convincingly create the heroic out of the mundane life of post-War Britain? Another way, and one I think Blue Pullman attempts, is to employ wartime commonality. All classes pulling together for the good of the whole. That sort of thing. But I can't image that to be an easy thing to do, and eventually it became a narrative, attractive though it is at this distance, that could no long cut it. Society was changing, and the speed of that change was only to increase as the decade continued. That Wartime narrative along with that of progress itself came under increasing criticism and rejection. In the specific case of 'Blue Pullman' the issue, surely, was the gap between the cinematic rhetoric and the daily experience of, say, a commuter in the south-east travelling in over-crowded and dilapidated rolling-stock. The film itself fell victim to this when filming was temporarily abandoned after British Rail postponed the launch date of the new service by a good six months from January 1960 to July following problems with the new rolling stock. Sadly, the Blue Pullman service was not a success. The Midland service was withdrawn in 1966, though the rolling stock continued in use until 1973

(02.03.2025) Independent auteur, David Gladwell, was production assistant.  Gladwell is best known, perhaps, for his 1973 film, 'Requiem for a Village'.

Blue Pulman

1960

Director                 James Ritchie
Cinematogrpahy  David Watkin, Jack West
Producer               Edgar Anstey

Own work: The House of Correction, Folkingham

     The first big piece of art I have done in a long while. The House of Correction, Folkingham, Lincolnshire, by that excellent provincial Georgian architect Bryan Browning. A favourite of this blog. Here is the real thing.  Perhaps a little more restrained than I would have liked, but maybe that is a reflection of how I'm feeling at present. Usual mixed-media.

Own work: Birthday card

     Just thought I'd share with you this birthday card I recently made for a family member. My first piece of creativity for months.

British Transport Films: 'An Artist looks at Churches'

     We are back in the world of British documentary films, a place that this blog has not visited for far too long a period - the sort of thing that was played in British cinemas before the main feature, and also, I can just remember, aired on BBC2 way back in the late Sixties and early Seventies. That was where I first saw 'Shellarama' and, I think, 'An Artist looks at Churches', which was written and narrated by the British Neo-Romantic artist John Piper. The latter was produced by 'British Transport Films', the former by the 'Shell Film Unit'. Thanks to the BFI both films are available on DVD. Piper was more than an artist - perhaps more of a Renaissance Man - the designer of tapestries and stained glass, graphic designer, writer, photographer, editor, theatre designer.

     'An Artist looks at Churches' forms part of six disc compilation of work by the BTF entitled 'Railways Forever!'. Another three compilations, at least, are available, but for me this and 'A Future on Rail' are the most interesting selections. All of these box sets, however, are very evocative, sometimes moving, and one cannot help but feel a wave of nostalgia. British Transport Films was established under the direction of Edgar Anstey (1907-1987) in 1949, a year after the nationalisation of the railways. Anstey, who was also a film critic at 'The Spectator', was stepped in the British Documentary tradition, having previously worked John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board. I suppose the BTF's remit was not unlike that of Lord Reith's BBC: 'Inform, Educate, Entertain', as well, of course, as drum up custom for the railways. In addition they made films for other transport bodies such as London Transport. In all the product of that same class and culture that was chronicled by the novelist C P Snow. A somewhat better class of 'product' it has to be said. And one which seems to easily blend both the progressive and the conservative strands of post-war culture.

     Odd really, this nostalgia of mine, for it is for a time I did not know, for by the time I was born most of the best work by the BTF was past, as films made from the late Sixties onwards tend toward the utilitarian and the commonplace. Occasionally they succeed but too often the films lack a sort of heroic quality that can be found in works such as 'Ocean Terminus' and 'Snowdrift at Bleath Gill' - the 'Heroic Materialism' described by Kenneth Clarke in his landmark television series 'Civilization'. In some respects, this tilt towards the banal is mirrored in other aspects of contemporary British film making and in the culture generally. Perhaps it reflects a crisis in Modernity, a loss of narrative. Certainly 'Heroic Materialism' failed to satisfy, failed to make up for the absent God. But it did for a while, at least, supply a common narrative structure. All that said the GPO Film Unit was still capable of producing a film like 'Picture to Post', directed by Sarah Erulkar, that could brilliantly combine the post-war ethic with the visual language of 'Swinging London'. Certainly the BTF didn't come to terms with the changes of the 1960s. Edgar Anstey retired in 1974, the BTF finally closing in 1982.

     Back, finally, to the film in question, and it is a classy production - atmospheric cinematography and a score by John Racine Fricker (1920-1990). We briefly see Mr Piper at the beginning of the film, strolling through an autumnal looking churchyard but otherwise he is an invisible presence. Just his very flat, rather mundane accented narration guiding us through a thousand years of English church history - one church, at least, for every hundred years. Not that architecture over predominates - space is given to the other arts, stained glass and sculpture for instance. Perhaps the choices are not the most obvious, but the film is none the worse for that. Though those choices are mainly from the south west, if memory serves me right. It is good, however to see the somewhat unknown St Philip's Cosham by Sir Ninian Comper included (and filmed so beautifully). The more well-known churches, such as Lavenham or Ottery St Mary, appear in the two 'collages' that bookend the film. In common with nearly all of these short documentary films of the early Post-war period there is a note of optimism - rather misplaced here at that. We have not entered into a new period of church building, or a golden age of church patronage of the arts. Far from it.

An Artist Looks at Churches                                                                                               1959

Producer                                Edgar Anstey
Director/Cinematographer   John Taylor 

'Last Things'

     I recently finished C P Snow's novel 'Last Things', the final instalment of his mammoth eleven novel sequence 'Strangers and Brothers'; the story of the narrator, Lewis Eliot, and his rise through the political and cultural strata of British society. It has been adapted for both television and the radio, with mixed success. And here I have to admit that I've started at the wrong end of the sequence, seduced - God damn it! - by the cover of the Penguin paperback, a lovely little pen and ink drawing by the English artist & graphic designer David Gentleman. Not only that, but I've been dipping, in a pretty haphazard manner, into BBC2 adaptation from the early eighties starring Shaughan Seymour, written by Julian Bond, and directed by Jeremy Summers and Ronald Wilson.

     C P Snow(1907-1980) was a scientist, writer, critic and all round public intellectual. He had a long career of public service, and also worked for a time in the private sector. Not the sort of person then that we see that often these days where the culture encourages specialisation to the detriment of character, or the ability to contextualise knowledge. C P is best remembered for the term 'The Two Cultures', the title of a 1959 lecture, in which he described what he saw as the dislocation of science and the humanities. He saw this as a harmful, if no outright destructive, tend in the culture. Although thinking in what may be thought of as a through going materialist and utilitarian manner - Snow argued, for instance, that the British education system, with its emphasis on the humanities, disadvantaged the economic wellbeing of the nation - there is an element of shared feeling with, say, a writer such as Aldous Huxley. Both realised that there was an increasing rift in the culture, an epistemic fracture perhaps, but argued from different perspectives. Both looked for a re-integration on both a societal and, at least for Huxley, personal level. Perhaps Snow, who is sometimes a derided figure these days, should be thought of as attempting the cultural synthesis one finds amongst the early members of the Royal Society such as Wren and Hooke, who were both scientists and architects. Although on feels he may have looked askance at the RS's putative origins in the 'Invisible College'. But I digress.

     Snow was a contemporary of the patrician Anthony Powell the author of another great novel sequence - 'A Dance to the Music of Time' - chronicling upper class British life in the middle years of the 20th century. Both novels are in part autobiographical, both are roman fleuves in the realist tradition of Nineteenth century novelists such as Dickens and Balzac, and in particular both are heavily influenced by 'La recherche du Temps Perdu', Proust's gargantuan novel sequence with its patrician detachment and carefully qualified sentences. Of the two I would suggest that 'Strangers and Brothers' is perhaps more comprehensive of the two; the 'Dance' being more concentrated on the world of the English haut monde. To be honest I have to confess that I do find that air of detachment a little bit difficult at times in the work of both authors. I want that bit more 'bite', more sense of urgency (for want of a better word). Immediacy. 

     Still Eliot, successful in worldly terms but flawed and occasionally cruel in his private life, makes for an, at times, interesting narrator, coming to his retirement from public life and assessing his life and career, and facing the prospect of his own mortality. (That literary detachment, then, it could be argued, does well in reflecting the professional caution of a public servant.) Lewis looks askance at the cultural change of Sixties Britain - when there was a return to the irrational, the violent, the occult (in some way Huxley, at least temporarily, had won the argument) - a mere two chapters or so towards the end of the novel, and that perhaps a little too tangentially. Disengagement again. One feels, somehow, that is the work of a 'gross materialist', and that this detachment may reflect an attempt to apply the scientific method to the English Novel, but it does also mark a reluctance of the author to explore anything beyond the material to the detriment of the novel. The effect is flat like stage scenery; characters seem to blend into one another. Conversation, even between members of the same family, are more like a public meeting or a college debating society. Did anyone in real life ever talk like that? Polite distrust permeates the book. (The BBC2 adaptation is even worse, everybody seems caught up in a sort slow motion argument, but then one American critic did describe the whole adaptation as 'terrible'.) For a man who wrote an exploration  of the nineteenth century novel, 'The Realists', Snow seems oddly reluctant to assimilate what those masters can teach us about writing. That isn't to say that isn't a novel without some merit; it is reflective and intelligent. Sometimes quietly moving. But its real importance, I suspect, lies beyond the literary in the historical, as it offers an insight into the mindset of a generation that helped form post-war Britain.

'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' - Dune Messiah

     I don't usually issue a 'spoiler alert', as I make an effort when writing a review not to disclose too much plot information, but just enough to intrigue. However this book cannot really be discussed without revealing more than usual. You have been warned.

     Apologies for this post having taken so long: firstly lockdown has really taken it out of me and although I am functioning and not just slumped in a heap in a corner with depression motivation is something I have lost. Secondly this post, like the 'Dune' post, has been subject to endless editing as I have been trying to get to grips with what is an extraordinary piece of literary imagination. 

     'We saw our parents' nakedness; Rivers of blood will be required to cover them. Rivers of blood.'

     I've been re-reading 'Dune Messiah' by Frank Herbert, the second novel in his 'Dune' sequence - a slim intermezzo of a book between the behemoths of 'Dune' and 'Children of Dune'. Not that I would want to suggest that 'Dune Messiah' is in anyway 'light' or frivolous. It is certainly neither. This re-reading, I have to admit, has been prompted partly by the growing excitement on social media over Denis Villeneuve's new film adaptation of 'Dune' but also by a loss of direction in my reading. It was there at my bedside and I just picked it up for want of something better. I suspect 'Dune Messiah' gets called a sequel for convenience sake - I certainly did in my post about 'Dune'. However we would be wrong to do so: Herbert originally conceived the first three novels (of what would eventually be six novel cycle) as one. It was his agent who got Herbert spilt them into three worried that they would make too hefty a tome for easy reading. (Herbert speaking at UCLA 17.04.85) Certainly there are parts of 'Dune Messiah' that were written at the same time 'Dune'.

     And I must say I'm glad I did, for although at times, as I mentioned in my previous 'Dune' post, the 'Duniverse' is a very strange place at times - the climax of 'Dune Messiah' is one of the weirdest and saddest things I have yet read - this has been an intense, immersive experience. In fact it has had quite a profound effect on me, causing me not only to re-asses my attitude to the Sci-fi but causing me to loose sleep as its strange and hermetic themes swirled about my head. So much so that I changed by bedtime reading to the much duller world of Margaret Drabble and 'The Ice Age', a state-of-the-nation novel of the mid 70s. What I was really looking for was 'The Great Fortune', the first of Olivia Manning's fabulous Balkan Trilogy. (I have already the third novel in the sequence: 'Friends and Heroes'.) Anyway 'The Ice Age' has turned out to be oddly successful for a novel that is virtual all 'tell' and no 'show', and I would recommend it.

     'He remembered his earliest visions of the jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion he'd experienced. Now of course he knew visions of greater terror. He had lived with the real violence. He had seen his Fremen charged with mystical strength sweep all before him in the religious war. The jihad gained a new perspective. It was finite, of course, a brief spasm when measured against eternity, but beyond that lay horrors to overshadow anything in the past.'

     'Dune Messiah' is, I suspect, not so much read as 'Dune' and this has allowed the latter to be misinterpreted. David Lynch's film of 1984 certainly did (Why on earth did it rain at the end of the film killing off all the sandworms destroying thereby all spice production and consequently ending space travel?) and I fear that the latest cinematic adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve may well be found guilty of the same. I really cannot emphasise enough that Paul Muad'dib is not a hero. He is not as Timothee Chalamet said in a 'Vanity Fair' interview 'Think Greta Thunberg, only she's a Jedi with a diploma from Hogwarts'. (Unless, of course, he knows something about la Thunberg that we don't.) It doesn't bode well. And he is certainly not the 'Mightey-Whitey' of Noah Berlatsky's article in escapist.com.* I think it might have helped his case if Mr Berlatsky had actually done some reading in preparation. Otherwise how do you explain such a wilful misreading of the texts? Paul is not the leader of some armed liberation movement, but a mass murderer guilty of genocide on an incomprehensible scale, or else, to exonerate him a little, merely the facilitator of such a gargantuan crime:

     '[]....at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion people, sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised four hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions [] We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad.'

     The Fremen jihad was a war for the political and religious domination of the Known Universe - not a war to set themselves free from oppression, but a revenge on the rest of humanity for thousands of years of perceived subjugation. Just a niggle but it is never explained how the Jihad commences, or how the Fremen achieve such cataclysmic results. Yes, we are told that they are fanatics, but still.... Historically, the success of the Islamic/Arab conquests were in part due to the exhaustion of the two great powers of the day, the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iran, after an apocalyptic war. There is no evidence of any such civilizational fatigue in the Dune Universe, unless one counts the lack of religious belief among the elites of the Empire. My guess is that after the defeat of Shaddam IV and his Sardukar troops on Arrakis the Empire momentarily collapsed into anarchy and the Jihad grew out of Muad'dib's re-assertion of Imperial authority, but it is only speculation.

     'No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.'

     'Dune Messiah' opens twelve years after the events of 'Dune'; Muad'dib's Jihad - that 'blood-dimmed tide' - has, as we have seen, spread to nearly all the inhabited worlds; the small Arrakid city of Arakeen is now the Imperial capital and the centre of all religious life in the Empire - thousands make the Hajj, the pilgrimage, to its temples and shrines; Muad'dib's promise to 'green' the planet advances. Never has there been an Emperor as powerful as Paul Muad'dib. And yet....and yet....Arakeen still feels empty and provincial - though crammed with vulgar, bombastic monuments and surrounded by ugly monotonous suburbia that is prey to constant intrusion by the desert. And the Fremen are disillusioned (as happens so often after a revolution). There is a sense that things have taken a wrong turn. They have had their revenge on humanity, but now their lives are largely empty, devoid of meaning and direction. The Jihad failed to become the moment of re-integration with the world, as the former jihadi Farok, speaking early in the book, believed Muad'dib offered his followers. And not only Muad'dib, but, as explained in 'Dune', the Bene Gesserit have been there before him inadvertently tilling the ground in preparation for all this violence and failure when all they wanted to do was protect and promote their own. Instead of bringing liberation the jihad only furthered the alienation of the Fremen as it effectively destroyed their past in the process, leaving them suspended between that lost past and a non-existent future. In effect they merely exported Arrakid chaos to the rest of the universe. There is now a desire among the Fremen to return to ways of the desert, and towards the end of the novel we learn that the newly constructed qanats (irrigation canals) and other symbols of the new Arrakis have been sabotaged, the Golden Flower rejected. Ennui envelops and corrupts many. They are ripe for exploitation at the hands of plotters.

     And it is with the plotters, a motley crew if ever there was one, that the real weirdness steps in. In particular we are presented with two products of the Bene Teilaxu: the Guild Steersman Edric, and the face dancer Scytale (both genetically engineered mutations). Connected with the plot are two more products of the Tleilaxu; the human distrans Bijaz, (another piece of genetic manipulation) and most importantly the ghola Hayt. The other conspirators are Helen Gaius Mohaim and the Princes Irulan (both Bene Gesserit). In addition there is Korba, who like Farok we have encountered in 'Dune', a fighter from Seitch Tabr and later a Fedaykin leader and now one of the Qizara Tawfid, the priests of the new religion of Muad'dib. A long term intimate of Muad'dib then, but he and his own separate coterie of plotters are not happy either. 

     And then there is Paul Muad'dib himself that strangely disengaged prophet, complex and contradictory, conflicted and more isolated than ever: his mother, the Lady Jessica, and Gurney Halleck (one of the few survivors of the Atreides household, of any rank, to have escaped the Harkonen purge) have returned to Caladan. The estrangement between Paul and his wife Irulan has deepened, his relationship with his concubine Chani under increasing strain. He rules by personal fiat - he is a benign autocrat surrounded by a small coterie of counsellors. He refuses both a constitution and to rule as a god. And what is more Paul's prescience has become a curse rather than a gift. He has become its prisoner, unable at times to assert his own autonomy and agency. (It is not as though his prescience is 'all seeing', indeed it is partial, selective; obviously something else is at play here, most likely the unconscious. It is certainly not an objective 'sense'. Similarly I don't view the collective unconscious, as exemplified as the collective memory of the Fremen, as in anyway objective. Perhaps like memory prescience is a creative process. In the case of the Fremen we cannot rule out the influence of the hand of the Missionaria Protectiva either.) Estranged from wider society by his semi-divine powers he draws closer to his younger sister Alia. It is impossible to not feel a deep sympathy when encountering Alia, St Alia-of-the-Knife, Abomination, object of veneration. Merely a teenage girl. Prescient and fully conscious at birth. 

     With all of that established, and bubbling away nicely, we witness the arrival of an embassy from the Spacing Guild headed by steersman Edric. Among the entourage is a gift, Hayt. The ghola. Paul recognises immediately that Hayt is in fact Duncan Idaho - his friend and weapons trainer. Dead Idaho. The Idaho murdered by the Harkonens 15 yrs previously. Restored to life. Re-animated as it were. Re-heated and served. The Bene Tleilax are good at that sort of thing, manufacturing not only humans to order but other even more morally reprehensible things: war, famine, & poverty. Soon we learn that Hayt has been trained as a mentat and in Zensunni philosophy, but importantly, for the plot at least, he has no recollection of his earlier life. The gift is accepted, and a strange relationship develops between Hayt and the Atreides that only serves to further isolate them from the Fremen, who are rightly suspicious of the Tleilaxu and their 'products'. They have a particular aversion to the ghola's eyes which in common with all of his type are metal.

     Slowly the plots converge. Muad'dib looses his sight in a terrorist explosion (A small nuclear device known as a 'stoneburner' is detonated within the Imperial capital) and then his prescience. And at the climactic, melodramatic conclusion of the novel, Paul and Duncan end their exile, their occultation. Their identities restored, they become once again fully integrated human beings. And thus restored Paul walks out alone into the desert. Perhaps we are supposed to have in mind here the death of Alexander the Great at a similar age, and the occultation of T E Lawrence at the end of WWI. Unlike Indra, the slayer of Vritra, who I discussed in my 'Dune' post, Paul rejects his cosmological dharma. It is left to others to fulfil that terrible purpose. (This is for others to explore, but I do wonder if in the relationship between Paul and Duncan there is an echo (and a faint one at that) of that between Arjun and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Just a thought. Be that as it it may, Duncan can be seen as Paul's moral anchor.) 

     'Dune Messiah' has caused me reassess my attitude to Science Fiction and Fantasy writing. I still haven't changed my mind about the literary quality of both genres, but I've come to see that both fulfil important roles within the culture. It works something like this: the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason degraded the position of myth in Western Culture, echoing both the earlier Protestant Reformation, and its jihad against 'superstition' **, and British Deism. These movements tended toward dis-association, an alienation in humanity. One that industrial, mass society has exacerbated. It helped feed the growing 'Meaning Crisis'. Romanticism 'rediscovered' myth, as a means to heal the breach. Think, for instance of the work of William Blake. It, Romanticism, had perhaps a better understanding of being human than the Enlightenment. However, dis-associative culture remained and continues today in certain sections of elite culture. In the twentieth century Carl Jung attempted to end the crisis in meaning by attempting to re-incorporate myth into what was essentially a new metaphysics. Later other thinkers have attempted the same: Joseph Campbell being a notable example whose cultural influence has been immense. It was Campbell, I believe, who pointed out that myth is the mirror of the self. In our own time both Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke are attempting the same. I believe that both Sci-fi and fantasy are popular and 'spontaneous' attempts, largely outside elite culture and the academy, to heal that breach, to fill the vacuum created by Modernity. They are not therefore to be dismissed. Specifically I've come to see the 'Dune' sequence, in all it richness and complexity, to be very cultural important. It speaks to our time. I begin to wonder if the sequence is an extended metaphor for the Pax Americana.

*   Berlatsky is not alone in this. See Haifa Mahabir's essay 'Dune and Orientalism' on the 'Munitions of War' website. I'm not entirely sure whether she has read 'Dune' or not. I think not though.

** I've come to take the view that the Reformation in its attack on the sort of customs, such as ashing or the production of religious art, and which are common to other religions, as a form of de-naturing. Sadly attempts to re-nature ourselves, such as Anglo-Catholicism, have largely failed by being largely prescriptive and self-conscious, lacking in spontaneity (being overly concerned with the correct externals).

'Die Nibelungen'

      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

Producer:                Erich Pommer
Director:                  Fritz Lang
Cinematographer:  Carl Hoffman, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann