Frtiz Lang's Die Nibelungen xpost

[rich...@gmail.com]

One of the films that perhaps bears most closely on at least the
visual
aspects of Wagner's Ring, as well as elements of the original Norse
myths, is
Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, a 1924 film masterpiece of almost 5 and
a half
hours, in two parts (Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge). It is a
completely
enthralling piece of drama, is available (or at least was a while
back) on Kino
Video, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone with an interest in
Wagner,
theatrical production, or any of the many issues which ‘cross’ with
Wagner
and his music would not find the film mesmerizing. The film heavily
influenced
many later filmmakers, not least Eisenstein (there are some direct
quotes from
it in his later work, particularly Alexander Nevsky, but also in Ivan
the
Terrible). The film comes with an excellent essay by Jan-Christopher
Horuk,
which has been very helpful for me in filling in some of the history.
You can
find some pictures of the film and an essay I don't entirely agree
with here

http://www.michaelorgan.org.au/nibel.html

although unfortunately the pictures are colorized, but there are
several
excerpts from the film on You Tube.

The film was shot by Lang based on a script written by his then-wife
Thea
von Harbou. Although Lang dithered for about half a year after the
Nazi
takeover, he ultimately fled Germany; his wife had apparently divorced
him a
year earlier, around the time when she joined the Party, and she was
an
absolute true believer in the cause, and in the Fuhrerprinzip. The
film itself,
which was apparently one of the great favorites of both Hitler and
Goebbels,
is dedicated to The German People, and while some have tried to
distinguish
Lang’s filming techniques as being subversive of the authoritarian
message of
von Harbou’s text, such attempt is really a reconstruction of what is
not
there. The film was in fact re-released by UFA in 1933, just after the
Nazi
takeover, with new spoken dialogue (which one would love to be able
to
hear!!) and using the music of Wagner (!!!) instead of the original
score by
Gottfried Huppertz (which is used in this version), and so I don’t
believe that
Lang’s contribution, however interesting in terms of some narrative
strategies,
would have been seen as detracting from or commenting critically on
the real
message of the work. I certainly would be curious about how Wagner’s
music
would have been used. The performances are spectacular (in particular,
the
Brunhild, Hanna Ralph, gives, a performance of the intensity of
Falconetti in
The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Dreyer) and the use of advanced
filming
techniques eye-popping and imitated, but not to be equaled, for many
years
afterwards.

The story obviously is an amalgam of the Niebelung myth, as selected
and
understood by von Harbou, with elements of Wagnerism and the
political
issues of the Threat from the East. Although Wagner obviously drew
from,
but hardly copied, any one myth or source, there are any number of
visual
moments in the film which seem to clearly incorporate anachronistic
references to the Ring Cycle, and I suspect must have been recognized
by
Lang and von Harbou, that their use of certain motifs would bring the
Ring into
better alignment with the ideology of the Niebelungenlied and the
politics
which they wished to draw from the myth (although NOT with Naziism,
which
barely existed at the time the film was made, and which they would not
have
been thinking of); it should be noted that Lang, who was still in
Germany at
the time of its re-release, stongly objected to the use of Wagner's
music, for
reasons I am sure of.

To name just two instances, the first glance we see of Brunhild is
clearly
meant to hearken to the Wagner equivalent, for example, and when
Kriemhild,
who had married Siegfried, confronts Hagen with his murder of her
husband,
her hand rises to point at him in a way, at the end of Part I, which
is quoted
once again very directly in Part II, and has to call to mind the dead
Siegfried
raising his hand in the last act of Gotterdammerung. The mise-en-scene
is so
striking that in certain scenes, most particularly some of the very
spare and
modernistic scenes in the Chapel of the Burgundians in Part I, you can
see
prefigurements, I think, of some of the design approaches taken at
Bayreuth
after the Second World War. The dragon simply has to be seen, so that
you
know what you are missing in every other dragon that you have
enountered in
the Ring (and those you haven’t seen on stage).

While the film is in no way anti-Semitic, it is a paen (remember, this
is 1924 -
it is produced at the height of Weimer, and just around the time of
the Beer
Hall Putsch) to the most mystical and race-superior sense of the
romanticized
Volk as represented by their knightly nobility, and it follows, in
broad outline,
the Niebelunglied, from Siegfried‘s journey to the Burgundians, to
his murder
by Hagen and, ultimately, a battle of the Burgundians (who were
understood
by the Germans as meaning ‘them’) against Attila and the Huns. While
you can
see, for example, in the “African’ safari movies of the first part of
the century
that Africans were routinely portrayed as subhuman, and at best
children,
the “Huns” are portrayed as insects (literally) who, if given a
chance, will
swarm up from under the earth to vanquish European nobility.

One can see how Hitler and Goebbels would have felt the film
important
inspiration for the Third Reich. It dignified loyalty to the leader
above all else,
a sentiment quite popular after the First World War (although in the
film, as in
the Niebelungenlied, such loyalty led to the ultimate destruction of
the
Burgundians, and it is sobering to see the destruction by fire of the
hall in
which the Burgundians are huddled against the Huns against the
scorched
earth policy of the Reich). At the same time, the role of women in
the film
(and I suppose in the Niebelungenlied) is a very tortured one; both of
the lead
women, Brunhild and Kriemhild, are in their own ways supremely
destructive to
the societies in which they live (Brunhild with the Burgundian, and
Kriemhild in
the Hun society, and also as a traitor to the Burgundian code of male
loyalty),
and there is none of the ennobled womanhood which was so important to
Wagner. In fact, the Nazi society was almost entirely male-dominated,
the
role of women strictly subordinated (even when they were artists), and
one
can imagine that this most have seemed to the Party a complete
vindication
of its policies and approach.

A brilliant piece of film-making, with echoes and lights to throw on
physical
productions of the Ring, and a fascinating alignment of the myths, the
operas,
and the political situation of post First World War Germany.