Die Nibelungen (1924)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 291 mins.
Alt: "Die Nibelungen: Siegfried" and "Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache"


The legacy of Die Nibelungen is a complicated one, ultimately apropos for its epic size, its mythic origins, and the accolades bestowed on it by fascists. It is one of the most ambitious silent films ever made — a two-part adaptation of a German myth running nearly five hours in length that was two years in the making by a veritable who's-who of Weimar film production. At its time it was the crown jewel from Ufa studios, which was intent on rivaling America as the cinematic powerhouse of the world. And it is for the most part a muscular film, particularly its astounding first half, even if its second half is often as arduous for the audience to endure as it is for the characters on the screen.

Director Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, his German-era screenwriting collaborator and wife, adapted the screenplay from a 13th-century Norse epic poem called "Nibelungenlied," the love story of a prince named Siegfried who wants to woo Kriemhild, the sister to a neighboring king, and her eventual vengeance of his murder. It is a tale of both fantasy and brutal reality. In the first part, as Siegfried is on his way to Worms to earn Kriemhild's heart, he slays a dragon and attains invulnerability after bathing in its blood (save one pesky spot), defeats evil dwarfs and attains riches, and finally helps the king win the love of the queen of Iceland so as he can win the love of Kriemhild. But the Icelandic queen's growing skepticism leads her to call for Siegfried's murder, and after discovering his weak spot, she orders the hit and draws the wrath of Kriemhild, who seeks to avenge his death.

To say this is not really to dispel too much of the film's plot, at least as far as it's understood that the story is abundantly familiar — Richard Wagner adapted the legend for a four-part opera between 1869 and 1874, which has since become one of opera's most famous stories. (It was prominently parodied by Chuck Jones in "What's Opera, Doc?") To watch Die Nibelungen correctly is to focus on the production itself, the thrill of the fights and the mysticism of the fantasy, to marvel at Lang's sublime craftsmanship when it is put on display. Perhaps more than any film Lang had made to this point (and soon to be surpassed by his next, Metropolis), Die Nibelungen is visually arresting. In all contemporary respects, the story takes a backseat to the nuts and bolts of cinema.

And yet ironically, it is the story that has made Die Nibelungen a component of world history. It carries some dubious historical baggage in the extent that it was beloved by German fascists; both Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, loved it for its projection of unabashed nationalism, for the courage and dominance of the German people, for the way the characters exhibit loyalty against reason. Die Nibelungen is dedicated "for the German people," and von Harbou — whose marriage with Lang ended when he fled Germany in the rise of Nazism and she, a national socialist, remained to work for the party — adjusted certain elements of the original myth in her screenplay to give the Nordic characters a superhuman quality, particularly in the second half, where a small band of men bravely fight the Huns although they are greatly outnumbered. Some, including Siegfried Kracauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler, consider Die Nibelungen to be "a key film in the nationalist uprising" primarily through its emphasis on the notion of Fate (a Langian leitmotif — twisted, it seems, beyond its auteur's original intent) and its narrowly tailored movement that sends all its abstract and mercurial elements — love, hatred, jealousy, betrayal, full-scale revenge, deadly loyalty — to a simmering culmination. As scholar Jan-Christopher Horak points out, it is no coincidence that Siegfried, the film's first half, was re-released in 1933 with a spoken prologue and a "Wagnerian soundtrack" only weeks after Ufa had fired all of its Jewish employees.

The history is so transfixing, I think, because what we know about Lang suggests this was not his intention, even if von Harbou's proto-fascism was. Given our understanding of Lang and von Harbou's world views, it's impossible not to regard the first half, Siegfried, as his and the second half, Kriemhilds Rache ("Kriemhild's Revenge"), as hers. Siegfried is far more mystical, with the inclusion of the dragon, the dwarfs, and multiple special effects; it more closely mirrors the dominant expressionism of its time, and tracks closer to the otherworldliness brought to life in Lang's Der Müde Tod in 1921. It is also the more austere of the two halves, more devoted to the careful set up of its tragedy. Kriemhilds Rache — in which Kriemhild moves to the far east, marries Atilla the Hun and plots her cold and implacable revenge against those who have done her wrong — is looser, messier, and with its principal interior sets, less interested in crafting a unique kingdom. From start to finish, Kriemhilds Rache is a hard slog, weighed down by the way it coils over and over on itself as it awaits the barbaric explosion at the end, which hardly proves satisfying after a two-and-a-half-hour wait.

It is the contention of some critics (including this one) that Lang's visual style, at least in Siegfried, largely undermines whatever fiery nationalism can be teased from van Harbou's script. More effective than any nationalist sensation is the overwhelming sense of fatalism that pervades Lang's oeuvre, this time brought to life on a gigantic and ancient scale. Lang's films always exhibit his geometric peculiarities, with symmetrical framing and painterly attention to the austere composition. For Siegfried, the camera works as a force of predestination: elements are so balanced that collapse seems inevitable. Scene to scene, there is an unmistakably palpable physicality, even if what could be touched never existed. Ufa, the studio, and Erich Pommer, the producer, gave Lang a gargantuan budget for 1924, and it shows. The dragon Siegfried slays, while somewhat silly in contemporary contexts, was nonetheless a feat of peerless puppetry, sixty feet long and controlled by no less than seventeen people. For all the theorizing that von Harbou and her nationalist cohorts saw Die Niebelungen as a torrential force in German uprising, Lang seems to capture an alternative sensation: suspension as an act of comfort, the awareness of anticipated implosion merely waiting out in the distance. If some historians believe Hitler, Goebbels, and others saw Die Nibelungen to presage the rise of the Übermensch, there's an equally compelling argument to be made that Lang presaged the downfall before it had even risen.

A final assessment is difficult because Siegfried and Kriemhilds Rache are two significantly unequal halves. Although they belong together, they were released two months apart and stand well separately, as long as the viewer enters with a working knowledge of the myth. Luckily, Siegfried is the first and better of the two (one of Lang's best silent films, actually), and not entirely dependent on Kriemhilds Rache to prove itself as a remarkable cinematic experience. But the total effect of Die Nibelungen is brought down by the unsatisfying qualities of Kriemhilds Rache, qualities that feel intentionally drawn to differentiate the two in style and theme but ultimately are inferior to Siegfried so that the contrast is perhaps too starkly drawn. As unfair as it is (or at least as much of a cheat as it is) to split the film in half when technically it is one large whole, it would be equally unfair to knock down the final grade of the film and do a disservice to its first part at the sake of its second. The film overall is recommended for its place in expressionism and the history of cinema, as well as being a crucial part of Lang's filmography. Siegfried is a must-see; but I excuse you from the Kriemhilds Rache if you're not interested.

Siegfried — ★★★★½
Kriemhilds Rache — ★★★

Continue reading »

Screen Savour Now Available on Twitter

At the sage advice of my tech-savvy wife, and after Twitter proved itself to be indispensable for communication in the chaos of Iran's fraudulent election (thus not the sheer fad I originally envisioned), I have brought Screen Savour to Twitter.

What you'll get (besides spelled out words and proper punctuation) are notices when I have posted a new review or a preview of what might be upcoming; links to interesting film-related articles; brief thoughts on the film world and other reverie; and conversations with fellow film bloggers.

If you're on Twitter or looking for a reason to join, come find me.

Continue reading »

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 270 mins.
alt: "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler"


Those with the slightest exposure to Fritz Lang typically identify him through his three M's: Metropolis, M (naturally), and Mabuse. The last, to be precise, is Dr. Mabuse, the literary creation of novelist Norbert Jacques, whose thriller about the morally bankrupt criminal psychologist became a best-seller in Europe between the world wars. The timing and location of his appearance, in the pulsing boom of modernism on a continent already ravaged and unknowingly prepping itself for another leveling, is important, particularly in the connection to Lang. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a classically lovable villain — a brilliant con artist who delights with disguises and hypnosis for selfish gains.

Lang made three Mabuse films, beginning in 1922 with this silent epic, whose title translates to "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler." The second film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), is generally regarded as the best, but der Spieler is important; granted, that importance translates more into its contributions to German cinema and Lang's career, as well as its influences on other directors, than for its sheer entertainment. The story, adapted by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, is more than a detective chasing Mabuse, who stalks the already seedy underworld and steals forthrightly from those at gambling tables through his use of hypnosis. It is a venture into Langian territory as an exploration of an amoral society and its general lack of salvation (insanity, it seems, proves to be an unsettling refuge for characters). It is also a question in free will and self-control; Mabuse's preferred method is the cracking open of another's psyche and controlling that person from the inside — an imperfect mode of manipulation, of course, but horrifying in its success rate.

Though actually one film, Dr. Mabuse was originally exhibited in two parts and continues to presented as such. That break is imperative for the film's enjoyment, primarily because its greatest liability is its slowness and sparsity. Size is by no means a harbinger of headache; in the sense that Dr. Mabuse upholds its commitment to the aforementioned themes and Lang's direction sustains an interest in the characters and their surroundings, the film is a success. But the thrilling moments — even the quieter moments that nonetheless can amaze — are too far apart and the story is stretched too thin to fill the film's four-plus-hour running length. The first half, perhaps ineluctably, proves to be the better half if only because the introduction of Mabuse is accompanied by self-activating mystery. The second half is more a brass-tacks police procedural and upper-class critique, with more chases and more Mabuse (this time, typically unmasked), but it lacks the general psychological depth that is introduced in the first half. The unevenness of the story is countered well by the even-handed direction from Lang. Dr. Mabuse lacks the visual surprises of Der Müde Tod, but the first half is peppered with optical delights, including a mesmerizing camera technique for a moment when Mabuse is seducing a victim under hypnosis and the lens slightly zooms toward his face while the rest of the scene fades to black, his seemingly disembodied glowing white head floating in the middle of the frame.

For contemporary lasting power, Dr. Mabuse has influence on its side. In some circles, it is referred to as the first film noir, which is a cinematic term I am dutifully careful not to overuse (I suppose you can draw the lines of your dictionary wherever you'd like). It's evident that this sort of film clearly presages the film noir style and many of the police films that would come after it; but I would wager that its more important influence, or certainly it's more apt influence, would be its lasting effect on Alfred Hitchcock, who as a young British man earned a crash course in filmmaking in Weimar Germany where he drew title cards and observed F.W. Murnau. Hitchcock claimed Lang's previous film, Der Müde Tod, as among his favorites, and Dr. Mabuse contains numerous elements that would become fundamentals in the Hitchcockian aesthetic, including: police procedural elements, the wry humor underlying or undercutting more serious moments, and the quasi-espionage angle of Dr. Mabuse sneaking around to commit his psychological crimes. The ending, and this isn't giving it away, comes down to a shoot-out the likes of which would be mimicked by Hitchcock in his 1934 career-launching classic, The Man Who Knew Too Much. And though this first Mabuse film is perhaps too unwieldy to be an unqualified success, Lang, like those he influenced, would learn later to crystallize his own filmmaking techniques and thematic explorations into condensed packages of compelling drama.

Continue reading »

Der Müde Tod (1921)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 114 mins.
Alt: "Destiny"


For all intents and purposes, Fritz Lang's career begins here, with 1921's Der Müde Tod, released in the U.K. as "Destiny." In the United States, it found itself with different English translations — "Between Two Worlds" and its literal translation, "The Weary Death" — but none has stuck quite as well as "Destiny." Looking back over Lang's entire career, it's not difficult to see why: whereas Lang's previous film, the adventure serial Die Spinnen, is breezy and fun, Der Müde Tod sets course for a career of fatalism and determinism, the impending doom (and potentially subsequent resignation) captured by the eventual understanding of the inescapable. The arch-rival of the protagonist in this film is the personification of Death, and although people have tried for thousands of years to cheat him, there has been headway only in prolonging the inevitable.

This is one of the earliest examples of great expressionistic German filmmaking, shy of masterpiece status (like many of the early ones) but enthralling nonetheless. F.W. Murnau cited it as an influence, particularly on The Last Laugh; no less than Alfred Hitchcock would count it among his all-time favorites, and Luis Buñuel noted its fantastical nature helped draw him into film. I've not heard any words on Ingmar Bergman's thoughts on it, but the influence seems too striking to be unavoidable, even if it's merely tangential.

The story of Der Müde Tod, co-written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, is the story of cycles, fantasy, and fable. While riding into a small town in what appears to be nineteenth-century Germany, a young woman (Lil Dagover) and a young man (Walter Janssen) encounter a mysterious man (Bernard Goetzke). His presence and purpose soon become quite evident when he, later revealed to be Death, abducts the young man into the afterlife — seen here as a large windowless, doorless stone wall that keeps the living out while the spirit of the dead pass through. The woman, determined to retrieve her fiance, manages to slip the bounds of the wall and is given a brief tour of the ephemeral backstage of life by Death. She beseeches him to let her have her love again, and he strikes a deal: she will have three chances, in different eras and locales, to save a man (always played by Janssen, with Goetzke lurching in the background) who is destined to die. If she can merely save one of these men, she will get her own fiance back.

Like the best silent cinema, the story is not simplistic for the sake of being purely simple. The moral and narrative stakes are always higher in silence — extreme cases of life and death, love and loss, etc. — which either can allow the story to synthesize quietly with the art or create a situation where the story overwhelms the technical elements. It is a testament to Lang's talent that this early in his career he was capable of doing the former and doing it well. Although he had been unable to direct The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari due to other obligations, he wisely hired that film's production team (Walter Röhrig, Walter Reimann, and Herrmann Warm) to help bring to life the fantasy world of Der Müde Tod (which is not nearly as surreal or geometric as Caligari's, and instead stays closer to embellished visions of ethnic nations) to life. The film features five primarily exotic locations: first, the world of nineteenth century Germany and the castle of Death; then, as the young woman attempts to save men in order to save her own fiance, she is transported to Persia, circa One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; the Renaissance courts of Italy; and a far eastern trip to ancient China.

The cumulative appeal is broad. Like the best of Lang's films, Der Müde Tod is a visual exploration of the space within the lens, which stands as a filmic metaphor for our own limits and boundaries in life. The acting is slightly overworked, but there is balance from Lang in maintaining our interest in both the characters and their story and the ornamentation of the sets and the haunting composition. The special effects hold up even ninety years later. They are used strategically and infrequently so as to dazzle: transformations, materializations, a flying carpet, a horse riding in the sky, a burning home, etc., all lend power and mystery to the design. The effects were trailblazing enough by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who delivered the greatest argument in favor of Der Müde Tod through his fear of it. He purchased the rights to its distribution in America so he could effectively keep it from the public and stash it in cinematic limbo while he and Raoul Walsh co-opted many of the special effects for The Thief of Bagdad, a rewarding movie in its own right but not as powerful as Lang's. It's difficult to be upset with Fairbanks, however; they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Continue reading »

Die Spinnen (1919-1920)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / Two parts, 124 mins.
Alt: "The Spiders"


The earliest surviving film from Fritz Lang (that we know of, at least) is his third, Die Spinnen, a two-part adventure serial released between 1919 and 1920 known commonly as The Spiders. It is a relatively simple film, bare-bones in its plot and very action oriented, and the influence from the already growing genre of the American western and from France's serial master Louis Feuillade are quite clear in the sense that "The Spiders" — a band of outlaws looking to reap treasure for themselves — are vaguely reminiscent of Feuillade's criminals in Les Vampires. Yet outside of the idea of Lang directing an uncharacteristically airy and chipper adventure serial, there's not much here to chew on.

The hero of the serial — which is divided into "The Golden Sea" and "The Diamond Ship" — is Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), a wealthy and cavalier sportsman. He acquires a bottle found at sea that proclaims the possibility of Inca treasure in first episode and a powerful diamond in the second, and must race with The Spiders, led by Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) to be the first to reach the objects of their desire. What Hoog and The Spiders are searching for, of course, essentially doesn't matter; Lang, the film's screenwriter as well, happily employs the full force of the "Macguffin" practically a decade before Hitchcock. The plot serves only as a way to get characters from one exotic locale, or one fabulously decorated interior, to another — to put characters on trains, on boats, on balloons, on rocks, and in caves; to introduce kidnapping, espionage, gun-fights, and horse races; and to evoke as greatly as possible a sense of extravagance. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of things, but they're underdeveloped and occasionally gratuitous. The sense of exoticism linked to theme hadn't yet been developed in Lang's storytelling.

It should be of interest to those who regularly muse what might have been that Lang turned down The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to make The Spiders, which was originally envisioned to be a four-part series. It wouldn't be fair to suggest it was a bad career move for Lang, as he's obviously earned his own place in the pantheon through films much better than The Spiders, which is messy and unfocused and not as tight as it could be. The first installment ("The Golden Sea") is the better of the two, but both have soft strengths: lavish sets designed by Hermann Warm and above-average camerawork from the great cinematographer Karl Freund in one of his earliest films. There aren't many Lang fingerprints here, but The Spiders functions as a moderate thriller in spite of its insubstantial script. I wouldn't recommend it for attention outside the outlaw-ish band of Lang completists.

Continue reading »

Best Films of 2002

My top ten list for Counting Down the Zeroes is now up at Film for the Soul. In a few days it'll be cross-posted here.

Continue reading »

URL Note

Due to a glitch in the Google/Blogger system, any screensavour.blogspot.com URL isn't currently connecting in Internet Explorer or Safari and is prompting those with Firefox to proceed to an unprotected page.

If this is affecting your reading of Screen Savour, my apologies. Although I have never given it much thought, I've used two different URLs — both screensavour.blogspot.com and screensavour.net — for many of my in-site links; before the glitch, re-direction was not a problem. I'm doing my best to correct them all to screensavour.net where applicable.

Thanks.

Continue reading »

Broken Blossoms (1919)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 90 mins.


As a text, Broken Blossoms is perhaps D.W. Griffith's most rewarding film to experience. He dabbles in themes ranging from the large and complicated to the delicate and subtle (or as subtle as Griffith is capable of being), and combines those themes with Griffith's advanced approach to cinematic engineering. It is the story of two neglected souls — an adopted girl with a brutalizing father; a Chinese immigrant who experiences London for all its foggy demoralization — who have crossed paths numerous times before but finally come together and burst outward with the energy of mutual adoration. As a film, it is a tip toward greatness, tarnished if slightly by its stereotyping propensities and occasional mawkishness.

The film is a study of triumvirate of characters. Cheng (Richard Barthelmess) is leaving China for England to become an entrepreneur and bring the tenets of Buddhism — or, as Griffith seems to see it, eastern Christianity — to the English. He has fallen in love with a young girl named Lucy (Lillian Gish) from afar, but due to constraints on him from the culture and constraints he has put himself, almost never is close enough to say anything meaningful to her. She is a resident of a violent household, where her adoptive father, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), is a drunken boxer who regularly turns to violence against her when he is upset. It is typical silent melodrama, though enriched by Griffith's small storytelling flourishes along the way (and a gorgeous array of expensive sets). He dips into nonlinear narration early on by allowing all three characters to have cutaways depicting scenes of thought — Cheng, depressed and alone in England thinking about life back in China; Lucy, reflecting on a married woman who warns her to avoid marriage unless she wants a lazy husband and bratty children and on prostitutes who warn her away casual relationships; and Burrows, given a moment of victory in the ring.

As with the rest of Griffith's works, Broken Blossoms is a study in comparisons and contrasts: masculine versus feminine, poverty versus wealth, peace versus violence, East versus West. Such dichotomies, often easy to glean from first impression, make the engine of silent drama churn more fluidly. The appeal of Broken Blossoms as a text exists in the way Griffith uses such contrasts and applies to the triangle of characters: Cheng reflects both in Lucy and Burrows, for example (and Lucy and Burrows each reflect in the two they are not). We immediately sense the differences between war in Burrows and tranquility in Cheng, who treat Lucy in categorically opposite ways, and what is even clearer is the way in which Burrows's ignorance will lead to certain doom for all involved. More interesting, however, is the subset meditation on masculinity and femininity viewed through the lens of war and peace, a recurring contrariety in Griffith's work, most notably — and explosively — in The Birth of a Nation. In this work it is not as explosive, but neither is particularly subtle. Cheng and Lucy draw visual likeness in their perpetual hunches, a posture in Gish's acting to reflect her submission to Burrows and her despondency in all aspects of life, and a posture in Barthelmess's acting that reflects a similar hopelessness and, more awkwardly, a cultural stereotype; Burrows, meanwhile, stands erect and barrel-chested, both at home and in the ring.

The masculine/feminine contrast is no more apparent than in the cross-cutting sequence between Burrows's boxing fight and Lucy's perceived threat of Cheng attacking her. Burrows finds out through a compatriot that Lucy is convalescing at Cheng's shop, but rather than leave his boxing match he sticks around to complete it before going to "save" her. Meanwhile, we constantly suspect Cheng will force himself onto Lucy (the film instructs us to read it as such, given its inherent xenophobia and its previous portrayals of male characters), but he never does. He is quick to act, quicker than Burrows in many ways; when he realizes Burrows has taken Lucy from his shop back to their home, there is no hesitation on Cheng's part to save her, as there was with Burrows earlier. Griffith's ultimate view of masculinity has less to do with the strength and power embodied in the male figure than it does with the strength and power to restrain oneself and act in an appropriate and timely manner when needed. (It should be noted, however, that the source of such restraint is spurious; it's not only the fact that a real man wouldn't force his way with a woman, but that a Chinese man couldn't be portrayed actually giving such love to a white woman. The only way such love would be possible would be in the metaphoric image that opens and closes the film, silhouettes of overlapping boats against the harbor. More on that in a moment.)

Gish is a peculiar actress, no more evident than her work in Broken Blossoms. Her performance is at once overwrought but highly effective, a sort of expressionistic acting that occurs at the edges of realism. When she and Griffith decide to portray Lucy as so unhappy that she can barely smile and must force her muscles upward with his fingertips to create the illusion of happiness, it borders on the overdone. And yet, the moment she willfully and authentically smiles later is affecting, nearly erasing what felt too stagy earlier. The emotion meant to be interpreted through her posture is almost too evident, and her earlier moments of fear (coupled with the occasionally sensational inter-title cards) are enough to draw suspicion; but again, near the film's end when Burrows's threats against her are deadly serious, a look of fear washes over her face that cannot be taken in any other way but true. If she hadn't made you afraid for her life in the film's first act, by its third she's become striking and convincing. Her acting is somewhere in between the laconic approach of Barthelmess and the fiery approach of Crisp, exemplifying her troubled state of mind.

Historians often label Broken Blossoms as perhaps cinema's first interracial love story, a definition that works as long as you acknowledge the lovers on screen are both of the same race. Of course, a Caucasian playing an Asian character was customary (though not essential), and continued long into the era of sound. "Yellow face" — which consists of a silken wardrobe, a straw conical hat, and eye-squinting — is not nearly as distracting as the horrendous black face in The Birth of a Nation. because it is not objectively racist, as it was with the ignorant and vicious portrayals in Birth, although surely Griffith and Barthelmess take considerable advantage of cultural stereotypes. (The line might seem arbitrary, but there is a distinguishable difference in the films' attitudes.) Barthelmess, though white, is not ineffective in his portrayal of Cheng. The exterior might be poorly and lazily channeled, but the character's interior struggle with loneliness and fear should be lauded. Still, when Barthelmess is given a close-up, the film unavoidably showcases the ersatz nature of the actor and subtracts from what could be a more organic narrative. We can be generous and grant the film this as a result of its time and place, but assessing art is always a balance between what it meant upon its debut and what it still means today; it might not have raised many eyebrows then, but today it does, and should appropriately be considered a flaw.

I've held back comparison to Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat until the end. In a way the films are so different it seems almost unfair to draw a comparison, except to elucidate the flaws of Broken Blossoms by way of suggesting DeMille's is better — or at least has aged better, due to its own innovations and emphasis on avoiding the pitfalls of silent melodrama by channeling genuine subtlety. DeMille's film is not an innocent bystander, and is indeed a product of the 1910s in the way that it doesn't steer clear of possible xenophobic interpretations. But its thematic transgressions are ultimately less than Griffith's. DeMille has an Asian actor (the grand Sessue Hayakawa) playing an Asian character, and realizing the potential theatricality of his story, opted to hew as close as possible to subtlety. As a result, DeMille's film is self-sustaining, playing as well outside of context as within, and that's something that can't quite be said for Griffith's film. Compared to his other works, Broken Blossoms does move in that direction to, but properly put into context of other films, it is still guilty of superficiality and few editorial decisions that draw inessential attention to its production. But in its multiplicity and push toward a subdued narrative and reined thematics, Broken Blossoms proves itself to be perhaps the top work in Griffith's canon.

Continue reading »

The Blue Bird (1918)

d. Maurice Tourneur / USA / 81 mins.


Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird rests on the cinematic palette as some sweet and twisted hybrid of German expressionism and The Wizard of Oz — all the more impressive because it would two more years before the lead-off jewel in the expressionist canon, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, would find its way to America. L. Frank Baum's novel and its many filmic adaptations had already been percolating through American culture for almost two decades, but to compare Maurice Maeterlinck's fine stage play and Tourneur's equally fine film to Baum's creation is ultimately a bit unfair to both. True, both are stories of children whisked away to magical realms and searching for something; but if Baum's is a journey about finding yourself and returning home, then Maeterlinck's allegory of children with a home searching for "the Bluebird of Happiness" to make such a life bearable is incrementally more sinister. If the most sublime incarnation of The Wizard of Oz is Victor Fleming's lavish Technicolor vision as a reflection on the dream-like material at hand, then Tourneur's shadowy, unsettling silent vision of The Blue Bird must be noted for the way it suits its material with equal metaphoric faithfulness and, though less achieved, provides an enjoyable experience.

The pursuit begins when two young children, named Tyltyl (Robin Macdougall) and Mytyl (Tula Belle), are visited by the fairy Berylune (Lillian Cook), who accompanies them on a journey into wondrous lands to find the "the bluebird of happiness," but as with many journeys, it will not be until the end that the children realize what they've traveled for and why their views on life will perhaps not be the same. Along the way they are accompanied by their (now anthropomorphic) dog and cat, portrayed rather effectively by men in transparent costumes who smoothly scamper on all-fours, and by the incarnations of elements like Fire and Water.

The special effects here, if one can call them such, are inspiring. Equipped with only physical materials (which are used to create striking angular sets and loose, simplistic costumes that evoke the story's origins in the theater) and a knowledge of celluloid, Tourneur pulls off a distinctive world positioned with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. No doubt Tourneur was heavily influenced by the cinema of Georges Méliès, where strategic cuts could make people appear and disappear from and into thin air; overlay images to create ghostly amalgams; and blend the real and the artificial into a gimmicky sort of cinematic pleasure. In the sense that they are conducted with the same skill as Melies they are tricks, but in the sense that enrich the story with child-like wonder they are successful bursts of brilliance. To those unacquainted Maeterlinck's play, it may seem as if Tourneur waits to reveal these special effects. It is fifteen minutes before a sense of fantasy even creeps in.

Contrast this to something like Snow White — the Famous Players Company production from 1916 — which all but erases its sense of wonder by spoiling the entire opening through an image (completely unrelated to the film, it should be noted) of Santa Claus leaving toys. Realism as a device, particularly in the faces and emotions of the young children who are our central characters, is treated with as much deference as fantasy, which is why this adaptation works well in the end. In what surely must be chalked up to accident, there is a blanketing effect of the silence — it suppresses favoritism, allows the children to exist as captivating characters and allows the fantastic sets, costumes, and characters to come to life with the delight of youthful imagination and the sheer terror of adult knowledge.

Continue reading »

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 187 mins.
Click here to read my 2008 review of this film.


I feel compelled to revisit Griffith's The Birth of a Nation for four reasons:

1) I am curious if my saturation in a summer of silent cinema has fundamentally changed the way I read this film — that is, if a film that struck me one way with a previously limited exposure to silent drama will strike me differently after a broadening of said exposure.

2) The title has come up in numerous reviews of silent films in the last few weeks, often in contrast (i.e., to DeMille's The Cheat); but the more I've thought about the film, the less its visuals come back to me and the more I feel myself inflating its technical aspects into pure abstraction. A revisit is thus necessary to hit the refresh button on my brain.

3) James Agee, who I have been re-reading under the prompt of the recent Movie Book meme. I respect Agee, and often disagree with him, but it felt nearly impossible to resist a wade back into the fray after reading Agee's eulogy in The Nation upon Griffith's death in 1948: "This was the one time in movie history that a man of great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. The Birth of a Nation is equal with Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, Whitman's war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily as 'the greatest'—whatever that means—but as the one great epic, tragic film." It's hard to resist the simple act of re-watching a film with writing like that.

4) Because we are enjoined by the philosophies of criticism to wrestle with tough films, to meditate on them and revisit them from time to time as we see fit, the way any other thinker struggles with content and form. In the movies, there is no bigger wild beast for a film critic to wrangle than The Birth of a Nation.

Allow me to begin by turning to the crux of my August 2008 review of the film, which asked, its virulent racism and white supremacy aside, whether Griffith's work is a fundamentally great movie:

The ultimate answer is: not by a long shot. The adjective "well-made" can only be applied to the strictest technical elements. The camerawork during the battle sequences is powerful and remarkably fluid, and the cuts are sharp throughout. Griffith also plays with light in ways that were wholly unique; the captured landscape is as haunting as the ghostly photography that came out of the war. But when the film is broken down into pacing, plot, characters, etc. — the hallmarks of any good movie — "well-made" doesn't even begin to describe The Birth of a Nation. At 190 bloated minutes, it's entirely too long (the second half containing the most egregious episodes of racism, too). Most of its characters are abstract and non-emotive (the result of a sagging story). Like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, it is a film that has eclipsed its original intent (to entertain) and has become a stolid artifact of film history. Rendering a verdict might involve more a struggle if the film was consistently entertaining, tightly edited, and robust in its story.

Where to begin with myself? I suppose the best place would be a concession that my feelings of the film have improved; certainly not to Agee-levels (I doubt I shall ever declare this film a masterpiece), but I would be remiss to say "not by a long shot" again. My second viewing of the film within a year (my third viewing overall) marked my most appreciative attitude toward it yet. I have a hunch that this might actually prove itself to be a criticism plateau, however; many of the elements I praised in my original review — the camerawork and the editing, primarily — continue to be the elements I most revere; some of what I disliked, namely the characters and the approach to the plot, fared better at times during this screening; and what I disliked the most about it — the pacing, theme, and point-of-view — will be forever lost on me. I still find The Birth of a Nation at the least a half-hour too long, and the pacing in the first halves of both sections is problematically sluggish (it makes it difficult to get into the film at first and makes the mid-section lag).

So why was there an improvement? I'm not too sure, but one of the surprising aspects of this viewing was that in many ways, and as surprising as this may be, The Birth of a Nation works better when its racism is accepted as a foregone conclusion. Certainly that does not mean an endorsement of such abhorrent material (more on that in a moment), but my viewing of the film opened when I basically wrote off the second half as nonsensical, insulting rubbish. A typical reading of The Birth of a Nation leads the audience to focus more on formal mechanics in the first half — which includes an introduction of the characters and plot; the Civil War; the Lincoln assassination; and the launch of an shaky Reconstruction — than in the second half, which largely concerns itself with channeling fear, formalizing xenophobia, and fabricating a heroic visage for the Ku Klux Klan. This offensive content rages thunderously and drowns out clearer examples of Griffith's contributions to film grammar. In reality (and again, I say this aside from the content itself), an argument could be made that the second half is superior film-making from a sheer technical standpoint. It lacks the epic scope of a Civil War battlefield, but its shift to vengeance and pursuit, however morally wrongheaded, translates into a grander production: the cross-cutting during the chase scenes is tighter, and the cinematography is more nimble and experimental (in one shot, the horizon is high in the frame and silhouetted Klansmen ride across in front of a red-tinted sky).

That is not to dismiss the style of the first half. The battle sequences do command attention, both for their aforementioned ghostliness and their realism. (So real, you might say, that sometimes not being able to follow what's going on while the camera is positioned in extreme long-shot is pure toss-up between flaw and enhanced realism.) And then there is the miraculous shot when the camera first moves — something that sounds banal in this text, but when compared to the relative stasis of much of the film (and until then the battle sequences only gain momentum through editing) arrives as a bit of a shock. The battle charge forward, culminating in the breathtaking shot of a Confederate colonel jamming a flag staff down the barrel of a Union cannon, lasts just a second but makes sure the audience is paying attention. The Lincoln assassination is another thrilling sequence, an example of Griffith's remarkable authority in camera placement and editing. Through a mix of close-ups, long-shots, varied angles, and iris shots, Griffith creates a sequence that stirs the system with suspense and tension.

And what of film's notorious, nefarious approach to racial issues? Back to the original review: I want to stand by the central thesis I posited then, that the film causes angst primarily due to the difference in Griffith's approach to the film's most noteworthy elements — its formal construction and its politics:

In order to be as technically innovative as he was, Griffith needed to be as detail-oriented as possible. There are shots that attempt to recreate scenes with unrivaled precision and exactness (Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example). But when it comes to the film's approach to race, it is the categorical opposite of detail-oriented; its picture is painted with sweeping, inflammatory, and prejudiced strokes: white actors appear in blackface as barbarian caricatures; it endorses anti-miscegenation and pro-slavery positions; it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and is audacious enough to imply that the white supremacy hate group brought law and order to the post-war South. (The critic Andrew Sarris wrote, "[The film] was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word.")

We normally give Griffith a pass on the racism charge, primarily because he asked us to. (He asked for our acceptance publicly, he asked for it during the film's re-release, he asked for it in Intolerance, and he asked for it in Broken Blossoms.) If this second analysis of the film made me appreciate certain aspects to a greater degree, then I must confess it made me feel that Griffith was more culpable in the film's content than he wanted it to seem. More than ever I'm less inclined to believe that Griffith was truly innocent, and I find the claims of "That's just how it was in 1915" to be equally unsatisfactory. I have no doubt such racism was rampant in the 1910s (it was rampant all through the 20th century, though noticeably not in our national cinema) and I certainly understand the narrative complexity with telling this story from the point-of-view of angry and insular Southerners. But the film's objective point-of-view, illustrated in the title cards that were unaltered, is too extreme to be innocent. It's not incidental; it's active. There are passages in the film that are detached from the characters and seem to harness the voice of someone else (perhaps Griffith), passages that are so offensive it creates an unsustainable balancing act — it seems virtually impossible to claim ignorance on something as heinous as the racism here; to do so is to show yourself to be more unconsciously removed from social mores than ever previously thought; to not do so is to admit such views were consciously inserted, and thus creating culpability. It was Griffith, after all, that wanted to adapt this story — not any story of the Civil War, but this story from Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman."

All this leads to the common claim that we must consider The Birth of a Nation as an apolitical whole. If and when such things are possible, I contend they are only possible on an isolated and deconstructed scale. One can examine the climactic ride of the Klansman, for example; you can notice the camera moves not once but thrice, exciting and riveting movements; you can notice and commend the sophisticated editing, which is effective enough to create suspense and moral discomfort. But inevitably such strict scrutiny can only work in the moment. The Birth of a Nation and its politics are inseparable; one comes forth from the other, and vice versa. It is unfair to ask for consideration of the film with its racism set aside because it is truly impossible, and such, an irrevocable flaw in the fabric of the work. This tension between exacting attention to technical detail and a lack of control whatsoever over the political elements is the chief angle for criticizing the film for its racism. If the film's best-made scene is the Lincoln assassination (where technical construction seems perfectly and acceptably in tune with political messaging), then the film's worst scene occurs in the second half when a single white man fights off ten black men — and if it weren't for a gun, he'd win! It is flagrantly ridiculous, both in its absurd portrayal of white (and masculine) supremacy and for the way it retreats the audience, fabricates its own vulgar mythology, and entrenches itself deeper into moral obsolescence. It is a lack of control on Griffith's part that makes the film spiral away from the audience in these moments.

So The Birth of a Nation can never be, by my own personal standards, great art. Great art is much of what The Birth of a Nation has to offer: ascertainable qualities such as creative vision, influence, and technical skill, as well as esoteric qualities like controversy, crisis, and an intellectual coercion that demands that you wrestle with its challenging elements. But great art is timeless and self-sustaining, which are things this film is not. We make excuses for Griffith and for The Birth of a Nation because we wish to recognize their importance, but great art doesn't need an excuse made for it; great art stands alone, without support or defense, without tomes of analysis and sometimes even without context. Everyone who says this is great art is forced to use the word except, and what sort of praise is that? Without reservation we can call it what it is: important, influential, apoplectic. But we should not call it great.

Continue reading »

The Cheat (1915)

d. Cecil B. DeMille / USA / 59 mins.


Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat is one of the great early silent films precisely because it feels like it should have been released a decade after its late 1915 premiere. With swiftness and grace DeMille impressively merges the two crucial elements so often undefined in early cinema — narrative and photography — and one-ups his contemporary D.W. Griffith in the process by making the totality of the final work something that's stunningly subtle. There's no doubt Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, released the same year as The Cheat, is one of cinema's truly capital-I-capital-F "Important Films," and there's also no doubt that its size and magnitude allowed it to be literally sweeping in its approach to all elements across the planes of production. DeMille's film is smaller, a third the length of Griffith's, and nowhere near as incendiary, but somehow it matches to be more breathtaking and imminently more watchable.

The story, one of both prurience and possession that DeMille acknowledged in autobiography was both melodramatic and lurid, is tight and focused: a vacuous Long Island socialite named Edith (Fannie Ward) burns through her husband's (Jack Dean) money, and when a ten-thousand-dollar copper investment completely bottoms out, her neighbor Tori (Sessue Hayakawa), a wealthy ivory dealer from Japan, lays hold of her debt in exchange for her body. If that sounds vaguely racist ("East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," a title card tells us), then yes, it's necessary to say The Cheat cannot escape its possible xenophobic interpretations, particularly near its end when a shocked audience demands vengeance. The depictions of a Japanese man would so infuriate Japan that for its 1918 re-release (and most of the versions available today) the film identifies Tori as Burmese instead of Japanese and changes his name to Haka Arakau.

To those willing to forgive Griffith's Nation for its extraordinary racism, The Cheat will seem profoundly tame. Even against Griffith's Broken Blossoms (which also features an Asian principle character) The Cheat seems to come out ahead of the curve, precisely because its Asian character is not played by a white man (as was the custom of the day, and as Griffith employs in Blossoms) but instead played by Hayakawa, whose performance is dynamic in its control; in praising his performance in 1915, some critics at the time went as far as to say his effect on American was "more electric" than Rudolph Valentino's. Although an "exotic" character, Tori is not an epitome of Eastern stereotypes; his wardrobe is decidedly western, his house elegantly styled, and his syntax well developed. These might seem innocuous, but they go a long way toward making the art of the film go unbothered by the context of the narrative. The action that does him in (meant to interpreted in multiple ways) is his use of a cruel branding iron — "That means it belongs to me," he says as he applies the smoldering device to Ward's shoulder.

But that moment and many that follow demonstrate DeMille's profound interest in cinema for all its visual opportunities. Griffith may have brought the camera outdoors and introduced mobile panorama to his audience, but DeMille ventures into the territory of grounded artistry. Looking back on the film in his autobiography, he says that because the plot had such a great possibility for overblown melodrama (a cardinal sin of much silent cinema), he "resolved to direct its acting with great restraint." More than the image of a branding, DeMille is interested in the image of hot steam wafting off the heated iron from off-screen and slowly and fluidly entering the frame. He utilizes lighting is a painterly fashion, such as in the film's most famous shot, where Edith fires a gun at Tori and he falls to the floor against a back-lit rice paper screen, his shadow slumping downward and leaving a trail of blood behind. Even when DeMille does venture into the wider and more expansive shots (as in the film's culminating moments set in a courtroom full of angry townspeople), there is an authority over the images that one might expect from an august craftsman instead of a relative newcomer who'd only been releasing films as a director for two years.

Continue reading »