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FRITZ LANG - DIE NIBELUNGEN - 1924-2012
The interest of this film, this double feature is the fact it was produced and shot by Fritz Lang in black and white in 1924. This is a restored version that has been completed with various repairs and reconstructed elements. It was also colorized so that the very crude black and white was replaced by some light golden palette of various shades of this basic color. The result is extremely beautiful to the eye. The second great element is of course the setting, built or natural. It is impressive by its gigantic size, especially for the time. The trees and the forest scenes are awesome and forbidding. The castles, German or Hun, are enormous and extremely realistic. Then the acting is essential since it is a silent film to which a music track was added and at the time it was actually performed along with the film, live or maybe on the first records of the time.
Fritz Lang goes back to the very old saga of Siegfried and the Nibelungen, reaching beyond Wagner who had produced a purely Germanic series of four operas and what we could even consider a pure saga of German-centered nationalism. Fritz Lang corrects this simple vision of the pure Germans in their national culture of a time when the whole of Europe or nearly was under German rule or feudal control, with only one challenge in the east, the Huns and Attila. Fritz Lang centers his tale in two parts, first on Siegfried and then on his widow Krimhild and her vengeance which is at once avenged by one of the rare Nibelungen survivors.
The old saga is available today in print and I have dedicated some long article on it for some university journal in Avignon. This old saga is definitely singing and chanting the glory of the Nibelungen and the Germans but with a certain distance that Fritz Lang tries to recapture in a concentrated form. Those Nibelungen are heroes and strong only because they found no one to stop them along the way. They never had any enemy or opponent at their real level, able to defeat them in a square and fair battle. The end becomes very dubious with Fritz Lang who is projecting what he is feeling coming up in Germany and Europe in 1924, after Hitler's attempted coup in October 1922, his trial, and his conviction and sentence to four years of prison that in fact only lasted one year.
The film here shows that the Germans and the feudal vassalization of everyone behind one person who is the king of them all, but with some super-vassals or even some competitors from within or from without. The first film is exclusively centered on the betrayal against Siegfried from within the court of the King and even the family of the King. Betraying is like a birthmark with these Germans. There is always one individual who is jealous of the heroism of another, and he will kill him in any possible, generally dishonest way. But the second film goes a lot farther. Krimhild has sworn to get her vengeance and to kill the murderer, Hagen Tronje who is untouchable because of the allegiance that connects him to the King and the Nibelungen.
Using Attila, the King of the Huns, to get her vengeance is particularly vicious since she uses an eastern or even Asian challenger against the Germans to get the whole band of Nibelungen and quite a good party of knights and soldiers to celebrate her marriage with Attila and the birth of a child. But they came prepared, and they expected this treason. They then reveal that they are never going to accept a defeat, even an honorable defeat. So, they are burned inside Attila's castle and Hagen is finally killed by Krimhild, and yet at once one of the rare Nibelungen survivors kills her. Hagen, or some other knight on his side, had said "you don't know the Germans," to the Huns. The Germans are described as treacherous people, die-hard fighters, and even totally insane self-centered people who can have hundreds of simple people killed to reach one single act of vengeance, and yet the actor of this vengeance is killed by some other German on the spot.
It is quite obvious Fritz Lang is harping at the insane and absurd division or divisions of the Germans that lead them to inner strife and rivalries that can only come to fights, war acts, treacherous acts, and many other unhealthy political acts. This is the reflection of Germany in the 1920s that will lead directly to 1933: divisions between Communists and Social-Democrats, divisions between the left in general but definitely not unified, and the New National-Socialist party of Hitler who will reach power with a little bit more than 30% of the votes while the left, if they had been able to unify themselves could have won with quite a good margin over 50%. We all know what came after this unhealthy political and historical victory or defeat. Attila is not a myth in this fable but a real enemy in a way. It is the East. Does Fritz Lang only mean the Soviet Union or does he see even farther and mean Asia, think of Japan in this old historical time who will enter the war rather fast within an alliance with Germany and Italy. Maybe a little farfetched, but the Soviet Union is definitely closer at hand to be that kind of a competitor.
The film has a certain value in the long run because globalized humanity today is just the same. One camp, the west, is divided in the most obvious and ridiculous way and is unable to speak with one voice. They accuse one another to betray the whole world with capturing batches of COVID-19 vaccines for their own use, one side of the Atlantic against the other, and in the east, far from being only China, the challengers and competitors are simply doing their own business in the three quarters of the world this west does not consider, and they are little by little establishing a different world order with a very wide and open alliance against which the western factions are impotent because they would like to be able to do the same technologically and socially, but they are being sidetracked by their private property obsession that leads them to let private enterprises and interests dominate the market they control, and western politicians do not see that they control hardly one little third of the world and the big two other thirds are for grab for the various eastern and Asian countries who are all in a way or another in a controlled and regulated system, certainly not the free unregulated market economy of the west. Maybe not entirely unregulated in Europe but by far too much unregulated.
The historical distance and the beauty of the film will probably prevent the audience from seeing the discourse it holds on the present world, the present situation in the world. And in the west, they are so vainly convinced they are making history that they consider they do not have to study the forces that are at work in the world that definitely have more influence on history than the objectives of humans. The climate-change is reduced to something caused by humans whereas the whole geological history of the Earth is a vast succession of cycles that are visible in its changes in the climate and that can be measured in the ice of the polar areas with extremely great precision. We probably should not and should not have polluted, we probably can or could introduce policies that could reduce the pollution, but we cannot change the geological cycles of this earth. But we could rather easily tackle the demographic problem before it becomes too serious, and we are close to this point. Beyond this point, the population will have to be reduced and if we do not do it, nature, the earth, the climate will take care of the problem. Of course, the rich will migrate to Mars, or Venus if they have an erotic mind. But it is easy to see that then one or two or even three billion people will die of hunger, diseases, thirst, or simply accidental or brutal death. The earth will reset the clocks to some acceptable time. Then you can bet the rich will come back to take the control of the situation.
Thanks, Fritz Lang for this lesson in globalized philosophy.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU.
score 10/10
Dr_Coulardeau 30 March 2021
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6762140/ |
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31-3-2021 00:06:37