Les Nibelungen : La Mort de Siegfried

Fritz Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN: SIEGFRIED is absolutely astounding cinema, heroic, beautiful, tragic, and overwhelming in its scope. Even though I have been a fan of silent cinema for a decade now, I was intimidated to watch this film due to its length, but the two and a half hours went right by and now I am pumped to see the second installment. As someone who doesn't tend to enjoy "binge-watching," let me tell you, it is a great temptation to just drop my other obligations for the day and just continue this great story.

The most interesting part about this movie is that it both revels in and subtly critiques its main characters. There really isn't a good guy or a bad guy. All of the characters are in their own ways sympathetic, but they are also quite vicious, capable of violence, pettiness, and deceit. Their codes of honor come to fail them as one character after another vows vengeance for wrongs done to them.

After a greasy diet of banal modern blockbusters more interested in advertising the next sequel rather than telling a compelling story, this is such a wonderful alternative.

UFA's Die Nibelungen films have suffered from a problem common to Metropolis, King Kong and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in that they are motion picture classics that also happen to have been favourites with Adolf Hitler. While those others I mentioned tend to be overlooked as coincidences – evidence of nothing more than that sometimes even fascist dictators have taste – the Nibelungen pictures have fared a little worse because of the significance of the legend to German nationalism, as typified in the opera by the German anti-Semite Wagner.

However, while the Nazis may have been able to project their racial ideology onto the original story, Fritz Lang's direction of the motion picture version actually breaks with the heroic nationalist reinterpretation. Wagner's opera was calculated to be exciting and rousing. Screenwriter Thea von Harbou would eventually become a nazi stooge, and probably intended a similar effect for the film. The original poem Nibelungenlied though is not intrinsically nationalistic – it is simply a folk tale in a similar vein the King Arthur legend or the Iliad, and Lang recognised this fact. Like those ancient sagas from which it is drawn, his version is lacking in any kind of emotional manipulation, yet is rich in pageantry and poetic imagery. In Die Nibelungen we in fact have a perfect example of how a director's formal technique can shape the tone of a film.

Throughout the picture, Lang takes a cool, detached approach to the material. There are few close-ups or point-of-view shots. We know that Lang was not averse to these techniques – look at his previous picture, Dr Mabuse, where the title character is often staring straight into the lens, as if to hypnotise the audience. Let's also compare the dragon slaying scenes from Die Nibelungen and the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad (directed by Raoul Walsh). The important difference here is not who had the best dragon (and to be fair they are both pretty naff), but how they are filmed. For the Fairbanks legend to work, you have to get swept up in the action, and Walsh places the camera at the hero's back as he delivers the fatal blow, bringing the audience in for the kill too. Siegfried's fight is staged almost identically yet Lang just matter-of-factly shows it happen, even giving us the dragon's death indirectly with a shot of its tail flopping to the ground.

All this is not to say that Lang did not have respect for the Nibelungen story. He had great reverence for it, but again purely in the form of an old legend – an artefact of a bygone era, not something that a modern audience can or should try to relate to, but something profound and beautiful nonetheless. Lang reflects this in the overall look of the picture, forming neat, painterly tableau, encouraging exaggerated, theatrical acting and giving the overall picture a stylised sense of rhythm. Ironically he brings it close to opera in tone, although of course this version was in no other way like Wagner's.

Lang's distinctive visual style pervades Die Nibelungen. So far, Lang had made striking use of interiors, but Siegfried's story mostly takes place outdoors. There are no rolling vistas here though. Lang creates a claustrophobic landscape out of crowding forests and overbearing rock formations. In earlier Lang films we can already see how his sets and shot compositions seem to form patterns and paths to hem in the characters and even control their movements, but now the actors almost seem to become part of the scenery. Take for example a shot about two-thirds of the way through, when Brunhild is framed between two curtains – the pattern on her dress matches that on the curtains. Throughout his career Lang first and foremost shoots the sets – the actors are merely a part of them.

This thoroughly Langian interpretation of the Nibelungenlied may have brought a tear to the eye of Hitler and Goebbels, but the emotional connection to the material can only have existed in their heads. To the majority of viewers, this picture and its sequel do not encourage any kind of romantic or heroic feeling. They are in a way more of an illustration than a story in their own right. While this detached style does not make for gripping viewing, the films do have an aesthetic beauty to them that makes them watchable.

This lavish and memorable adaptation of the first part of the Nibelungen saga is worthwhile for a number of strengths. While Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou seem to have rather freely adapted the original material, they succeeded beyond doubt in bringing the main characters to life and in creating a distinctive and interesting atmosphere for the story. The cast, likewise, do a good job in portraying their characters. The visual effects are uneven, and a couple of times they do not work all that well, but at other times they work wonderfully.

This first part of Lang's epic primarily covers the "Siegfried" part of the saga. Siegfried is the kind of near-perfect hero who can become rather dull in a hurry if the actor and director overdo it, but here Paul Richter works well in the role, and Lang effectively brings out the sometimes tangled connections between Siegfried and the other characters. These relationships are really the most interesting aspect of this part of the story, and Lang does well in keeping them the main focus for most of the time. Gunther, Hagen, Kriemhild, and Brunhild each have an interesting connection with Siegfried, and by giving the other characters a well-developed personality, the movie also enhances Siegfried's own identity.

The story moves rather slowly much of the time, in order better to develop the atmosphere and characters. This actually enhances the action and adventure sequences, giving them (and the movie as a whole) more substance. The picture works very well and, aside from a very small number of its visual effects, has held up well over the years.

I am not especially an aficionado of silent films though I have long loved Lang's 'Metropolis'. Being an opera lover, especially Wagner, it is to my shame that it has taken me decade to get around to watching Lang's masterpiece 'Siegfried'.

Even more than Richard Wagner's 4 Ring operas in 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' Lang's films tie in many of the ancient Nordic and Teutonic legends that contributed to Wagner's monumental creation.

Brunhild is a powerful Icelandic Queen, Siegfried the son of King Siegmund, all this quite different from the operas in that Siegmund was not a king in those. Also, Hagen, the evil deus ex machina is portrayed here as a Wotan like figure, with patched eye and horned helmet. Otherwise, the basic story is the same but more believable as drama than Wagner's highly fantastic story line.

This film is going to last a lifetime with me. And it is especially wonderful that the great musical score by Gottfried Huppertz has been included in the DVD release on Kino films. Its a haunting score and very much its own character. It doesn't try to imitate Wagnerianism but there are what Wagner called leitmotivs to represent the various characters and mood.

Even if you aren't a Wagner fan this film by Fritz Lang displays so many amazing innovations for 1924 that it puts the computerized f/x of our day quite in the shade in terms of novelty and human artistry.

I can't recommend 'Siegfried' highly enough. Haunting and beautiful, even in black and white. The Kino picture is quite clear and the acting superb.

I think this is an important film to see even for historical reasons, since after "Die Nibelungen" (1924) Lang would make "Metropolis" (1927), something for which he is best remembered. But more importantly, this is in my mind astonishingly gripping and the far more satisfying film (or two).

It's fascinating how different the two parts are. As they are, their respective brilliance shines brightly, individually, and in itself the film as one grand epic reinvents itself come the revenge story of the latter half. The first film is the fantastical one, precursor to what we have now as high fantasy adaptations, mainly "The Lord of the Rings". In this sense "Siegfried" is shockingly modern, and here Lang succeeds far better than in "Metropolis", where he didn't have a national epic upon which to project the visual aesthetics, instead his own sense of national identity projected into a perceived future or alternate present. This is surprisingly lucid, which itself is a testimony of its filmic brilliance.

The court at Worms is as rigidly symmetrical and foreboding as one can be, and the film is full of such visual information, rigid symmetry that I bet greatly inspired Eisentein's "Ivan Groznyi" films (1944, 1958). In fact, I would love to see these masterworks by the two directors together someday, since their similarities go beyond style and visual language, also converging in their handling of national folklore in highly theatrical terms.

The new restoration of the project, made by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, is available on Blu-ray in both Region A and B, courtesy of Kino and Masters of Cinema respectively. What a treasure! In fact, the more I think of it, I can't wait to revisit it again.