Film Review
Der Müde Tod (a.k.a.
Destiny) may have received a
lukewarm reception fom critics and audiences when it was first seen in
Germany but today there is little doubt that it is the first work in
which Fritz Lang demonstrated his genius for creative filmmaking.
A hauntingly poetic fantasy which could not be further removed from the
realist dramas of Lang's American period,
Der Müde Tod is the first and
most visually daring of the director's expressionistic masterpieces, a
film that not only influenced his contemporaries (most notably F.W.
Murnau) but also inspired many other great cineastes, including Alfred
Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel. In making the film, Lang and
his designers appear to have taken their inspiration from both
contemporary and classical German art, combining modern expressionistic
motifs with the distinctive stylisation of such artists as Albrecht
Dürer. The result is one of the most fascinating examples of early
German cinema.
The film is atypical for Lang both in its fantastic subject matter
(pure fantasy is a genre that Lang tended to avoid, unlike many of his
contemporaries) and its complex narrative structure, which comprises
three self-contained stories within a framing story. Each part of
the film was assigned a different creative team, something that gives
it a striking diversity in appearance, tone and impact. The
sequences that make up the framing story are the most chilling and are
visibly influenced by an earlier expressionistic fantasy piece, Robert
Wiene's
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari
(1920). The representation of Death as a mysterious, seemingly
benign old man dressed in black is a concept that Ingmar Bergman would
subsequently employ for his 1957 film,
The Seventh Seal, and it seemly
likely he borrowed the idea from Lang.
Given how short the three contained stories are (the first is set 9th
century Persia, the second in 17th century Venice and the third in
feudal China), it is astonishing how ornate and grand the sets are,
typical of the extraordinarily high standard achieved at the
Decla-Bioscop studios (later to become Ufa) in the 1920s. The
special effects are just as impressive, particularly in the Chinese
sequence, where Lang and his technical team use travelling mattes and
superposition to great effect to conjure up such astonishing spectacles
as a huge miniature army and a flying horse. The actor Douglas
Fairbanks was so impressed by the film's special effects (especially
the flying carpet sequence) that he bought the rights to the film to
prevent it from being released in America, enabling him to copy the
effects and pass them off as his own. Lang's impact on Hollywood
began long before his arrival in Tinseltown in the mid-1930s.
The sheer thematic variety offered by
Der
Müde Tod gave Lang immense scope for experimenting with
filmmaking technique and visual storytelling which he seized with both
hands, and whilst the film does not quite have the coherence and impact
of his subsequent work it was clearly an important milestone in his
career. What came immediately after this astonishing work was a
string of a hugely ambitious masterpieces -
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922),
Die Nibelungen (1924),
Metropolis
(1927),
Spione (1928) - which rapidly
established Lang as Germany's most important film director and one of
the most creative talents of his generation.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Fritz Lang film:
Vier um die Frau (1921)
Film Synopsis
Shortly after their arrival in a provincial German town a young woman
learns that her fiancé has been taken from her by a mysterious
stranger dressed in back. The woman manages to pass through a huge wall
that is impenetrable to mortals and finds the stranger in the dark
world beyond. Identifying himself as Death, the stranger tells
the woman that her fiancé now belongs to him but he promises to
restore him to her if she can prove her belief that love is more
powerful than death. The woman is transported to three different
periods in history, but despite her best efforts she fails to prevent
her beloved from being claimed by Death. The stranger offers her
one last chance: her fiancé will be brought back to life if she can
find someone to take his place in the afterlife...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.