Starring Paul Richter, Theodor Loos, Margarete Schon, Hanna Ralph, Gertrud Arnold, and Hans Adalbert Schlettow

In the hands of silent master Fritz Lang (“M,” “Metropolis,” and “Between Two Worlds,” that one vampire movie said to be Hitchcock’s favorite), the silent film can be truly otherworldly.  It’s not just that we can’t hear anybody talking, it’s the look of old movies themselves:  all scratched, flickering, with missing frames, populated by strange human-esque figures who wear too much makeup and who emote like Shatner on crack.  I ADORE scratches, dust, hair, crud, and lighting that seems to pulsate.  Contemporary Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin reminds us of this with his retro-silent pieces like “The Heart of the World,” “Cowards Bend the Knee” and “Dracula:  Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.”

“Die Nibelungen” is “Lord of the Rings” for the silent era, except with fewer pretensions and a better pedigree (a 13^th century epic poem versus some book from the—snicker—1940s).  It is the largest and most magnificent feature-length, non-racist silent I’ve ever seen, ablaze with energy, sporting rows of men-at-arms, castles blackened by sunrises, clouds of incense set sparkling in the light of church windows, a shirtless hero always ready for the fight, Viking-style landers dwarfed by menacing cliffs, and enough caves, crags, and crevices to call to remind you of the dawn of the world.  Lang’s compositions are flawless and his vibrancy is infectious.  This is a fantastic film, a masterpiece, and why its name hasn’t popped up on any of the recent glut of Top 100 lists is baffling.

Many of “Die Nibelungen’s” effects are the simplest and most ancient of all camera tricks:  the double exposure.  The longevity of the double exposure comes from it being as convincing as anything else put on film, and has a ghostly quality that perfectly suits Lang’s land of legends.  It is used when Siegfried uses his magic hat to become invisible or the king’s double, or when the dwarf smith’s slaves turn to stone, or when a magic orb makes a cave wall disappear.  The dragon that Siegfried ambushes is not what you’d call convincing, but with his turtle’s gait and neck stretching for water, he isn’t boring, and is enough of a character to elicit some of the same sympathy we feel for King Kong nine years later (part of what makes Kong more believable and likeable is that he blinks).

The silent film seems especially suited for the epic.  Part of the difficulty with Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” is that a movie in sound and color, almost by necessity, must be populated by beings who are basically like us.  But Herakles, Beuwolf, and Siegfried are not quite human, not as we understand the term.  The desires that drive them are at once universal to all men, yet too simple and unexamined to be called real.  Things happen to these heroes that any sane person would question, yet no one ever does.  Only the dreamy, alien landscape of the silent seems capable of doing the epic hero justice.

So this past weekend the expensive private university in my city showed “Siegfried,” that is the first seven cantos (2 ½ hours) of Lang’s five-hour epic.  It’ll be off to Netflix for me to get “Kriemhild’s Revenge” and finish this sucker off.  You’d think that kids rich and smart enough to go there would be intrigued by the soundless adventure.  But no, they responded to everything they weren’t used to in the way all children do:  snickering.  We meet everything we do not understand with fear or ridicule.  Much worse than the laughing was that the kids felt it was okay to leave noisily in the course of the film, as if they everyone within earshot to hear their immediate disapproval.  Oh well.  I still had a great time.

In the kids’ defense, silent acting is an acquired taste and does often incorporate a lot of humor.  Bordering on kabuki, silent acting is all oversized gestures and huge expressions, made by faces caked beneath makeup that produces the hard lines of a comic book.  Death is a drawn out, gesticulating, stiff-armed affair.  To hear the kids laughing you’d think that silent moviemakers just didn’t know any better.  To try to explain to them that, just maybe, these early filmmakers were intrigued and delighted by the abstraction, by how far it got them from reality instead of just recreating it—that would be too much to ask.

So we meet Siegfried (Paul Richter) of the windblown hair, whom Lang portrays as a violent, Teutonic Homestar Runner.  He is forever dashing off after another adventure and joyously bounding from one danger to another.  Laughing off his wife’s premonitions of his demise, Siegfried is endlessly heroic and endlessly gullible.  No sooner has he heard tell of Princess Kriemhild (Margarete Schon) of the impossible braids than has he declared that he will win her.  No sooner has he been given a sword sharp enough to cut feathers than he is threatening the neighbors of the man who made it for him.  No sooner does he see a dragon does than he stabs it in the eye.  Siegfried is precisely whom Jung had in mind when he described the archetype of the “hero:”  honest, brave, always in motion, and dumb as a box of hammers.

The fame of slaying the dragon wins him the wary admiration of King Gunther (Theodor Loos).  The two men strike a bargain:  if Siegfried will win the Icelandic Amazon Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) for Gunther, Gunther will give Siegfried his sister Kriemhild’s hand in marriage.  But Gunther is weak and easily swayed—the one ordinary man trapped in this world of towering superhumans—and his one-eyed advisor Hagen Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) looks upon Siegfried with suspicion.  Winning Brunhilde is no bargain either:  surrounded by a lake of fire, any man who hopes to win her hand must beat her in three tests of strength.  Losers die.  Winning might be worse.

The movie’s score, by Gottfried Huppertz, is as close to Wagner as you can get without actually using Wagner.  Many of Lang’s visuals create a strange impression that “Die Nibelungen” is taking place a generation or two after the dawn of the world, or at least the dawn of homo sapiens.  The Dark Ages collide with pre-history.  Of course we see two castles populated by upright Aryans, but we see no farms, towns, fields, herds, or much else.  The Nibelungen—or dwarves—who fashion the crowns and weapons coveted by Siegfried and Gunther are as primitive and apelike as Neanderthals.  In a dreamy sort of way that defies exact interpretation, the castles seem to exist as a way for our earliest frontal lobed ancestors to coalesce, fend off, and perhaps enslave the lower species.  The presence of armor and clothing only obscures this.

I pray for the day that Guy Maddin makes a huge scale silent epic (although his 1990 film “Archangel,” unseen by me, may qualify).  Well into the sound era and even today, filmmakers have often admired the mysterious pull and abstraction of the silent film.  George Lucas refers to his “Star Wars” movies as essentially silent.  Hitchcock mourned the death of the silent and was interested in dialogue only when keeping it to a minimum; think of that scene in “Topaz” when Hitchcock decides we don’t need to hear what the two spies are discussing.  In his Great Movies review of “2001,” Roger Ebert writes that Kubrick’s dialogue is so spartan that it could be replaced with title cards.  Speaking of “Spartan,” the David Mamet of late achieves bizarre results with his dialogue by never letting any of his characters say anything that we can see.  No one says a word for the first 10 ½ minutes of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”  Brian De Palma always makes it his business to have one wordless stretch per movie, always lasting several minutes.  It’s no accident that the man vs. beast finale of “Predator,” in which Ah-nold and the ugly mother sink into pre-historic mud-covered depravity, is largely wordless.  A talking picture, to some extent, is a movie that doesn’t believe that film is an art and wants to borrow the credibility of novels and the theater.  We talk in real life so we don’t need to see it in art.  But, then again, I am a guy, and men hate talking.

Finished Monday, August 29th, 2005

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