Snapshot: Episode Five: 1920s - Fritz Lang

The undeniable silent classic “Metropolis” has been much in the news lately.  The discovery of a supposed complete print has been hailed as a significant milestone in the on-going project to restore Fritz Lang’s 1926/1927 work to its original, immense running time.  This comes a mere five years after the last re-release, a version which was digitally cleaned up as never before and which wisely included inter-titles indicating where footage was missing, making the plot comprehensible for the first time in three quarters of a century.

The 2003 “Metropolis” went aways to changing my mind about the film.  While all the schematic weaknesses of theme, tonal inconsistencies, and over acting remained, Lang’s visual sense was revealed in breathtaking detail.  By this I don’t just mean the celebrated scenes of robot creation, or mass flooding, or even the iconic images of automatons toiling at giant clocks.  The real revelations were in the more intimate moments, instances of hand held camera work and delicate lighting.  A chase sequence through a labyrinth was unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in silent cinema.

Lang’s 1920s career had an impact on the medium that cannot be overstated.  His influence on Hitchcock is obvious. The British master of suspense once singled out Lang’s 1921 supernatural thriller “Destiny”, in which a woman bargains with death for the life of her lover, as being of special significance to him.  One can also imagine its importance to Bergman, particularly the Bergman of “The Seventh Seal”.

The great Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel says in his autobiography that “Destiny” ‘clarified my life and my vision of the world’, that it directly resulted in a sense of cinematic vocation.  Years later, upon meeting Lang for the first time, when he himself was seventy two and the German well into his eighties, Bunuel immediately asked Lang for his autograph!

Lang’s influence goes far beyond the art house world of the auteur though.  “Metropolis” is clearly the template for all science fiction films that followed as well as a dystopian vision that pre-dates Orwell’s by two decades.   More prophetic still was Lang’s last silent feature, 1929’s “The Woman in the Moon”,  which updates Melies and anticipates NASA in dramatising a lunar expedition by a greedy group of capitalists.  The Nazis felt its rocket designs were so authentic that they later withdrew the film from circulation.  Indeed, one of its technical advisers later contributed to the V2 programme, long after Lang himself had fled Germany for Hollywood.

Lang’s brilliant exercises in Teutonic mythology, “Siegfried” and “Kriemhild’s Revenge” (both 1924), have epic grandeur, conveying a world of knights, dragons and bloody battles, setting the standard for the likes of Lucas and Jackson.  His espionage thrillers, “Dr Mabuse, the Gambler” (1923) and “Spies” (1928) are proto-James Bond films, complete with omnipotent Goldfinger-like villains, inventive gadgetry, and sensual seductresses.

In one other crucial aspect Lang is the harbinger of modern cinema: extreme length.  All those who think that with “Lord of the Rings: The Return of King” Peter Jackson offered up far too much of a good thing should remember that Fritz Lang’s original, 1923 cut of “Dr Mabuse” was three hundred and thirty two minutes long!