120 / BD 46 Die Nibelungen

[HerrSchreck]

Has anything happened here over the last year? This is one title I am not buying from Kino, first of all because I am looking forward to the MoC edition.

Everyone's waiting on the FWMS for the restoration, which, if everything stays on track (fingers crossed), should be available in January Y3K.

[Erikht]

Has anything happened here over the last year? This is one title I am not buying from Kino, first of all because I am looking forward to the MoC edition.

Everyone's waiting on the FWMS for the restoration, which, if everything stays on track (fingers crossed), should be available in January Y3K.

That sounds optimistic....

[Tommaso]

Absolutely nothing compared to the postponements at Edition filmmuseum...

[HerrSchreck]

..which even still is a mere fairy-godmother bibbity-bobbidy-boo wand-*ding* away compared to the WB rollout of Greed, The Crowd, Chaney TCM II, and the MGM "Seastrom" Sjotrom's.

Snarl. Why did I hafta go & bring that shit up..? now I'm inna lousy mood.

[domino harvey]

..which even still is a mere fairy-godmother bibbity-bobbidy-boo wand-*ding* away compared to the WB rollout of Greed, The Crowd, Chaney TCM II, and the MGM "Seastrom" Sjotrom's.

Snarl. Why did I hafta go & bring that shit up..? now I'm inna lousy mood.

Can't believe you forgot the Magnificent Ambersons, which according to the last Warners chat has been given serious thought

[denti alligator]

Thanks for the update, BooCross!

P.S. I am just about to submit my doctoral thesis on Lang's adaptation of Die Nibelungen.
Looking forward to engaging in discussions about the film with you all!!!

Congratulations!

[Erikht]

P.S. I am just about to submit my doctoral thesis on Lang's adaptation of Die Nibelungen.
Looking forward to engaging in discussions about the film with you all!!!

That would be sometimes in 2010...

It must be said that the little I saw from the film at the film museum in Berlin looked quite good, actually. But I keep asking myself, why should I buy the Kino version now? And mind you, I don't dislike Kino in any way.

[HerrSchreck]

I hope it fulfills this tremendous global longing. Impossible to overstate Lang's achievement with this film-- just wonderful, wonderful, this film.

In a class by itself, really, as a myth-fantsy-epic. I remember grabbing the last restoration on the Kino dvd right around the time that Lord of the Rings was all the rage, and said to myself 'How backward the cinema has moved since the glories of this film.'

[Sloper]

I remember first seeing Siegfried years ago on the dreadful Tartan video edition, with one of the most inappropriate scores imaginable, when I was new to silent films, and it was still a totally hypnotic experience. It’s not just the spectacle - the fight with the dragon, the moat of fire around Brunhilde’s castle, the Ruttmann segment, the blossom tree shrivelling into a skull – it’s the slowness, the sheer unabashed leisurely approach to the material, ‘epic’ in the truest sense. (If only von Stroheim had been allowed to linger this much in his films from this time…) It does indeed show up just what an ersatz-epic Lord of the Rings is.

There's a shot - I think it's near the beginning, when the bard is telling Kriemhild of Siegfried's conquests - where we just see a long line of warriors, Siegfried's illustrious retainers, walk past in a seemingly endless procession, framed by a spare, rigidly ornamented decor. That one shot has more scale and power than Peter Jackson could achieve in nine hours. (There's a similar, but briefer, shot after the Moloch disaster in Metropolis, when the bodies are being taken away.)

For years I subsisted on another crap VHS, one of the atrocities put together by the (apparently notorious) ‘Jef Films’, with that perpetual Schubert-loop you sometimes hear on the soundtracks to cheapo silent releases; but at least I got to see the second part. More recently I’ve been able to borrow the Kino edition two or three times from my university’s library, and appreciate the film in all (or at least most of) its magnificence, with the typically brilliant Huppertz score. When I finally get my hands on MoC’s definitive release, I might just have to die of joy – if I haven’t already expired from holding my breath for so long. This is such a timeless, important work of art, one of the first to introduce me to the wonders of 1920s cinema, and it would be a real coup for MoC to be the ones to at last do the film justice.

Die Nibelungen was also one of Hitler’s favourite films, though perhaps MoC won’t be mentioning him in the advertising (still too soon…).

[HerrSchreck]

There's a shot - I think it's near the beginning, when the bard is telling Kriemhild of Siegfried's conquests - where we just see a long line of warriors, Siegfried's illustrious retainers, walk past in a seemingly endless procession, framed by a spare, rigidly ornamented decor. That one shot has more scale and power than Peter Jackson could achieve in nine hours. (There's a similar, but briefer, shot after the Moloch disaster in Metropolis, when the bodies are being taken away.)

Well observed-- I too noticed the almost identical nature of the two setups-- the procession in Nibelungen and the post-distaster/Moloch shot carrying the casualties in Metropolis.

Re Stroeheim-- he did take the liberty of lingering, but the reels which contained the material was always excised from the final cut. It's a shame that Lang's producers (Pommer, really) had the wisdom to release his sprawling masterworks in 2 parters, but men like Mayer and Thahlberg had no such foresight or faith in American audiences (or even the intelligence to at least recognize the quality of the material they were so liberally excising and at barest minimum, preserve it instead of throwing it in the fucking trash... some of the blackest marks ever laid at the feet of a producer). I truly believe EvS was probably Griffith's most talented pupil, and had he blossomed in Germany under Pommer instead of the Hollywood assembly-line, he'd have given Lang a run for his money in the super-epic dept. Already with the cruddy gaps and scraps that remain of Foolish Wives, Wedding March, Greed, etc, he's every bit a peer.

One of the most heartbreaking quotes in all of filmdom, about GREED:

"Even if I spoke to you for a week straight I could not even begin to communicate to you the heartbreak that I felt watching my pride and joy destroyed before my very eyes," (lightly paraphrased)

[Sloper]

Agreed on all that, Schreck, though of course there’s a fundamental difference in the material. Die Nibelungen is slow alright, but it’s also a very grand and patriotic celebration of a great cultural myth, and the Wagner connection alone should have guaranteed some popular interest in the film. Moreover, Lang had already shown himself to be a master of crowd-pleasing Feuillade-style adventure in Spiders and Mabuse, so Pommer had every reason to trust him. You can imagine how audiences would flock back to see Kriemhild’s Revenge, and Lang even rewards them with a film whose frenzied rhythm provides more conventional excitement than the first half (maybe it’s just the presence of Klein-Rogge, but I always feel the second film reverts, almost with a sigh of relief, to the thrills-and-intrigue style of Lang’s earlier work, losing some of the epic grandeur in the process – at least until the climax).

It’s hard to imagine American audiences seeing the first half of Greed and then coming back for more later on. ‘If I ever get my hands on Marcus Schouler’/‘If…you…ever…do’ isn’t much of a cliffhanger. When I read the novel McTeague, I was struck by the fact that all the really successful parts of the book were the ones that remained in the extant version of Stroheim’s film, while the half-baked subplots were entirely new to me. Now I’m sure the full version of Greed was every bit the masterpiece Stroheim and others who saw it claimed, but it may be that the two-hour version is the most coherent version there could have been (coherence isn’t everything, of course).

I just think it’s wonderful that films as monstrous and perverse as Foolish Wives, Greed, and the Wedding March got made at all, and at such expense, in the Hollywood of that era. When you consider what difficulties Griffith himself had in the ‘20s, despite doing everything he could to make popular films with mass appeal, the mangling of his crazed Austrian pupil’s mammoth works isn’t so shocking. Either Karl Brown or Byron Haskin or someone says in Brownlow’s Hollywood doc that it was as though Stroheim had suffered some terrible indignity in his youth, and channelled his rage and frustration into making vast, beautiful, and above all expensive movies which he knew very well the producers (and probably the audiences) would hate, as a kind of revenge against the world. He’s so much like Orson Welles, an artist unable to compromise – or at least to do so with any consistency – but unable, also, to curry favour with those whose money he needed to work.

Lang is a totally different kettle of fish, always able to turn out something appropriate –superbly crafted, but lacking (to me, at least) that sense of personal investment in the material, the sense of really needing to have made this film, which makes Stroheim probably the greater and more difficult artist.

[Tommaso]

Die Nibelungen was also one of Hitler’s favourite films, though perhaps MoC won’t be mentioning him in the advertising (still too soon…).

I always wondered whether and how much the 'style' of the 1934 party rally as seen in "Triumph of the Will" was influenced by the Lang film; a lot of the processions in "Siegfried" or the symmetrical order in which people are placed in the frame at the court in Worms look very, very similar. It was perhaps this formal set-up that Hitler (and Goebbels) admired in the film. On the other hand, Lang (perhaps more so than the 'Nibelungenlied' or Wagner) clearly shows that the outward order is only a cover for what is actually a decadent society governed by treachery, mistrust and finally murder. The film clearly cannot be used as propaganda for 'Germanic' ideals, not least because the Nibelungen-society is shown to be devastated in the end both by the huns and by the justified revenge of Kriemhild. So I'm not fully sure whether the film is meant to be a "very grand and patriotic celebration of a great cultural myth", as you write in your last post. By implication, if Hitler et al. regarded "Die Nibelungen" as an expression of an ideal Germanic society which the Third Reich was to mirror, they must have overlooked or misunderstood the second film completely. Or am I on a totally wrong track here?

[Sloper]

On the other hand, Lang (perhaps more so than the 'Nibelungenlied' or Wagner) clearly shows that the outward order is only a cover for what is actually a decadent society governed by treachery, mistrust and finally murder. The film clearly cannot be used as propaganda for 'Germanic' ideals, not least because the Nibelungen-society is shown to be devastated in the end both by the huns and by the justified revenge of Kriemhild. So I'm not fully sure whether the film is meant to be a "very grand and patriotic celebration of a great cultural myth", as you write in your last post. By implication, if Hitler et al. regarded "Die Nibelungen" as an expression of an ideal Germanic society which the Third Reich was to mirror, they must have overlooked or misunderstood the second film completely. Or am I on a totally wrong track here?

Tommaso, I don’t know the other versions of the myth, so I’ll defer to you if you say that Lang’s take on it is more subversive; and I know what you mean, the same thoughts tend to occur to me when I watch the film. It is, if I remember rightly, ‘dedicated to the German people’, but yes, the amount of treachery and (literal) back-stabbing that goes on would seem to undermine its value as a celebratory patriotic myth.

However, most great epics of this sort are ambiguous in similar ways. In Homer’s Iliad, for instance, the ostensible hero (Achilles) spends most of the poem sitting around feeling disgruntled and complaining about how unrewarding it is being a hero; he finally pulls his finger out only in order to avenge Patroclus’ death. The second most heroic character is Achilles’ mortal enemy, Hector, who seems similarly fed up with the war, and when finally confronted with Achilles he runs away. He is only defeated because the gods play a trick on him to make him confront Achilles, so even the latter’s victory seems less than heroic, especially since he then dishonours Hector’s body. The heroism consists in these heroes making errors of judgement, lapsing from the heroic ideal, and then overcoming their own weaknesses – the most heroic act is really Achilles’ granting of Priam’s request at the end, and the poem ends on a very sombre, pessimistic note with Achilles pondering the miseries of human existence, and Hector’s body being burnt. Odysseus hanging around on Kalypso’s island is another example, as is Aeneas’ sojourn with and betrayal of Dido.

In fact, the Aeneid always strikes me as a very ambiguous cultural-origins myth, quite searing in its depiction of the sacrifices and offences against human dignity – and the sheer violence – that go into founding a great nation. It was this aspect of the poem that Enoch Powell played on in his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968: what had been a warning to Aeneas about the suffering he and his descendants would have to go through in order to create Rome became (if I remember rightly) a warning to Britain about the supposed ‘dangers’ of infiltration by foreign cultures. Which just shows how easily the mere ambiguity of the ostensibly patriotic myth can be twisted into something more negative.

In Lang’s film, the main points of ‘dishonour’ are Gunther’s cowardice, Hagen’s treachery, and Kriemhild’s ruthlessness. Gunther makes up for his cowardice at the end, when he refuses to abandon Hagen, while Hagen’s treachery could be justified as a service done to his lord, to redeem his honour, and as well as being fiercely loyal to his true master, we are clearly meant to be impressed by his bravery at the end. As you said, Kriemhild’s revenge is justified, but it seems to become immoderate, to the point where even Atilla the Hun sees her as inhuman; she too compensates for this by simply dying once her work is done (interesting to see how this will play in the new ending). Obviously, Siegfried himself is the main locus of the film’s patriotism, such as it is, but being more or less completely ignorant about the importance of the rest of the story to German culture, I couldn’t really say any more about it as a ‘celebration’ of German values.

But I think one of the main things that keeps such myths alive, and gives them such dramatic potency, is their ambiguity, and this doesn’t necessarily undermine their usefulness as propaganda. I often feel this film is similar to Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin – another film that is at once patriotic and tragic, showing in lingering detail the errors of judgement committed by the hero, and which, like Die Nibelungen, ends with the celebrated group destroying itself for the sake of honour, transcending and leaving behind them the more worldly (in Ronin) or primitive (in Nibelungen) mass of ordinary, non-heroic people.

All that said, Lang’s film really doesn’t feel propagandistic: as I said earlier, I’m not sure he really had a consistent ideological point of view on anything – Germany, mechanisation, child-murderers – and his disingenuous manner in interviews reinforces this impression.

[HerrSchreck]

Sloper though you raise many key fundamental points they have a complexity to them that render them challenging in terms of 'historical verdicts', so to speak, as to why EvS's works were butchered and Lang's were not. Of course my initial post above yours is simplistic in itself and is more of a guttoral cry of anguish that his material is lost forever than it is something to be able to withstand exacting historical scrutiny. But I will tackle some of it, at least cursorily:

Simply because a film is wrapped up in popular cultural mythology does not insure its success-- the legend of Faust is and was every bit as ingrained in the German national consciousness as a cornerstone work, a film was created employing Germany's greatest director of all time and all the resources of the country's wealthiest studio was placed at his disposal, no expense spared. Murnau's Faust fizzled. I'm also reminded of a film that Griffith himself made when financially up against the wall and in desperate need of a hit to insure the survival of his Mamaroneck studio: America, which was a box office failure... as was Abraham Lincoln.

And I'd argue that-- in Die Nibelungen-- people weren't coming back for Part Two "to find out what happened" (I mention this because you placed this film in successful opposition to Greed as the vehicle better suited to the cliffhanger part-break, insuring box office returns for the second part).. as you well know, this was in many ways the German National Myth. This wasn't an original serial where a cliffhanger part One would end and folks would come back to the theater and find out what would happen in Part Two! Even though Lang reverted back to the original poem rather than the Wagner opera, I'm sure most folks in Germany pretty much had an idea of what the story of Seigfried was all about. They went back because the film was a marvellous spectacle, a gorgeous piece of art, a majesterial one of a kind experience, plain and simple. They went there to live in their national epic, not find out what happened in it-- they already knew.

And of course, EvS and Lang made very different types of films. As to how hard it is to imagine audiences coming back to the second part of a two-part Greed, I'm reminded of the feedback given by the lucky members of the press who were invited to a rare private screening of the full cut: EvS's widow remembers exhuberant reviewers coming out after the six hours saying they'd witnessed the most extraordinary thing, and were now ready for six more hours if Erich had them. You must remember that you cannot judge the film, it's feel and it's rhythm based on what you see now: all of it's punctuation, it's narrative composition, subtextual interplay between depth and surface, of light and shadow-- all of it has been excised. What we have left it a very drab remnant, a fragment, the greyest middling melodrama with all of the surrounding brights above and darks below taken away. The nearest equivalent I could imagine would be like taking, say, either the Barrymore or March versions of Jekyll & Hyde, and straining out all of the bits about the experiments and Hyde, and presenting a story about a doctor who gives a lecture, makes a house call in the slums, then goes to visit his fiance and has a dance and a chat, builds a little conflict around getting his future father-in-law to agree to a sooner wedding... he succeeds... happiness-- the end. All Mayer was interested in with Greed was extracting "a story" that "worked", really.

And I'd remind you that Lang had his failures in Germany as well-- Frau im Mond flopped, Metropolis utterly destroyed not only Pommer but devastated Ufa as it was up to that point... it's one of the most legendary and spectacular flops in cinema history, really. I'm not clear on the reception of Spione, but clearly after Metropolis he found himself in a position of having to form his own company in order to continue making the kind of films-- with the kind of freedom-- he enjoyed.

As for their personalities, and their personal investments in their films, I think the clearer genre nature of Lang's films can be a touch misleading-- at least it makes them seem less 'personal'. But this is deceptive. His films are indeed quite personal, and reveal a very peculiar and individual set of obsessions-- paranoia, false veneers/realities being pulled away, infiltration, covert action, subterfuge, bogus identity, the effect of a harsh impersonal world on the good man unprepared for its callousness, the nature of concentrated power, colorful old professor types with mouldering libraries that yeild musty, obscure ancient secrets, etc. And Lang was every bit as obsessive, financially indulgent, brash, nasty, domineering, hated and despised as EvS (on his very first American feature-- Fury-- the crew were so Not Ready for this command-issuing German Maestro with his nasty attitude that a plan to murder him with the 'accidental' falling of a heavy object from the studio rafters was not only thought of and planned out but was in-effect and aborted only at the last minute; no director was loathed more than Lang, who incidentally was the first director to fire pistols on the set of his films to maintain his command over cast and crew... a routine that his disciple Freidkin mimicked on The Exorcist).

[Sloper]

And I'd argue that-- in Die Nibelungen-- people weren't coming back for Part Two "to find out what happened" (I mention this because you placed this film in successful opposition to Greed as the vehicle better suited to the cliffhanger part-break, insuring box office returns for the second part).. as you well know, this was in many ways the German National Myth. This wasn't an original serial where a cliffhanger part One would end and folks would come back to the theater and find out what would happen in Part Two! Even though Lang reverted back to the original poem rather than the Wagner opera, I'm sure most folks in Germany pretty much had an idea of what the story of Seigfried was all about. They went back because the film was a marvellous spectacle, a gorgeous piece of art, a majesterial one of a kind experience, plain and simple.

My point wasn’t really that it was a ‘cliffhanger’ story in the sense that people would want to know ‘what happened next’, but I would maintain that it is precisely the kind of story that ‘makes sense’ as a multiple-part film. An awful lot of people knew what would happen in parts two and three of Lord of the Rings as well, but – as much as Dr Mabuse, but for different reasons – these are stories which contain all the right ingredients for long-term box-office success, they ‘make sense’ as epic two- or three-parters. You would go back to see Kriemhild take her revenge, just in order to see it, and in part simply because it's the great German myth and it's your duty as an Aryan to invest the time and effort, but what comparative incentives would the second part of Greed have offered? More greed, more poverty, more grizzly hair on Gibson Gowland’s already not-so-easy-to-look-at face, Zasu Pitts getting her fingers bitten off, and Jean Hersholt’s increasingly terrible dress sense. And not even the canary makes it (in the novel, it's still alive, in its cage, at the end).

And I wasn’t saying that re-telling a great myth was a guarantee of huge profits; there are almost no circumstances in which a film’s commercial success is guaranteed, but, to state the obvious, there are certain things producers will bank on and invest in, and certain things they won’t. A studio would have every reason to think that Die Nibelungen, Faust, America, Metropolis, Frau Im Mond, and so on, were good investments, likely to make a profit, especially in the hands of such proven directors as Lang and Murnau.

Those things sometimes succeed, sometimes fail, but how often do stories like those Stroheim fixed upon ever get the full epic treatment? As two-hour, one-off tragi-comic melodramas, his films make perfect sense – his initial successes indicate that there was a public appetite for this sort of thing, and after all he did make Hollywood’s first million-dollar movie – but it would be astonishing if Mayer or Thalberg had been willing to invest in them to the point of releasing them in several mammoth parts. Stoheim dealt with the kind of sordid material an audience might just flock to once, but expecting them to turn out for multiple instalments would have been an enormous gamble, surely?

As to how hard it is to imagine audiences coming back to the second part of a two-part Greed, I'm reminded of the feedback given by the lucky members of the press who were invited to a rare private screening of the full cut: EvS's widow remembers exhuberant reviewers coming out after the six hours saying they'd witnessed the most extraordinary thing, and were now ready for six more hours if Erich had them. You must remember that you cannot judge the film, it's feel and it's rhythm based on what you see now: all of it's punctuation, it's narrative composition, subtextual interplay between depth and surface, of light and shadow-- all of it has been excised. What we have left it a very drab remnant, a fragment, the greyest middling melodrama with all of the surrounding brights above and darks below taken away.

I’ve never seen the 4-hour reconstruction (could never afford the VHS, and have been confidently expecting the DVD since the dawn of time) or read the book that attempts to piece the original film together, so you perhaps have more of a sense of what we’re missing than I do. However, I genuinely think that what you see in the two-hour Greed is what anyone in their right mind would select from the book for the purposes of a film adaptation. Presumably Stroheim made something great out of them, but the digressions and sub-plots in the book are just tedious beyond belief. My take on the book is that Norris came up with a good, compelling story, but wanted to write the Great American Novel (which Stroheim unaccountably seems to have thought it was) and so fleshed out his good idea with a lot of under-developed ones, which comment on the McTeague/Trina/Marcus story in embarrassingly facile, ham-fisted or mawkish ways.

Even with regard to this main plot, Stroheim’s film transcends the novel in so many ways, perhaps most of all because Norris’ bizarre ideology – a lot of vaguely racist nonsense about how the characters’ fates are determined by traits they’ve inherited from their ancestors, with Norris observing them very much as if they were animals in a laboratory – is only minimally present in the film, and the quality of the acting (and of everything else) lends more depth to the characters. (And I’ve been focussing on the sub-plots, but of course I realise there was a lot of extra material devoted to the main plot as well; the loss of that is something I have to just not think about, as I'm sure it would have brought to the film a grandeur and depth it doesn't quite have at the moment.)

But you’re talking of the film’s artistic quality – the quote I remember from one of the journalists who saw the full version is something along the lines of, ‘that was the greatest film I’ve ever seen; it’s a pity no one else will ever see it’, which really is the most soul-shrinking statement a film-lover could hear, but also perhaps testifies to an awareness that what Stroheim had done was, in practical terms, an un-commercial folly. Maybe it would have done well purely on the strength of its quality, but the likelihood is that it wouldn’t – at least that’s how a producer would have to see it.

It’s all very well for a novelist to drain his soul writing masterpieces on his own terms, which few people will ever want to read, but for a film-maker it isn’t enough that the work is ‘good’, and on the basis of the distinctions between Stroheim’s film and Norris’s book (several people testify that the film was pretty much an exact copy of every line of the book), I just can’t imagine any longer cut, regardless of artistic merit, being more likely to make money than the cut that was released.

This is all speculation, and it’s a sad conversation to be having. But Stroheim, like Welles, is one of those tragic examples of someone who didn’t deserve what he got, but was certainly asking for it, and couldn’t reasonably have expected anything else under the circumstances. Lang, on the other hand, was clearly far more pragmatic. I'd be hard pressed to think of any reason why Metropolis should have flopped, and expensive though it was, you can at least see every deutschmark up there on the screen; it didn't all go on caviar, champagne, orgies and long shots of footwear.

As for their personalities, and their personal investments in their films, I think the clearer genre nature of Lang's films can be a touch misleading-- at least it makes them seem less 'personal'. But this is deceptive. His films are indeed quite personal, and reveal a very peculiar and individual set of obsessions-- paranoia, false veneers/realities being pulled away, infiltration, covert action, subterfuge, bogus identity, the effect of a harsh impersonal world on the good man unprepared for its callousness, the nature of concentrated power, colorful old professor types with mouldering libraries that yeild musty, obscure ancient secrets, etc.

Yes, that all sounds like Fritz Lang – I was too quick to dismiss this aspect of his work earlier. Perhaps the problem is that he seems so uninterested in human beings themselves, which is why things like Destiny, Fury and You Only Live Once don’t work so well for me; the exception, I think, is M, mainly because of the extraordinary nature of the story, the narrative shifts, and Lorre’s performance. As a rule, I guess you have to dig deeper to find the personal aspects of his films, and that’s something I haven’t really tried to do.

Nice story about the assassination attempt, I hadn’t heard that one before. The only nasty anecdote I know about Lang is the fairly tame one about him bullying Edmund Breon on the set of Woman in the Window, forcing him to do take after take of a scene in which he had to eat an ice cream sundae, purely in order to make him sick. The poor guy didn’t even have an especially good part! Oh, and Peter Lorre being repeatedly thrown down the stairs for the final scene of M. (My favourite ‘evil director’ story is Michael Curtiz near-drowning the unsuspecting extras on Noah’s Ark (1929), necessitating the arrival of about thirty ambulances at the studio. The story is told in the first episode of Hollywood, I think.)

[HerrSchreck]

I really don't know how to respond to a lot of what you write since so much of it is taste/opinion based. I can tell you that as far as Greed is concerned, you're thinking in terms of melodrama, of translating story into functional melodrama onto the screen... and so what you imagine missing from the film is more of what you see vis a vis that which survives in the mutilated cut-- i e those passages that you know are in the book that have not been translated onto the screen, presented in the manner of the material that you have seen in the extant cut.

You need to see the reconstruction, whereby you'll understand that this is not the case. The material which was removed from the screen was of an extremely stylized, shadowy, grotesque, practically experimental nature. The parallel narrative of the junkman, meant to illustrate the sordid depths of depravity into which one can sink via obsession with money, is completely gone-- photographed in a garish, highly expressive and exaggerated style, with Cesare Gravina and Dale Fuller transformed into sinister clown figures living in their squalid shack in the junkyard. This picture gives only a sense of the makeup and exaggerated posture of their characters.

In contrast with this hyperstylized portrayal of the lurid depths of obsession and depravity, is the other narrative thread that has been excised: the tale of the elderly neighbor and his romance, his indifference to the financial obsessions swirling around them, and the happiness afforded by the simplicity of his life. What Mayer has done by removing punctuation like this is nullifying Stroeheims entire purpose for making the film: the visual frontiers he pushed & explored, the series of statements rendered by carefully arranged series of contrasts. This is why EvS's heart was so profoundly broken-- his visual, poetic-metaphorical, experimental masterpiece was obliterated and replaced with what you, Sloper, think it is... a grounded, literal, flat literary melodrama. The film is on Top Ten lists because of what we don't see onscreen, but we know once existed, when it existed... this is why the missing footage is considered cinematic Holy Grail #1. Mayer took the grandest culinary dish of fascinating & unique complexity, removed all the garnish, squeezed all the juice out of the cut of meat, ran it under a lukewarm faucet to remove all the spice and flavor, and served you bland baby food.

And I'm afriad I just don't agree that there are topical do's and don'ts for creating a two-parter or even a serial out of something. I don't believe that simple human dramas are not fit for multiple-part tellings, and "More greed, more poverty, more grizzly hair on Gibson Gowland’s already not-so-easy-to-look-at face, Zasu Pitts getting her fingers bitten off, and Jean Hersholt’s increasingly terrible dress sense. And not even the canary makes it (in the novel, it's still alive, in its cage, at the end)," simply tells me I'm talking to someone who's just not an awfully big fan of the film, and assumes that the material that was removed was unvariegated from the extant material, which is untrue. As for simple human dramas maintaining human interest, the most ridiculous soap opera will bear this out. As does reality television in which all you do each week is live in the household of some ridiculous bloody family.

My belief is that it's the handling of the material-- whatever it is-- that will keep the audience enraptured, hooked, coming back for more. Human drama rendered with style and imagination will absolutely keep an audience returning, or in their seat for an extended run of 4-6 hours: Berlin Alexanderplantz, Satantango, Les Miserables, Fanny & Alexander, to name a few.

[Tommaso]

Sloper, I'm not fully sure about it, but I think there is a difference between the Nibelungenlied and the Greek epics you mention insofar as the Nibelungenlied probably wasn't intended as an origin-myth about the German nation at all, although it is an epic dealing with heroes and power struggles; only its rediscovery in the 19th century led to its use (or abuse), its reinterpretation as the German National Poem and the ensuing reception history. When Lang dedicates the film to the German people, he either only makes use of this reception history or actually subscribes to it.

In Lang’s film, the main points of ‘dishonour’ are Gunther’s cowardice, Hagen’s treachery, and Kriemhild’s ruthlessness. Gunther makes up for his cowardice at the end, when he refuses to abandon Hagen, while Hagen’s treachery could be justified as a service done to his lord, to redeem his honour, and as well as being fiercely loyal to his true master, we are clearly meant to be impressed by his bravery at the end.

Yes, that is a convincing point-of-view, which perhaps because it is so alien to myself, I always disregarded as being intended as a positive 'model'. It appears to me as mad as Mishima's loyalty to the Emperor (though equally fascinating), and it may well be that Germanic and Japanese medieval society had quite similar codes of honour, and thus Hagen's deed may have been 'justified' at the time the poem was written. As to the Siegfried character: when I first watched the film a long time ago, I also thought that he's the main 'positive' centre, an idealized hero representing the values and heroic attributes that should be imitated (with or without an emphasis that these are specifically German attributes). But then Pt.2 of the film came, with that positive character dead and an orgy of bloodshed ensuing, totally reversing the impact of Pt.1. And with Siegfried gone, the formal beauty and symmetry of the images in Pt.1 are gone as well; to me it always looked as if Pt.1 represented an idealistic conception, whereas Pt.2 confronts us with the harsh reality. So if Siegfried represents an ideal German, he's pretty much the only one in the film who carries these attributes. That's where I came from with my original comment about Hitler et al; after all, Siegfried isn't killed by some foreign 'subhuman creature', but by precisely those Germans which the film apparently celebrates.

But as I said before, perhaps I have always read the film too much against the grain, and it was actually intended as a sort of 'motivation' for the Germans to become more like Siegfried and less like Hagen and Gunther; your comparison to Mizoguchi's "47 Ronin" made this a little clearer to me. But Siegfried seldom has the humanity and believability that those ronin have; he's a hero, that's all. And, needless to say, the return to medieval codes of honour isn't exactly what the modern world needs most; but the dream of such 'honour' can be easily exploited by politicians for their own use, and both Germany and Japan are good examples for this in 20th century history. Which doesn't make me admire the Mizo film any less (and the Lang is a another story altogether, considering the political situation in 1924 was rather different from the Hitler years).

I don't have the time right now to enter into the Stroheim discussion, but it is fascinating and yes, you MUST see the four-hour-version, even though it can be annoying from time to time because of all the 'breaks' where still photos and other material is inserted to illustrate what "Greed" once was.

[Sloper]

I'm not fully sure about it, but I think there is a difference between the Nibelungenlied and the Greek epics you mention insofar as the Nibelungenlied probably wasn't intended as an origin-myth about the German nation at all, although it is an epic dealing with heroes and power struggles; only its rediscovery in the 19th century led to its use (or abuse), its reinterpretation as the German National Poem and the ensuing reception history.

You’re right that comparison with Greek epic isn’t entirely appropriate, although it must be remembered that the Iliad itself is not an origin-myth. Nonetheless, these are all stories in which a culture celebrates their ancestors, and although it helps that the characters are generally heroic, the moral ambiguities which make them great works of art are integral to their subsequent value as propaganda. From what little I know of medieval epics, they tend to be anything but mindlessly celebratory of their forbears – I guess you could look to modern-day biopics for analogues to this sort of thing. They tend to be generally celebratory in tone, but take care to show the weaknesses of their heroes as well (even to the extent of fabricating those weaknesses).

As to the Siegfried character: when I first watched the film a long time ago, I also thought that he's the main 'positive' centre, an idealized hero representing the values and heroic attributes that should be imitated (with or without an emphasis that these are specifically German attributes). But then Pt.2 of the film came, with that positive character dead and an orgy of bloodshed ensuing, totally reversing the impact of Pt.1. And with Siegfried gone, the formal beauty and symmetry of the images in Pt.1 are gone as well; to me it always looked as if Pt.1 represented an idealistic conception, whereas Pt.2 confronts us with the harsh reality. So if Siegfried represents an ideal German, he's pretty much the only one in the film who carries these attributes.

I agree about the distinction between the two parts; it’s a switch I have trouble dealing with as a viewer, the aesthetic is just completely different in part 2. I don’t so much get the sense that the second film undermines the first – it’s really just the working out of the revenge plot, which is exactly what the Iliad is – but I suspect that what you say about not being able to identify with the film’s ideology is the key to understanding all this. This perhaps is a feature of the ‘medieval’ perspective, which I think is more often than not fundamentally alien to the values of today. In some ways the ancient perspective is more accessible, more sceptical about the notion of honour, and more humane. But this is a complex subject and I’m in over my head.

***

As for Stroheim… No, I haven’t seen the reconstruction. I will do as soon as I possibly can (which very much depends on the people at Warner), but until then I have to defer to you, Schreck and Tommaso, as to what the film was ‘supposed’ to look like. However, there are some things I can address.

What you imagine missing from the film is more of what you see vis a vis that which survives in the mutilated cut-- i e those passages that you know are in the book that have not been translated onto the screen, presented in the manner of the material that you have seen in the extant cut. You need to see the reconstruction, whereby you'll understand that this is not the case. The material which was removed from the screen was of an extremely stylized, shadowy, grotesque, practically experimental nature. The parallel narrative of the junkman, meant to illustrate the sordid depths of depravity into which one can sink via obsession with money, is completely gone.

If the full version was ‘of an extremely stylized, shadowy, grotesque, practically experimental nature’, I would expect nothing less from Stroheim, and nothing less from an 8-hour film based on such minimal subject matter. Are you seriously trying to argue that Mayer and Thalberg should have seen such a film as a sure-fire commercial hit and released it in two or three parts? That they should have looked at the narrative of the junkman and thought, ‘well we could take this out and reduce the film to a reasonable length, but then it wouldn’t be as stylised, shadowy, grotesque and practically experimental, nor would it illustrate the sordid depths of depravity into which one can sink via obsession with money quite as insistently as it should if it’s going to pull in the punters – good work, Erich!’ This all began, remember, with me saying how great it would have been if Stroheim had been allowed to keep that sort of material in his films; I then made the point that it isn’t to be wondered at if he wasn’t allowed to keep it, since his preferred subject matter, unlike Lang’s, is of the sort that studios might feed to audiences in small doses, if at all. (I still don’t see why this has proven to be a controversial statement.) You then counter that no, the full version of Greed would have been commercially viable, but to support this claim you wax lyrical about what an experimental masterpiece it was. No doubt it was, but that only supports what I’m saying: that Stroheim must have been mad if he thought this sort of thing would be looked on favourably by producers who already didn’t like him and thought he spent too much money and shot too much footage.

When you’re not referring to the specifically cinematic qualities of the film – of which the reconstruction can only give the slenderest impression, though I should reserve judgment until I’ve seen it – you’re talking about the thematic importance of the parallel narratives. Your comment about the junkman story suggests that it merely reiterates a theme already driven home with sledgehammer force in the extant film. Then:

In contrast with this hyperstylized portrayal of the lurid depths of obsession and depravity, is the other narrative thread that has been excised: the tale of the elderly neighbor and his romance, his indifference to the financial obsessions swirling around them, and the happiness afforded by the simplicity of his life. What Mayer has done by removing punctuation like this is nullifying Stroeheims entire purpose for making the film: the visual frontiers he pushed & explored, the series of statements rendered by carefully arranged series of contrasts.

The contrasts you refer to are taken from the book. There they don’t work at all in narrative terms, and although I can imagine Stroheim making them work visually – and perhaps work them more neatly into the overall rhythm of the story – whether he succeeded in doing this or not is surely something you would have to judge by watching the whole film in motion? Since we cannot do that, it is indeed tempting to trust the testimony of those few who first saw the film, but the truth is that you’re talking about something that doesn’t exist. We’re arguing over what the existing evidence suggests about the film-that-is-no-more, and all I’m saying is I can’t imagine what Stroheim could possibly have made out of his material that would have looked like a good commercial prospect to the studio heads. Now, you say:

My belief is that it's the handling of the material-- whatever it is-- that will keep the audience enraptured, hooked, coming back for more. Human drama rendered with style and imagination will absolutely keep an audience returning, or in their seat for an extended run of 4-6 hours: Berlin Alexanderplantz, Satantango, Les Miserables, Fanny & Alexander, to name a few.

But if I taxed my sick mind, I could easily come up with ‘material’ which could not, under any circumstances, even with God himself at the helm, be ‘handled’ into something that would make a lot of money. It might be a very good film, but if it was nine hours of a dead baby floating down a river being pecked at by shoals of passing carp, it would not pull a crowd. (Oh dear, we’re back to that form/content argument again…) I maintain that the material in Greed was of a sort that might well have made a lot of money, because sometimes risks pay off, but that Mayer had every reason to think that it wouldn’t. The Fassbinder, Tarr and Bergman films were made in a different era, under completely different circumstances, and it’s absurd to cite them as evidence that a drama such as Greed might have been expected to do well in 1920s’ Hollywood. I haven’t seen the Fassbinder or Tarr so I can’s comment further on the appropriateness of the comparison, but why you’re bringing up Les Mis and F&A in this context is utterly beyond me. Yes they’re depressing, but they also feature extremely sympathetic characters, are ultimately redemptive stories, and (in the case of Les Miserables) have plenty of action, romance and other ingredients that go into making a popular classic. Greed has none of these things. It displays a simplistic and alienating contempt for human nature – tempered somewhat, in the film, by the nuanced performances – it’s about as romantic as raw sewage, its narrative offers little in the way of conventional excitement or intrigue until the very end, and the ending when it comes is as bleak as can be.

Unless Mayer cut out six hours of hair’s-breadth escapes, passionate trysts, and slapstick routines, I don’t think I need to have seen the reconstruction to know all this. Indeed, the only thing I can remember from the brief glimpse I got of the photo-reconstruction book years ago is that the film was supposed to end with a title card indicating the damnation of the characters in the afterlife. It was never going to have them rolling in the aisles. This isn’t a ‘simple human drama maintaining human interest’, because the humans are all greedy and disgusting (except for the nice elderly couple, who might have come over well in the film but are mawkish and perfunctory in the book) and it offers the kind of ‘human interest’ that very few cinema-goers would be able to find appealing for more than two hours.

Your comparison with soap opera and reality TV is also misguided: soap operas, to my knowledge, always offer more in the way of sympathetic characters, intrigue and all the other things I’ve been saying are absent from Greed; while reality TV only works because it is ‘real’. Do you think if someone made a film or TV show consisting of hours and hours of people sitting around doing nothing, as they do in Big Brother, it would be anything but a catastrophic flop (or an art gallery installation)?

"More greed, more poverty, more grizzly hair on Gibson Gowland’s already not-so-easy-to-look-at face, Zasu Pitts getting her fingers bitten off, and Jean Hersholt’s increasingly terrible dress sense. And not even the canary makes it (in the novel, it's still alive, in its cage, at the end)," simply tells me I'm talking to someone who's just not an awfully big fan of the film.

Those are all things I love about Greed. My point was that it’s not an obviously commercial story; what makes you think I was criticising the film? Do you think it was supposed to be a whole lot more fun and exciting than my description suggests? But if we’re presuming to know each other’s taste in films, then (in the spirit of tit-for-tat) you have so far described Greed in the following terms:

cruddy gaps and scraps…a very drab remnant, a fragment, the greyest middling melodrama…a grounded, literal, flat literary melodrama…Mayer took the grandest culinary dish of fascinating & unique complexity, removed all the garnish, squeezed all the juice out of the cut of meat, ran it under a lukewarm faucet to remove all the spice and flavor, and served you bland baby food…the film is on Top Ten lists because of what we don't see onscreen, but we know once existed, when it existed

This last statement makes no sense to me at all. You might as well put Four Devils on your Top Ten list. Your problem with my argument seems to be that I’m extrapolating too much from what does exist and not taking sufficient account of what doesn’t exist, but did once, and of which an (by all accounts fascinating and beautiful) remnant survives. All I can say is that I don’t in any way recognise your descriptions of the extant cut of Greed. I have never seen anything else like this film, from that period or any other. If we’re missing out on an avant-garde masterpiece, that’s a terrible tragedy, but I don’t sit through Greed weeping into my lap and blaming Louis B. Mayer for foisting an inadequate film on me. If you really think it’s baby food, that’s your loss…

But I know you don’t think that; I know that what you really mean is that, great as the extant Greed is, it’s only the top layer of a much greater work. I don’t disagree with that, but it seems to me that in your eagerness to condemn Mayer for his butchery of the film, you’re exaggerating the damage he did, to the point of being disingenuously negative about the film, and wilfully obtuse about the pragmatic realities of working in Hollywood in the 1920s.

[markhax]

As for Stroheim… No, I haven’t seen the reconstruction. I will do as soon as I possibly can (which very much depends on the people at Warner), but until then I have to defer to you, Schreck and Tommaso, as to what the film was ‘supposed’ to look like. However, there are some things I can address.

You can see the 4-hour reconstructed version they are referring to on YouTube--in 29 segments, taking some four hours.

If you are interested, you may also want to check out the very informative BFI monograph on the film by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

[HerrSchreck]

Sloper, could we come back to this perhaps after you've seen the resto? This is getting a little too... unexpectedly defensive.

And way OT for Die Nibelungen.

[Sloper]

A thousand thanks, markhax - I'll take a look.

And Schreck - I get defensive when I'm accused of not liking one of my favourite films. So would you.

[HarryLong]

As to the Siegfried character: when I first watched the film a long time ago, I also thought that he's the main 'positive' centre, an idealized hero representing the values and heroic attributes that should be imitated

It ought to be pointed out that Sigfried is hardly pure; he does, after all participate - it might be said he initiates - the deception that wins Brunhilde's hand in marriage. Like many a Greek hero referenced in this discussion, he sows the seeds of his own destruction. (I'm surprised no one noted the similarities between Siegfried's vulnerable spot on his back and Achilles' on his heel during the comparisons of the two myth cycles.) The Nordic and Greek myths share are both about gods (whom Lang significantly omits) and heroes who often behave badly ... as in some grand soap opera.

I really need to go back and check the post-Moloch scene in METROPOLIS based on an observation above. There are a great many paired/mirrored images in DIE NIBELUNGEN (most significantly Brunhilde and Siegfried look very much alike, one blond the other brunette) and METROPOLIS strikes me as a continuation (or Part Three) of NIBELUNGEN in its themes and visual treatment. Discovering yet another echoed visual is interesting - there's also the more obvious one of the dias on which Maria dances, held aloft by muscular men (or statues of muscular men, I'm never quite certain which) echoes the dwarves holding aloft the treasure in NIBELUNGEN & their turning to stone is mirrored by the cathedral figures coming to life in METROPOLIS.

[HerrSchreck]

A thousand thanks, markhax - I'll take a look.

And Schreck - I get defensive when I'm accused of not liking one of my favourite films. So would you.

I get a little snippy when folks don't have the self awareness to realize when they've created a very distinct impression (in this case of not liking a film) and blame the impression on their interlocutor. I'm there now. You need to chill, Sloper-- nobody was "accusing" you of anything. I was merely defending my point that the film had a holy disservice of mutilation done to it my Mayer... a mutilation which you fully understand or support

[Tommaso]

Harry Long, interesting idea, and your examples are rather convincing. But if "Metropolis" is the Nibelungen court transposed into the future, could one argue that the inexorable fate that governs the epic/heroic world is now replaced by the impersonal power of machinery and capitalism? In any case, whereas Lang in "Die Nibelungen" offers no way out from that fate (nor, of course, does the epic poem), the end of "Metropolis" seems to indicate that the destructive forces can be overcome by rational thinking and emotional, human behaviour (which is largely absent in "Kriemhilds Rache"). But then, I always regarded that end as unconvincing or at least as too simplistic in its message.