Izo wrote:I find these films kind of wonderful despite their various inadequacies in special effects and performance, which in a work of naive exotica I find very easy to overlook. Lang's direction remains faultless throughout - if not among his flashiest work - with minimalist set design that nevertheless communicates this mythical, Temple of Doom-style vision of India. I find Debra Paget's dance with the cobra, for example, simultaneously spellbinding and ridiculous, and it's done with very little in the way of set dressing aside from the various extras and the statue backdrop. Smoke fills much of the screen, serving the dual purpose of adding to the atmosphere and covering up some of the seams. Not even the goofy cobra puppet derails the scene for me.
I'm not generally a fan of this sort of film, and on a first viewing I found Lang's Indian epic quite tedious, especially the first part - but after listening to David Kalat's commentary (one of his best, I think) and then watching the films again with the English-language dub, I feel pretty much the same way as you.
Even on a first viewing, and even after the gushing on this board about the beauty of the imagery (and the transfer), I was astonished by how good this film looks. If I hadn't already known this was directed by Lang, I might still have felt like comparing its visual grandeur to that of
Die Nibelungen. The sets are amazingly detailed, although as you say they don't feel excessively cluttered or busy, and some of the lighting effects are just breathtaking. There are several moments when the lighting is actually quite inconsistent - Lang seems to like having an orange light glowing in from an adjacent location, even if that location was a cool blue colour - but this is all part of the deliberate, deft artifice that permeates the film. See also the moment when Berger's executioner comes for him in his cell: the orange light on the wall in front of Berger tells him there is someone with a torch by the door, then when the man enters at the top of the staircase, he's suddenly bathed in an inexplicable green light. This is not an authentic world, populated by real human beings, but a painstakingly intricate illusion constructed by a master-craftsman.
Such effects not only draw attention to the craft that has gone into the film, they also give a clue to why it is often hard to enjoy. There is very little in the way of authentic humanity on display here, and I can't help feeling that Lang's cold, detached attitude to people is unsuited to this kind of material, however brilliantly he conjures up the setting. This is, after all, not
Die Nibelungen: the main characters are not super-human archetypes engaged in a mythical struggle, but relatively ordinary people we’re supposed to be able to identify with. Under Lang’s direction, they never look like anything but automata, and most of the time I found their struggles uninteresting at best, irritating at worst. Indeed, it’s telling that the only two characters who have any real life in them are Chandra and Ramigani (their relationship a sort of variation on the Gunther / Hagen dynamic). The former especially, played with real complexity and finesse by Walther Reyer, injects some human drama into the proceedings. It’s this sort of morally ambiguous figure that Lang is most comfortable with, part murderous tyrant, part tragic, lovelorn hero.
Anyway, when I watched this again with the English dub, not only could I enjoy the imagery in a more undiluted way, I could also appreciate the cleverness of the films’ construction now that I knew the whole plot (which I’m slightly embarrassed to say I found quite hard to follow on the first go...). These films are about the relationship between large, overwhelming forces and the puny humans who are subject to them – not really man vs. Fate, as the blurb on the MoC sleeve suggests, because the higher powers here are not that coherent. There’s a crucial exchange where Berger expresses an impatience to get started on the building work, and Chandra counters that impatience is a European illness; what is an hour, or a day, or a year, in the endless stream of eternity? Orientalism aside, this is fundamentally similar to the outlook on life found in many other Lang films, where people’s attempts to control their lives turn into a futile scrabble against the randomness of circumstance.
We see this again and again in these films. The first one begins by showing us labouring peasants, and we first see the hero sitting among some poor children in a courtyard: the kid with the dog looks up at him, he smiles, the kid smiles back. Then we see Berger coming to the aid of Bharani at the well. He is a friend to the poor and disenfranchised, and that’s pretty much the most interesting thing we ever learn about this character. Most obviously, this makes him a suitable antagonist to the other ‘tiger’, Chandra, who has an unhealthy sense of his own superiority to his subjects.
But the point turns out to be more complex than this. Lang shows us that moment of friendship between Berger and the dog-owning boy, not because the boy will be an ally to the hero later on, as we might expect in this kind of story, but only so that we will recognise this boy when he and his dog get eaten by the tiger. (It’s a measure of the film’s tin ear for human sentiment, and its stoic worldview, that the hero’s reaction to this event is sociopathically nonchalant.) Similarly, despite Berger’s rescue of Bharani, he is unable to save her when Ramigani contrives her death, specifically because of Chandra’s insistence on an inflexible hierarchy: his is the sovereign will, he does not like to see his brother disobeyed by a servant, therefore Bharani must get into the basket. (Again, Berger is comically brusque when consoling Seetha for the loss of her beloved servant.)
When they make their escape, Berger and Seetha ride their horses to death – Lang pauses to take in the futile sacrifice made by these animals – are looked after by villagers whose homes are then burnt...and then they are captured anyway. When Berger picks up the orange at Shiva’s shrine and then hears Seetha’s scream outside, this might seem to affirm the existence and omnipotence of the gods, a coherent and meaningful ‘higher power’ controlling events. But Seetha, who never learns of her lover’s act of sacrilege, is left feeling that there are no gods, and she would be killed by the cobra during the dance-trial later on, purely on account of a random un-fastening of her ankle-bracelet, if it were not for Chandra’s intervention. You might say that this trial was arranged, not by Shiva, but by a self-interested priest, but I think the point stands: on the whole, these films do not display any serious faith in a meaningful ‘order’ to events. Rather, the overall impression is of random chances afflicting people who are helpless to exercise any real control over their lives.
The sequence of events at the climax to the second film is indicative of this: we see Walther and Irene Rhode making extensive efforts to figure out where Berger is being held prisoner, but they don’t find him, he escapes; he escapes, not by carving his chain out of the prison-wall, which we see him trying to do three times, but by an extraordinary stroke of luck (and, yes, some quick thinking and dexterity on his part) when his executioner’s attempt to humiliate him backfires; as he’s making his escape, Irene catches sight of him, and calls his name; but they can’t find each other, and she falls through a hole in the ground, now calling the name of Asagara, who also can’t locate her at first; then he happens to figure out that she’s in the leper-cave (he has knack for this, having saved Irene’s brother earlier on in exactly the same way) and gets killed by falling rocks; and then Irene, Walther and Berger just happen to end up in the same spot at the same time; Berger then commits some acts of heroism which we don’t get to see, except for the aftermath of his slicing the one soldier’s head open, and his slaughter of the other soldier whom Seetha has just incapacitated for him; then we finally get a showdown between Berger and Chandra, but in a wonderful touch of realism, our hero is now too exhausted to hold the axe or even stand up, and the day is saved, not by the hero, but by the ambiguous villain and his last-second change of heart.
As good vs. evil adventure stories go, this one is incredibly messy, and it’s hard to feel all that great about the happy ending when so much of it depends on sheer dumb luck, and even bad luck that turns out to be good in the long run – Berger probably would have been killed if he had managed to free the chain from the wall. And by the way, note that despite Berger’s and Walther’s sympathy for the lepers, there is no clear indication that those lepers who survived the falling rocks, or anyone else in Eschnapur, will enjoy an improved quality of life after the Europeans bugger off home, leaving a power vacuum in their wake, and presumably without having built any hospitals...
The obsessive technical beauty and intricacy of the film seem to smother its human interest elements, seducing the viewer’s senses but (at least in my experience) making it hard to feel involved in what is happening. But the films are also
about the way in which human agency is smothered by the vast forces surrounding it. Much of the time, the effect of those beautiful images is to give a sense, not of benevolent or malevolent forces consciously closing in on the protagonists, but rather of an incomprehensibly complex environment to which the protagonists are oblivious. The light coming in from the next room is the wrong colour; implacable and possibly meaningless statues stare ominously down at the heroes; and look at the shots of the sky when Berger goes to visit Seetha in her gilded cage, with the sun obscured by clouds reflected in a pond, and then a wonderful low-angle shot where, as the camera pans, we see a vast block of grey cloud stretching out into the distance, framed by patches of blue sky on either side (at either end of the panning movement). These clouds don’t just represent the threat of Chandra’s wrath hanging over the lovers, but also the ‘darkness over Eschnapur’ which the wise man refers to in his conversation with Chandra, when he blows out the candle and says that he cannot see the way forward. Chandra’s final repentance seems like a response to the randomness of everything that has happened, a realisation of how little his much-vaunted ‘will’ can actually accomplish, rather than a sentimental revelation that Berger and Seetha belong together.
I still think this is a deeply flawed, and at times simply boring film. I enjoyed the commentary quite a lot more than the film itself. But it’s still very clever and brilliant in all sorts of ways, and the second part especially is very exciting and suspenseful at times – in part because you feel that, on the way to the inevitable happy ending, almost anything could happen from one moment to the next.
