So what was meant as a reassuring, hopeful last shot is actually a rather nasty conclusion—it is the clear implication that Caligari has won the day by his ability to pass as both a fairground performer and a respected doctor. This amounts to a trap: in this kind of cinema, no character can be identified with or simply written off to villainy. Every figure is part of the phantom elasticity that partakes of the opposed aspects in any human being. The difficulty in placing trust brings us to that essential enigma in German cinema, Fritz Lang, “Herr Director” to those he wanted to impress, but something far more dubious or disconcerting.
Lang lied about both his parents, but he existed in a dangerous world where the lie might be taken for granted. He said that his father, Anton Lang, was an architect, whereas he seems to have been just a construction chief who worked with architects. As for his mother, he said she was from the country and the farming class, but Paula Schlesinger was Jewish and part of a family in the clothing business.
Friedrich Christian Anton Lang was born in Vienna in December 1890. He was raised in bourgeois comfort, and he got fragments of education in studying architecture, painting, and design. But he was also a womanizer and a wanderer, and quite early on he was working in Viennese nightclubs when he told his parents he was doing more serious things. He claimed later that he had roamed over most of the world, but no one who knew him could determine when he had done this. When war broke out he joined the Austro-Hungarian army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, saw a great deal of action, was decorated and wounded. One injury affected an eye and encouraged him to wear a monocle, which he learned to use to intimidate others. It was while in hospital, recovering from his injuries, that he began writing movie scenarios.
There is a group of movie people born, like Lang, in the 1890s (as the medium was born). It includes King Vidor, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, and Jean Renoir. As kids growing up with the new sensation, they became founding fathers of film, but so many of them were drifters before film found or retrieved them. Lang would hardly have been willing to risk losing his sight to become a master of things seen, but he was sharp enough to see the publicity appeal of his disability once he was getting established—thus the monocle and the way he used it to send a flashing message to his actors and crew.
Once recovered and established as a scenarist, Lang rose quickly; it was part of the glamour of the movies that people could be “made” so fast. Erich Pommer did offer Caligari to Lang, but the novice was tied up on Die Spinnen (a big adventure film), so, by his own testimony, he did “no more” than suggest the framing device, the very thing the writers hated! I am inclined to believe this story in that it goes to the core of Lang’s undermining gaze. He is never more disturbing than in his hollow happy endings.
Then, all of a sudden, he was seized by demonic energy and in the next few years he made the three-hour Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and the three-hour film of Die Nibelungen (1924), which includes Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge. Lang’s evolving style was not as strictly expressionist as that in Caligari, though he was prepared to use that manner sometimes. But his visual appetite (as if famished) fed upon studio settings, the intricate traps in décor and artificial light. He became increasingly interested in the geometry of the city, and there are few kinds of exhilaration in silent film to match the frenzy of activity in the Mabuse films. Lang was steeped in pulp adventure literature and he knew that films had to be about lines of sight—seeing and being seen. So doors open, cars halt side by side at a traffic light, men watch women—the intersection is that of friction, and usually it leads to explosions.
This exhilaration extends to the character of Mabuse, one of the first movie villains who had won at least half the heart of his maker. Lang would say that Mabuse represented all the chaos and wickedness of Germany in the 1920s, plus the coming evil of Hitler and his gang. But as a director, Lang could not take his eyes off the mechanics of plotting—Mabuse is a writer, a storymaker, a would-be director. Sometimes he is seen in bed, surrounded by scattered pages.
Cinema seldom loses or kills off its monsters: Kong could fall off the spire of the Empire State Building one year, but then his son would be back. Mabuse was a character who lasted Lang from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and if he is mad, it is a marvel that sanity can find him so interesting—unless you share Lang’s Germanic instinct that there is something like a heightened death watch in cinema. The good guys in Lang and a thousand other films are so banal, so bland, until they are exposed to the temptation of going astray. In one of Lang’s Hollywood films, The Woman in the Window (1944), Edward G. Robinson is a solid, bourgeois citizen who dreams himself into a criminal situation.
Lang went to America in 1924 to open Die Nibelungen (a very classy production, building to a storm of battle and massacre). It’s hard to believe he wasn’t flirting with American offers. His reputation had soared, and Hollywood was greedy for continental talent. Ernst Lubitsch had been recruited only the year before to make Rosita with Mary Pickford, and when Lang got to Los Angeles, he spent time with Lubitsch, admiring his house and his pool and picking up Hollywood gossip.
Later on, as he amended his own history, Lang would say it was the sight of New York—the skyscrapers, the canyon streets, the density of a modern city—that most excited him. However, he did not explore the chance of making a film in those real canyons. He preferred to rebuild the idea of a modern city, at Ufa, with Metropolis (1927). And when he visited California, he observed a crucial difference between the two countries: Doug Fairbanks told him that American films were about stardom, so Lang decided that in Germany the director should be the star. He came back, apparently without an offer, saying, “They build things big in America. There’s enough space. And Paradise has been created.”
Not that Lang knew too much about that condition. In 1919, apparently, he had married a girl named Lisa Rosenthal. Not much is known about her—some say she was a hospital nurse; others claim she was a cabaret dancer; some believed she was Jewish. Later on, Lang gave no help to researchers and was inclined to forget Lisa. Why? Well, sometime in 1920, Lisa Rosenthal came back to their apartment one day and found Lang making love with Thea von Harbou. Thea was a leading screenwriter and the wife of the actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would play Dr. Mabuse.
There was an ugly scene in which, somehow, Lisa was shot dead by a bullet fired from Lang’s revolver, a prop he was inclined to brandish when he got overexcited. To this day no one knows what happened. It could have been suicide—though Lisa had made plans for later that day. It might have been something more sinister. Which plays better? No charges were preferred. From 1921 onward, Thea von Harbou became Lang’s chosen screenwriter, and then his wife. Later, when he left Germany, she joined the Nazi Party.
She did not accompany Lang on his 1924 visit to America, but not too long after his return, he seems to have shared some ideas for Metropolis with her, and prompted her to write a novel that would be the basis of the screenplay (plus a way of securing more income). The story was set in the year 2000 in an immense city-state called Metropolis:
When the sun sank at the back of Metropolis, the houses turned to mountains and the streets to valleys, and a stream of light, which seemed to crackle with coldness, broke forth from all he windows. A series of diagonal lines appearing from opposite sides of the screen form the opening title: METROPOLIS. Light shines through the letters in prismatic patterns, while the towers and tenements of the city appear in iris behind. Shadows move across the screen as we dissolve to a series of shots of the great machines of Metropolis.
That’s the start of the screenplay, which may be the most ambitious and literary film script written until that time. In the film itself, we do not quite get the impression of the urban forms stealing the natural forms, but we feel the light that crackles with coldness and the absolute removal of nature—whether countryside, natural growth, or daylight. For years thereafter, people marveled at the prophetic a
ccuracy of Metropolis: how far, seventy-plus years in advance, Lang had guessed at the look of the world. Now it’s easier to see that this city is a vast prison of lifelessness, because real architecture and abysmal social planning have made such places for us.
Life goes on, and the machinery of production grinds at its slave labor. But there are qualms in the Metropolis: Joh Fredersen is the ruler of the place (without crown, uniform, or insignia); his son, Freder, is a playboy who begins to doubt the viability of the social contract; Maria is a pure girl who is a saint to the workers; and Rotwang is a warped genius, in part the creator of the place, but now the kind of mastermind we know from Dr. Mabuse, an overseer who longs for the destruction of everything. (He is another part for Rudolf Klein-Rogge.) To defy any hope of reform, Rotwang kidnaps Maria, takes her to his laboratory, and makes a robot-like replacement so that he can send this “other” Maria out into the city—seductive, lascivious, treacherous—to spread moral confusion and destruction. (Both Marias are played by Brigitte Helm.)
Too often the drama is at this trite level, and by general consent, the resolution of Metropolis is not just foolish but also an evasion of the anxieties aroused by the film. The conclusion comes when Freder Fredersen brings his father and Grot (the workers’ foreman) together with this handshake sentiment: “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”
Siegfried Kracauer, who was bent on tracing how German cinema had paved the way for Nazism—his book was called From Caligari to Hitler—pointed out accurately enough that this cliché was awfully close to the way Dr. Joseph Goebbels appealed to the heart: “Power based on a gun may be a good thing; it is however better and more gratifying to win the heart of a people and to keep it.”
Even as Metropolis opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, in Berlin on January 10, 1927, there were lamentations over the abyss that separated its “content” from the cinematic power. This reaction was more to the point because Metropolis was the most expensive production ever mounted in Germany. It had taken 310 days of shooting (plus 60 nights), and the budget was reported to be 5 million marks. (This meant over $1 million in 1927 money.) Ufa had had to seek large loans to survive, and as the film failed to get its money back, the company passed into the power of Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, a newspaper magnate. He also owned or controlled more than a hundred theaters. (In American terms, he was a monopolist.) Worse, he was sympathetic to the Nationalist Party. So, in an oblique way, the hand-and-heart bromide of the film was swept aside by realpolitik. Because of the film’s commercial failure, Ufa became a Nazi company.
No one could suggest this was the long-term aim of Lang or von Harbou; the film’s inane but lofty ambitions are far from that. Still, Lang would be told later by Goebbels (he said) that when Hitler saw Metropolis in Bavaria in 1927, he declared that Lang was the man who might one day make the Reich’s films.
Was Hitler a good critic, a good audience? I fear he may have been, for both the sentiments and the sentimentality of Metropolis mean all too little compared with the dynamic of the imaging—the radical view of the workforce as just that, a force without individuality; the inspired or enflamed treatment of the two Marias (still photographs of the shooting make it clear what intimate, voyeurist, or collaborative attention Lang paid to Brigitte Helm as the robot Maria, especially in her snaking, erotic dance); the apocalyptic crisis of the city as it is flooded, the vectors of escape and destruction; and the aura of Rotwang, the most striking human figure in the film.
Am I suggesting that Fritz Lang was intrinsically fascist, or was it the medium? I’m not quite sure. As of 1927 that charge could not mean what it would mean by 1945. The record shows that Lang quit Nazi Germany, went to America, and made several films (Fury, Hangmen Also Die, Cloak and Dagger) that have overtly antifascist themes. What is tougher to assess is that Lang’s natural coldness, his severe analytic eye, and his thrill at disaster amount to a fascistic feeling in Metropolis. The crowd is a blunt instrument, gullible and dangerous—it makes an intriguing comparison with Nathanael West’s mob-in-waiting. The coda and its reassurance are trite. The clear impact of the film—and this was not unnatural from someone who had lived through Germany’s instability in the 1920s—was that the sociopolitical order was headed for disaster, and that the dynamism on-screen was a compelling message.
Or was it just that the basic circumstances of cinema—the overwhelming screen, and its eager but estranged audience—were suited to a fascist state?
At the time, and in the decades since, commentators have wrestled with Metropolis and the mixture of awe and dismay it produces, just as the film’s power remains disconcerting. H. G. Wells said it was maybe the silliest film he had ever seen—though he thought it had borrowed things from his writing. Decades later, Pauline Kael called it “a wonderful, stupefying folly”—and if that is not quite an official genre of movies it’s one we should leave open. It will have company before this book is over.
Luis Buñuel said the picture was two films cobbled together very awkwardly. One part was its text, which he deplored.
But on the other hand…What an exalting symphony of movement! How the machines sing in the midst of wonderful transparencies, crowned by the triumphal arches…Each powerful flash of steel, every rhythmic succession of wheels, pistons, and unknown mechanical forms, is a marvelous ode, a new poetry for our eyes. Physics and Chemistry are miraculously transformed into Rhythm. Not a single moment of ecstasy. Even the intertitles, whether ascending, descending, wandering about the screen, melting into light or dissolving into darkness, join the general movement: they too become images.
That last point is important: the titles within the film seem to have been written there by Freder or Rotwang by hand (and Rotwang has an artificial hand). Throughout the film, they remind us that the screen is a screen, and not just the site of a story. It takes the film closer to graffiti and agitprop slogans. The writing is nervous, occult, and magical, but more human than most of the things the people in the film do.
Over the years, Metropolis has had several versions, including being accompanied by pop music. Yet it was known that part of the film was lost. Then it was found, in Argentina, and at the Berlin Film Festival of 2010 the longest version yet was played—in a large theater, but also on a special screen at the Brandenburg Gate for an open-air audience of several hundred braving a bad winter. Once more, the film looked amazing and felt alarming, even if the “lost” passages were of inferior technical quality. Never mind: Lang’s Metropolis has the dread of impending apocalypse, which says so much of its era. It is evidence of Lang’s disturbing genius and Germany’s worse history.
Lang would make four more films in Germany at this time: Spies (1928), Woman in the Moon (1929), M (1931), and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). The last is a sound film in which Mabuse’s gang is still plotting the overthrow of all order. Lang claimed that he put many Nazi slogans into Mabuse’s mouth, and apparently the Party heard him. For in March 1933 they banned the film “for its cruel and depraved content.” Whereupon Dr. Goebbels asked Lang to visit him in his office.
Lang gave several accounts of that testing interview. He said Goebbels was friendly, telling Lang about Hitler’s admiration for his films. He apologized for the ban on the showing of The Testament and even indicated that a little recutting might solve the problem. Then he offered Fritz Lang the job of being in charge of moviemaking for the Third Reich.
Years later, Lang reported how he sweated through the interview, watching the clock advance—the clock is such a torture rack in Metropolis. He had reckoned as he listened to Goebbels that his number was up: he would have to leave Germany immediately; and he would have to gather what he could of his funds. The clock was urgent because the banks closed at three. But Goebbels talked and talked, and it was past five before Lang got away, promising to give Goebbels an answer as quickly as possible. He went home, gathered some money and jewelry from his apartment, and then that night took the tr
ain out of Berlin. He added in some versions of the story that it felt like being in a bad movie.
But it didn’t happen. A great deal of research has been applied to the case, culminating in Patrick McGilligan’s 1997 biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. This includes perusal of Lang’s passport and its exit visas. There was no sudden departure. Instead, Lang made several trips within Europe and did not leave Berlin properly until July 1933—he went to Paris then, where he had a deal (with Erich Pommer) to make Liliom. He and Thea von Harbou were divorced in April. There is no record of the meeting in Goebbels’s appointment diary—and he was a movie fan. A number of people had always doubted the “escape” story and noted how its details had varied in different tellings. Gottfried Reinhardt (the son of Max Reinhardt) had this to say: “Lang could have stayed in Germany, there’s no question about it. If they hadn’t found out that he was half-Jewish. He tried to stay. He was a dishonorable man, a totally cynical man. I don’t think he gave a damn.”
It’s not easy writing a fair history of cinema while locked into hero worship for directors. Yet many of us are resolved to be loyal to the medium, and to overlook the faults of its heroes. Are the pressures and opportunities in filmmaking so bound up with power over the millions, and so tied to money, that behavior suffers? Anyway, Lang didn’t take the job with Nazi film. But there was another candidate, of course, and we’ll be meeting her.
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