The Whanganui Film Society's next film, Destiny, is a newly restored early silent film from German Cinema legend Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, The Big Sleep). Like many German émigrés, Lang's own destiny meant fleeing Nazi Germany for the US, where his German Expressionist style contributed to the evolution of Hollywood film noir.
"He was born 126 years ago, before sci-fi films, serial killer movies and film noir were invented," the British Film Institute says. "He'd help invent them all. Fritz Lang was one of the giants of cinema."
Destiny is considered a significant early work from the director's four-decade, two-continent career.
The Guardian (5 Stars)
"The only response to this 1921 silent movie by Fritz Lang, now restored and rereleased, is a kind of amazement - at its ambition, its enigma, its combination of innocence and sophistication. As so often with early cinema and silent cinema, you see the kinship with fable and fairy story, but also find yourself suspecting that it is somehow silent cinema that is truly aware of the medium's possibilities; these seem to elude the more evolved, yet earthbound realist cinema that comes later.
Destiny is a parable fantasy. A young woman (Lil Dagover) is horrified when her fiance (Walter Janssen) is led away by the implacable figure of Death (Bernhard Goetzke) who has recently bought a plot of land that he has turned into a walled garden for his captured souls. The hatchet-faced figure is clearly an ancestor for Bengt Ekerot's Death in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. However, perhaps weary of his endless duty as the bringer of mortality, Death offers her a deal: he will transport her to alternative realities - Persia, 15th-century Venice and China - in which they occupy alternative personae, in love and in peril. If she can save her sweetheart's life in any of these, Death will spare him.
But it is a challenge that is to extend to a dilemma in the present day. Destiny, originally titled Der Müde Tod (weary death), is a deeply mysterious tragic melodrama that contrives also to be an expressionist satire, an absurdist opera about our hardwired day-to-day conviction that we, with our youth, health and strength, can overpower tired old Death. Love is greater than death, the woman proclaims, a line that echoes the (important) Woody Allen film. It is bizarre and captivating, an eerie dream of longing and fear."
- Peter Bradshaw
Time Out (5 Stars)
Metropolis director Fritz Lang's first major film, a dizzying and dreamlike portmanteau fantasy.
What an extraordinary rediscovery. In 1921 - six years before his masterpiece Metropolis and 15 before he fled fascist Germany for Hollywood and helped to kickstart the film noir movement - master director Fritz Lang and his wife and regular writing partner, Thea von Harbou dreamt up this glowering slice of silent cinematic sorcery.
The title translates literally as 'The Weary Death', but Der Müde Tod was released in English under the nondescript moniker Destiny. It follows Death (Bernhard Goetzke), who has grown tired of his endless task and buys a plot of land outside a sleepy European village. Here he builds a vast wall, and the only living person able to enter within is an unnamed innocent (Lil Dagover), whose quest to rescue her beloved will send her on a dreamlike quest from Venice to the Middle East to China, where she will bear witness to three doomed romances.
Shot in the aftermath of the Great War, in a land where death was far from a stranger, Der Müde Tod is weighty with a sense of portent and grim fate. But Lang's direction is never heavy-handed. Instead, he glories in the magic-weaving possibilities of cinema, from gorgeous visual effects - there's a lovely flying carpet sequence - to expressionist sets, dreamy dissolves and postmodern looks-to-camera. This one will haunt your dreams."
- Tom Huddleston
FILM
Destiny (Der müde Tod) Public Screening: Monday, June 19, 7pm Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum Fritz Lang • Germany • 1921 • 98 mins • Silent, tinted • PG • In German with English subtitles
