Three floral arrangements and a Sunday Intertitle

(1) WOMAN IN THE MOON (Fritz Lang)

(2) PASSING FANCY (Yasujirô Ozu)

(3) ERASERHEAD (David Lynch)

The necessary background: arrangement one has been destroyed, absent-mindedly, by a distraught would-be astronaut during a telephone call; arrangement two has been destroyed very deliberately by a distraught schoolboy in a horticultural tantrum; arrangement three has not been destroyed. That’s as good as it was ever meant to look.

I touched base with the Lynch again when discussing sound design with students, re-watched the Lang for an upcoming project (Fiona, to my surprise, had never seen it) and the Ozu is part of a programme of viewing designed to make me fit for yet another project. Let’s talk about the Lang a little.

The colossal, industry-busting size of METROPOLIS must have left the Lang-Von Harbou team in a bit of a bind. They wouldn’t want their next film to be an anticlimax, but they couldn’t realistically top what had gone before. Their eventual follow-up sprang from an abandoned idea for the previous super-epic’s climax in which the heroes would finally blast off into space (THINGS TO COME would eventually follow a comparable structure) and allowed them to make a slightly more modest film with a spectacular vertical ascent. So it was something different anyway. The advent of sound would allow the team to take M in an entirely different direction and not worry about gigantism as a goal.

While some compliment WOMAN IN THE MOON for inventing the countdown, I say it deserves more praise for correctly predicting that the first interplanetary travelers would walk the lunar surface wearing chunky knitwear and jodhpurs.

Whatever that weird experiment was that Lang was performing with his actors in METROP — a range of emotion starting in a kind of feverish hysteria and ending in complete meltdown — he’s abandoned it in favour of a lighter tone and somewhat more naturalistic perfs. Though Fritz Rasp can never be adequately captured by a word like naturalistic. Germany’s leading Backpfeifengesicht, he seems to really exult in being repellent, this time perfecting his gloating smirk from beneath an askew smear of oily Hitler-hair that seems to have been poured onto his scalp like syrup. A pre-echo of Gary Oldman in THE FIFTH ELEMENT.

Rasp and his hair

The first section of the film has more sweetness than any other Lang of its era, with sentimental sympathy for its outcast rocket scientist and his devoted young chum. (The scientist is introduced hurling an interloper downstairs, just like Professor Challenger in Doyle’s The Lost World.) Then a kind of Mabuseian paranoia takes hold as Rasp and his cohort of shadowy industrialists force their way into the moon mission.

Complicated intertitular thing: the announcer in the upper left is live action, the rest of the frame is a still image, and the words are animated, flying out from the announcer to vanish bottom of frame: “The spaceship (weltraumschiff) has reached the launch pad.”

Then there’s the launch and the journey — the intentionally juvenile aspect of the story is clinched by the presence of a schoolboy stowaway.

Then the stuff on the moon, where the team is beset with treachery, cowardice and, yes, lunacy, as well as a violently unstable romantic triangle. Though I’ll never stop boosting METROPOLIS, in its restored version, as a gripping story as well as a historically important epic, a case could be made for FRAU IM MOND as an easier sell if you’re thinking of introducing students or anyone else to German silent cinema.

The Sunday Nontertitle: Three Finger Salute

So, according to my calendar, one week after the vernal equinox announced the coming of Spring, we have the start of British Summertime (a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one). I never knew Spring was only a week long, but now that I do, it kind of makes sense.

To celebrate a Summer that isn’t a Summer, we have an intertitle that isn’t an intertitle. For Arthur Robison’s WARNING SHADOWS is title-free, apart from the opening credits. Above, we see how they signify the start of Act III. Now, a silent without intertitles is like a day without sunshine to me — even THE LAST LAUGH has one. But, on the other hand, the fewer the titles, the more effective the cinematic storytelling — or the simpler the story.

An overwrought Fritz Kortner smashes his mirror, an action Robison liked so much he gave it to Anton Walbrook in THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE — who repeated it in THE RED SHOES..

WARNING SHADOWS actually has a rather sophisticated narrative, disguised as a straightforward one. The “nocturnal hallucination” structure goes well beyond the usual “it-was-all-a-dream” bookends in terms of ambiguity, resonance and meta-narrative allusiveness. The sinister shadow-puppeteer, at once Hoffmannesque and reminiscent of the creepy cobbler in THE RED SHOES, is an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker himself, presenting a cautionary fable with such artistry that we all mistake it for reality.

The film is subtitled “A NOCTURNAL HALLUCINATION” — and they don’t mean this bit!

Robison seems an interesting guy — an American who became an archetypal German expressionist filmmaker, with both this and the sound version of THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE starring Anton Walbrook. Also a British version of THE INFORMER with Lars Hanson an unlikely Irishman. Further study is warranted. Here, he has the services of designer Albin Grau and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, both from NOSFERATU.

In WARNING SHADOWS, a tousled Fritz Kortner is tormented by homicidal jealousy regarding his wife, with her Grecian costume and strange, funnel-shaped hairdo. The arrival of a grimacing shadow-puppeteer leads to an extended revenge phantasie, making this the German expressionist version of UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (itself a screwball Othello). Fritz Rasp (the newly-restored Thin Man of METROPOLIS) plays a snide footman, his centre-parting extending right down to the back of his neck, a striking look in a film marked by tonsorial eccentricity from the off.

We also get Rudolph Klein-Rogge, and Alexander Granach (Knock, the Renfield character from NOSFER) is “the Shadowplayer” — a unique performance attained mainly by thrusting his arse out in an insolent fashion. I may have to make him my avatar.

The cast is frozen in time in this Last Supper pose/composition, so that Granach can project an instructive shadowplay inside their dreaming minds — a metaphor for the cinema itself?

Verdict: grotesque beauty. Not a horror movie, really, so Denis Gifford’s featuring two stills from it in his Pictorial History of Horror Movies is sheer perversity, of the kind we love him for. This may have been the last GOOD film in his book left for me to see…

Buy Kino’s DVD and rescue me from penury: Warning Shadows – A Nocturnal Hallucination

The Boxing Day Intertitle: The Metropolis Courier

Well, God knows it took us long enough, but we finally watched our BluRay of METROPOLIS (new and restored) — it was a big event that couldn’t just be indulged in on any old night. I was going to call this post “Things Fiona Said During Metropolis” because there were some zingers, but she was so charmed by the sight of The Thin Man reading The Metropolis Courier (the daily rag of Fiona’s home city Dundee is likewise a Courier) that I had to give up that idea, and my other one, which was McTROPOLIS. “How are you going to find enough Scottish references to justify that title?” asked Fiona, and I backed away from the challenge.

Fiona’s first line comes from before the film even started — “I’m afraid I still have fond memories of the Giorgio Moroder version,” which I decided was fair enough because GM did, for his sins, start the ball rolling restoration-wise. His “discretely” color-tinted, 80s pop-scored version undid much of the damage done by the US distributor’s rewriting of the intertitles, and left us wanting more, an important first step. My view of the music — perfectly acceptable in its place, but its place is not METROPOLIS.

Your opinion of Fiona may now rise, as I report her excitement at hearing that the disc is scored with the original score (slightly rejigged to allow for missing scenes) — I’d seen the excellent interim restoration of a few years back, on the big screen of Filmhouse 1, so I’d experienced this in shorter form, but it was news to Fiona. With all the versions of METROP which circulated during the years post-Moroder, not one of them seemed to have an adequate score, despite the fact that surely the film must exert considerable appeal to musical types (as its life as a pop-promo inspiration — Queen, Madonna — would indicate) and the fact that subtlety is not chief among its many insuperable virtues, and so finding an appopriate note to strike in a score ought not to be that hard…

Seeing the movie almost complete, I was struck again by how fast it moves — from the introduction to the world of the workers, to the Sons’ Club up top, with giant iconic skyscrapers in between, we get to the machine room inside fifteen minutes. Seeing TRON: LEGACY the following day, it was striking how much slower our plots move today, for all the kinetic embroidering they get. Fiona always remarks on the sexiness of the robot, although it was Olivia Wilde in TRON: LEG who caused her to report signs of incipient lesbianism.

Rotwang: “This is where I keep my old bikes.” ~ That’s Fiona’s line.

A word on Alfred Abel — the subtlest of the film’s actors, his character is often accused of making no sense. Each of the additional scenes in the “new” cut enhances his motivation, until it’s only his senseless allowing of the workers to shut down his whole city by trashing the Heart Machine that seems a bit silly. What’s missing (not in terms of the edit, but in terms of the original script) is a scene of him calling in the riot cops — fomenting revolution in your own country in order to quash the impulses behind it is an old dictator’s trick (the later burning of the Reichstag was a variant — frame the “revolutionaries” for your own crime) but it’s no good if you allow them to destroy the whole joint. Metropolis seems oddly devoid of police and military, come to think of it.

The film’s craziest acting probably comes not from its prototypical mad scientist but from hero Gustav Frohlich, a Marius Goring type rocking the jodhpurs look. “He’d be pretty if it weren’t for that helmet of hair,” said Fiona, and “He’s prettier than her.” METROP is often knocked for its acting, its theme and its story, but there are words to be said in favour of all three. The story, as I’ve said, makes reasonably good sense once the studio interference is neutralized. The acting is not “typical silent movie acting” by any means — in 1927, the early, broadly gesticulatory performance mode was old-hat, and the frenzied perfs provoked by Lang don’t belong to that tradition anyway. He’s more like Kubrick, encouraging his thesps to embody the wildest extremes of their own style. Klein-Rogge is violently declamatory, or else broods and glowers, a surly gargoyle. Abel is dignity itself, a marble statue. Frohlich freaks, Rasp sneers. Brigitte Helm, a newcomer, had no existing persona to caricature, so Lang has his way with her — she’s not remotely like this in her later movies. The good Maria is a Lillian Gish with pursed lips, while the bad is a psycho-nympho, more like her later ALRAUNE role in terms of perversity, a pure demon of annihilation, cackling hysterically as she’s cremated.

She also looks like the idealized lovechild of Lang and Harbou — big chin, long straight nose, hooded eyes, prominent brow.

David Wingrove saw the restoration ahead of me and remarked that seeing the damage on the newly-added scenes had the positive effect of allowing you to pinpoint what had been cut and to speculate on why. Much of the trimmed material relates to sex or politics (but so does much of the remaining material) — David suggested that, given Frederson and Rotwang’s love for the same woman (the previously-deleted Hel), it’s not unreasonable to suggest some doubt as to Freder’s paternity: if Rotwang is really his dad, then his line, when asked by Freder where Maria is — “With your father.” — is not a lie…

If the last major missing scene, Freder’s first fight with Rotwang, leading to Maria’s escape, were restored, we might get more of this.

All this is even more interesting given Rotwang/Klein-Rogge’s sort-of-threesome relationship with Lang and Von Harbou…

“I want a METROPOLIS desk-lamp!”

The film’s theme is a little harder to defend. Partly because its delivered as a naff homily, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart,” and partly because once that’s analysed, it does seem like a rather sappy bit of political wish-fulfillment. Lang was embarrassed by it in later years, and Jonathan Rosenbaum in the excellent booklet accompanying the Masters of Cinema disc calls the film’s conclusion “one of the lamest endings of any great film I can think of,” and he’s not wrong. But I think he’s perhaps mistaken to speak of  “naive socialist notions” — while Lang and Von Harbou are vague about exactly what kind of Metropolitan Paradise is going to be set up, it still seems set to be divided between workers and bosses. Seems to me that the movie is calling on the bosses to treat the workers just decently enough to avoid revolution. This puts it in the same camp as THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES, directed by rightwinger Sam Wood in Hollywood in the 40s. While it seems odd that a man who required his heirs to take a loyalty oath before they could inherit would make a comedy with a trade union leader as hero (Robert Cummings, the Butcher of Strasbourg), the logic is that socialism and communism can be de-fanged if the bosses are kindly to their underlings. “Let the fools have their ‘tartar sauce’,” as The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns once put it. It’s the same faux-liberal philosophy Charles Foster Kane sets out with: if those with power and wealth look out for the little guy’s interests, he won’t be tempted to revolt.

Joseph Tyrrel saw this movie, like twenty times.

So, while I don’t like the film’s philosophy, I see it as a somewhat artless expression of a wily conservative agenda rather than any kind of naive socialism. Von Harbou would later become a Nazi, after all, and National Socialists aren’t proper socialists.

Still, moving quickly along, it must be remarked yet again that each iteration of METROPOLIS reveals greater qualities. Lang spent his unheard-of budget wisely, crafting a movie composed entirely of extraordinary shots, each sign a triumph of design. As in DIE NIBELUNGEN, several opposing styles are integrated into the film, from the neo-brutalism of the workers’ city to the art deco majesty of the Upperworld, to the Gothic tumbledown menace of Rotwang’s home. And looking at the deleted scenes one marvels how they could ever have been removed, so essential are they to the overall scheme. But Lang’s film is so neatly plotted, and so full of grandeur, than no truncation would have been possible without mutilating the narrative.

“Health and Safety would never allow this today!”

Biggest casualties of the cuts were probably hapless prole Georgy 11811 (Erwin Biswanger) and The Thin Man (Fritz Rasp), a suavely repellent spy/factotum. I’m now aching for a version of Jeeves and Wooster starring Rasp and Gustav Frohlich. Paul Wegener as Roderick Spode, please!

Opening of Von Harbou’s novel ~

“Now the rumbling of the great organ swelled to a roar, pressing, like a rising giant, against the vaulted ceiling, to burst through it.”

It’s all like this — within a few lines we’ve had “wide-open, burning eyes” and “innermost depths” and “glowing moisture” — it’s a Jack Kirby universe of ultimates and extremes. Within a page or so of this pomp, I recoil, exhausted. The translation doesn’t help. Where Lang works as the perfect partner for Von Harbou is in distilling her fervid excess down until it’s clear and coherent, without losing any of the mad, visionary passion.