194.D: F. Lang: Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, Part I, 1922, 155'05"
195.D: F. Lang: Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, Part II, 1922, 115'02"
150.V: F. Lang: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933, from BBC2 broadcast, September 1998, 112'28"
151.V: F. Lang: M, 1931, video from BBC broadcast, September 1998, 101'12"
Sunday, 30th April, 2006, pm into Monday, 1st May, 2006, am
194.D: F. Lang: Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, Part I, 1922, 155'05"
Among the most ambitious products of the German silent cinema, Lang's Dr Mabuse, Der Spieler has not achieved the celebrity of his Metropolis or Niebelungen film. However, fate has been altogether kinder to it than to Metropolis and it has been possible to restore it to its original two-part form, making it a monumental four and a half hours in length.
In his commentary to Lifeboat, Drew Casper points to Hitchcock's blending of two great cinematic traditions: montage, as pioneered by the early Russian directors and German Expressionism, which concentrated meaning within the single frame. We tend to think of the purest examples of Expressionism being films such as Der Golem and Dr Caligari, which take us into legendary territory or the scewed perspective of disordered minds. Dr Mabuse represents a stepping back from that abyss: it is virtually an auto-critique of Expressionism.
The evil mind-bending Mabuse is the focus of the film and we sometimes see the magical effects of his hypnotic suggestions, notably in the use of magical text appearing on a card-table to distract a gambler. Also the film contains a very telling use of Expressionist design: long sequences take place within the palace of the aristocratic Tolds. The Duke is a connoisseur, himself something of a mad professor type. Art works and grotesque masks decorate the large spaces, much as they do the artist's quarters in Dreyer's Mikhael from the same period. There is even an ironic confrontation between the Duke and Mabuse. Asked how he views Expressionism, Mabuse dismisses it as a jumble of things. The irony seems to be that he cannot appreciate anything outside his own control.
Mabuse himself will adopt various masks throughout the picture, some of them as grotesque as any in the Duke's chambers. Yet Lang places his wicked anti-hero into the midst of a real society. These twenties decadents may be as caricatured as anything in Grosz or Dix but they inhabit real - if secret - spaces. The film unfolds in a series of hidden back-rooms - luxurious illegal casinos and drinking dens to be reached by a password. It was a vocabulary that would be carried over more or less intact into the Hollywood pictures about prohibition.
Yet in the large sets of Mabuse and the middle-distance photography, Lang was swallowing up the brief fragile flowers of Expressionism. Almost any of the stills from Mabuse should set the pulses racing. If it was a lost film, we would dream of its rediscovery and imagine it to be tremendously exciting. The story could be very adequately told in a series of annotated photographs and, to tell the truth, it more or less is. The camera rarely moves and there are so few close-ups that when they arrive, we think they must be a new discovery. The story is told at great length but it is so episodic that the inspiration of early French serials such as Fantomas seems to have been carried over into the structure as well as the theme. If we watched films just for the story, Mabuse wouldn't rank with a Republic Serial!
The extreme length of this restoration appears to be due to a religious adherance to16fps. By the same means, even incomplete prints of Metropolis can be made to run 139 minutes. There are some long intertitles and letters or newspaper notices which are repeated - surely a mistake! The intertitles are not always happily translated and one or two made me laugh out loud.
Surpringly for a prestige production of the period, there does not appear to have been an original music score for Mabuse. The modern small-ensemble score by Aloysius Zimmermann grated on my nerves after about ten minutes and he gets a short documentary in which he puffs his lame product. The other documentary materials are highly informative and include much later archive footage of Fritz Lang. We are spared a full-length commentary.
The big plus, after all these complaints is that the film has been reconstructed from surviving camera negatives so the quality of the picture is often first class. A few rough patches are untypical. Relatively few scenes employ the trademark Expressionist chiaroscuro lighting. Instead, Lang creates his luxury hotels and nightclubs as a symphony in soft grey tones. Some grain is evident but probably authentic. It has often been lamented that the sensuality of the early cinema-going experience is the least easy to convey with worn surviving prints. This restored version of Dr Mabuse may be the nearest we will get to recreating that. True, it is not an overly dramatic experience but having undergone it I am sure it will resonate in the mind of the viewer just as surely as it did in the minds of the professionals who went on to draw on its vocabulary for years afterwards. Dr Mabuse may not have finished his hypnotic work with us yet!
Wednesday, 3rd May, 2006 pm
195.D: F. Lang: Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, Part II, 1922, 115'02"
Things do speed up a little in the second Part of Dr Mabuse. Our stupid hero the Attorney is sent towards a quarry in his car by a phony hypnotist - played by Mabuse. Meanwhile he holds an audience mesmerised by a procession of Arabs emerging, as it were, from the screen. Mabuse's influence at a distance owes a lot to Nosferatu but the ossification of the arteries was already happening by 1922 - just one year after Murnau's Symphony of Horrors. There is a long and maybe dull chapter to be written some day about the German view of Arabia in the cinema. Maybe it would include honourary Son of the Desert Alfred Hitchcock for his peculiar resort to and retreat from the desert in his strange remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
He disliked the heat of the North African locations and cut the filming short, electing to film some colourful Souk scenes as unconvincing process shots on a sound stage. There was a real location for the Ambrose Chapel but those fifties London streets have an empty De Chirico air. The back of the Chapel was another studio invention. The question is why did Hitch want to set his travelogue-like first part of the story in North Africa at all. The European context of the troubled thirties had given the earlier film an urgency and it was not too hard to see that a Temple of the Sun might be an outpost of German wickedness, even if their congregation of old biddies was a little hard to explain. The later version gives us Africa instead of Switzerland, a taxidermist instead of a dentist and a Christian Chapel in place of the occultists.
Most of my exhibits would come from Herzog, I admit. The things poor Kaspar Hauser sees in his head. The things that Herzog went to see and could only report as dreams and mirages in Fata Morgana. Listening to Herzog commentating on his own movies is a peculiar experience. Is he deliberately dumbing things down? Is he hiding a lack of expertise in English? Maybe he is a little bored by his compliant interviewer(s). Or he just wants to throw us back on the sheer strangeness of his visuals, even when we suspect they had a perfectly reasonable intellectual justification.
The intellect that dare not raise its head. Surely he knows his German cinema history, whatever the technological deficiencies of his childhood. I don't fully buy the wild child mythos he beguilingly weaves anyway. He has had plenty of time to catch up.
Anyway back to Lang. His Attorney is lead to his near-death experience by a word of doom: Melior, which appears on the avenue of trees towards the quarry. I think Tarantino has experimented with this kind of direct screen-writing but in a playful way that will not compromise the serious action sequences. He may have got his ideas from Vigo, who animates the lampoons of the children in Zéro de Conduite.
The siege was surely noted by Hitchcock - in Berlin at this period - and used in The Man Who Knew Too Much, version one, 1934. The effeminate and fat men called on to shoot were rolled into one in the more charismatic personality of Peter Lorre - by then famous or notorious as the child-killer in Lang's M. The shadowy butch woman is taken over more or less complete. The staging of the siege caused Hitchcock censorship problems. Presumably he followed the German precendent and had shooting from early on, before the military are brought in.
It has to be said that Hitchcock knew how to turn an exciting situation into a humanly involving one. In Lang's film, we are only curious to know exactly how Mabuse will bite the dust. As it happens, he will descend into his own underworld of blind men and ghosts. Hitch gives us the innocent hostage in peril on the roof. Lang does not allow Mabuse to use the Countess as a hostage.
Sunday, 14th May, 2006, am
150.V: F. Lang: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933, from BBC2 broadcast of September 1998, 112'28"
Doubling, Integration and Vastation in Mabuse
List of Doubles:
1: The Testament was the resurrection of Mabuse from a sleep of nearly a dozen years. The 1922 silent film Dr Mabuse, der Spieler had itself been a twin film, intended for exhibition on two nights.
2: Lang and his wife Thea van Harbou collaborated on bothe these films. She was already a member of the Nazi Party and they would separate when the quarter-Jewish Lang departed for Hollywood.
3: In both Mabuse projects, the evil Doctor is doubled with a detective, whose entourage reflects his own. In Der Spieler, both figures have three variously comic and grotesque henchmen. In The Testament, the focus is upoon a single retainer. Lohmann has a fussy and put-upon minion, conceived comically in the manner of a stage-notary or servant. Mabuse is waited upon by asylum staff but bends the Director of the institution to do his will.
4: Throughout The Testament, Mabuse is effectively operating from within his cell almost as if from beyond the grave. His communications are collated by the Director and form the basis for a new crime-wave. Dr Mabuse lives again in the character of Dr Baum.
5: The informer Hofmeister will be driven mad by fear of Mabuse.
6: The combination of a crime-wave, a lunatic in his cell and the notion of affect at a distance may recall the case of James Tilly Matthews, whose curious writings and drawings were collated by Haslam the Director. By the time of Mabuse, all the modern devices of telephony and gramophones were employed to perform these sinister deeds. The deranged Hofmeister is seen sitting at a glass desk forever speaking into an invisible telephone. This represents the moment he called for help from Lohmann who delayed. The figure of Lohmann is unusual for today's audiences who are used to detectives as supermen and increasingly superwomen, balancing the job of being ideal husbands, wives and parents with that of keeping the streets clean of scum. Lohmann begins with no such earnestness - a portly, middle-aged figure, he wants to enjoy the good life and knock off from work on time. He is conceived half comically half approvingly as a German Everyman. His earthy persona seems to be a guarantee of immunity from the fanaticism and madness of Mabuse. Once alerted to the seriousness of the cause, he is willing to risk his life in a gun battle but alerting him to the scale of the problem is one of the major uphill struggles.
7: Mabuse begins as a card-shark and hypnotist. In Der Spieler, he is the master of disguise and it is clear that his motive is as much power as profit. He may forgo immediate profits in order to cash in favours later. He needs to have the world dance to his tune but when he meets resistance, his own powers seem to close in on him. His machines become beasts which threaten to devour him. His mastery of disguise may signal a lack of any real personality. We see him at the end of Der Spieler, cowering among his forged notes as the spectres of his victims close in on him.
8: In The Testament he has, like Blake's Urizen, drawn into himself completely. In the isolation of his cell, he begins to write his diabolical New Testament. These are instructions for a new wave of terror - every human institution is to be attacked to destabilize the population. Examples of horror: arson, robbery, plague and counterfeiting. It is not surprising that these scribblings have been compared to the Mein Kampf which Adolf Hitler wrote in gaol. The will to power impresses the Asylum Director Baum and in a memorable scene, the monstrous spectre of Mabuse actually fuses with him.
9: Madness in the Mabuse films seems to be a state of the contemporary soul. We do not set off looking for it in the childhood of Mabuse or Baum. We know that Hofmeister has undertaken dangerous undercover work and given in to corruption previously - the pressures are alarmingly depicted at the start of the film. We are seeing what drives him mad: the hideous thumping of infernal machinery and the assault by invisible hands in the street.
10: Faced with the demented Director who thinks he has become Mabuse, Lohmann takes refuge in the fact that coppers don't need to understand such things, a pragmatism which has been lost by 1960, when a psychiatrist employed by the state will tediously spell out the unlikely cinematic fusion of a boy with his mother.
11: Mabuse is historically fascinating. So many of the elements of the gangster picture are already present but his will to power seems curiously sexless. It is true that in Der Spieler, he has kept the dancer XXX in his circular love-nest but this is historic background merely. At the start of the action he is already using her rather as Klingsor uses Kundry, to bring down the Knights of the Grail. She still desires him, however. Later, he will prepare that long-empty chamber for the imprisonment of the Countess Told. There may be a certain vampiric sexual menace to his advances and to the sight of her inert body in his arms. Yet, for the climax, he has to relinquish her and we feel she was essentially more hostage than obsessive possession.
12: The last spectacular crime of Mabuse in Testament is the fire at a chemical works. There is some spectacular footage of the plant in flames and the railway engines which hinder the cops in their persuit. It looks, for a minute or two as if we are going to see some sort of White Heat conclusion. We see the Doctor chased into a woodland area, presumably still close to the chemical plant but his flight from the scene leaves the chaos he has created strangely suspended. Is it an objective correlative for the chaos within? No shots suggest this. In fact the connection with the fiery landscape is not profiled or underlined as it would ne in a Hollywood picture. Instead we get a memorable nocturnal car-chase - perhaps down the same avenue of trees on which Wend once saw the magic word MELIOR. We are led back to the eerie gates of the asylum and it looks as if the terrified Hofmeister is going to be murdered. Instead the final scenes bring us Dr. Baum tearing up papers in a state of breakdown like that of the first Mabuse.
13: The Mabuse films are essentially derived from pulp fiction and serials. They are not masterpieces of construction and their type of event is probably better suited to the serial form. Countless serials traded in the invisible master-criminal villain. Nor is Mabuse-Baum averse to the needlessly-protracted death scenarios, which enable our heroes and heroines to escape by the skin of their teeth. I like the sealed room with the ticking bomb here partly because the sounds of this film are thematic. From the thumping machines at the start to the horns which accompany the assassination of Kramm. By flooding the room, the hero & heroine risk drowning but they hope the water will absorb the shock and fire of the bomb. When it does explode they are left with a neat plug-hole in the centre of the room through which to make their escape. Intercut with their plight, we have the shoot-out between police and villains. These mobsters with their expensive suits and cheaps molls look distinctly American here, just as the illegal casinos of Der Spieler reflect the speakeasy culture of prohibition.
14: It is said that Lang at this date could begin a picture with a list of the key scenes he wanted to include. A story was woven around it. Hitchcock was doing the same as late as North by North West. It is said that Lang greatly envied Hitch's public profile and he did a fair amount of self-mythologising. Among the first words we see on the screen at the start of Testament are Ein Fritz Lang Film. It would take Hitchcock a few more years to achieve a name above the title.
15: Vastation - the emptying of a scene of all actors. When this happens in Der Spieler, it is prolonged and seems to lack convincing expressive purpose, It happens briefly in Testament, after Kramm has sealed his fate by revealing what he knows about Mabuse. He is accompanied to the outer door by a servant who engages him in conversation about the rain. We hear this conversation at the front door but the camera remains on the closed doors of the study, suggestive of the hidden decisions which deceide a man's destiny. Our final sight of Kramm will be sealed within his car, an image of freedom, here turned on its head as he is surrounded by vehicles. Even his death cries will be drowned out by the orchestrated motor horns. This was an early sound film but one in which lang seemed to be revelling in all the expressive possibilities it opened up.
16: In their methods of detection the police in Testament seem very modern and rational. Matching of guns and bullets is the heart of their case.
Saturday, 20th May, 2006 am
151.V: F. Lang: M, 1931, video from BBC broadcast, September 1998, 101'12"
Caught between organized criminals and a very procedural police force, Peter Lorre is the only fully human being in M - apart from the unfortunate mother at the start. He hardly features at all in the first half of the movie. We see his face in the mirror then we see the various ways in which society organizes itself to entrap him. As he is run to ground like a trapped animal, it is surprising we should feel any pity for him as a child murderer. He makes his own plea to the kangaroo court - he was unable to help himself. His appointed defence counsel argues that he deserves to be pitied as a sick man rather than punished. The various objections are those which would be raised today in identical terms more or less. It is only the arrival of the police which prevent a lynching and in the real trial, we see the judge put on his black hat.
Blackly comic at times, M introduces us to Inspector Lohmann, heckled at his entrance into a low-life bar as Fatty Lohmann. Our own age would demand that this sort of subject should be treated with high solemnity and I very much doubt if any modern actors would consent to the unflattering under-the-desk shot which ahows us more than we need to know about Lohmann socks and belly.
This old BBC print is longer than some, I gather but rather shorter than the 114 minutes at which the film premiered. It needs the brightness turning well down and even then there is a lot of variation in illumination. I don't know if the negatives have survived but M certainly deserves a thorough restoration. [I gather it has had one thanks to the Murnau Institute] Less monumental than some of Lang's other movies, it more closely approaches realism but without the romanticism of Metropolis. It is a world much closer to Brecht in its community of beggars. A highly influential and haunting work, M deserves its high reputatation. So many of the hard-edged urban qualities we associate with America were already present here - I especially like the advanced alarm system, which requires the night-watchmen to clock on at intervals.
The interest in writings by madmen was to be expanded in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse two years later. Here Peter Lorre taunts the police and papers in the manner of Jack the Ripper. A style imitated by the hoaxer who led our modern proceduralist police by the nose in their search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Though we have a scene of mothers in mourning at the end of Lorre's trial, there is nothing in the rest of the film to match the emotional impact of the opening. The wind blowing the drying washing in a loft, the table set for a meal the child will not eat. Lang's use of montage here is masterly.