THE OUTLAW AND HIS WIFE (Victor Sjöström, 1917)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The argument has been made that Sweden’s Victor Sjöström was cinema’s first genuine artist. Cinema, which began as a visual recording device in the late nineteenth century, evolved into an art form, and Sjöström is given a good deal of credit for inventing or refining an expressive visual vocabulary for its use.
     The Outlaw and His Wife is widely regarded as Sjöström’s masterpiece. It is about a couple on the run from the law.
     In a key passage, the isolating height of mountains where the “outlaws” hide projects the egotism into which their circumstance has pushed them. From this height, in order to protect their infant from police capture and contamination, the woman hurls down the baby; the subsequent cut away—quick, startling—vividly conveys what brusque, desperate, incoherent and deadly acts this kind of egotism enables. (In addition, the abrupt cut shortcircuits any irrelevant sentimental response.) Both the shot describing the mother’s misguidedly protective act and the cut, then, conspire to reveal the woman’s harried mental state as well as Sjöström’s own, very different feelings regarding both the act and all this innocent couple has been forced to endure that has led to the commission of the act. To generalize: What we see here does more than move a plot along or provide dramatic emphasis; it means something.
     It is also worth noting this purposefulness and expressiveness in another context. Silent Swedish cinema is celebrated for its pastoral beauty. Again, however, the scene I have described goes beyond merely recording natural splendor. Daunting rather than delightful, the setting illumines the feelings and psychology of the characters.
     Sjöström uses film to disclose what is on his mind and what is in the minds of his characters.

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Robert Wiene, 1919)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Made in Germany at the close of the decade and released at the dawn of the next, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari applies German expressionism to a masked meditation on the distress Germany suffered following its defeat in the First World War. It remains among the most intriguing and harrowing of horror films.
     Robert Wiene directed Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz’s script about an itinerant showman under whose hypnotic spell a somnabulist commits nocturnal murders. There is a narrative framing device: the chance encounter of two strangers leading to an extended flashback that discloses “the truth”: the man who condemns this showman is, in fact, an inmate escaped from the insane asylum the man he accuses heads. No wonder, then, he loathes and fears Caligari! Only, can we not glean from the final fadeout—an ambiguous closeup of the “good” doctor—a likely germ of truth in the madman’s ravings? The last shot pulls the rug out from under us, leaving our minds in a scramble to sort out the film’s suggestions and insinuations.
     To the sort of décor, in France, Georges Méliès had used in his curiously literal fantasies (among them, the 1902 A Trip to the Moon), Caligari’s painted backdrops, with their distorted perspectives, add an ambiguous subjectivism, helping film to become thereby a striking means of dark psychological probing. But that is not all. Here, proceeding from this probing are social and political implications that mine the national mood that eventually will give rise in Germany to Nazism.
     History, then, would provide the lion’s share of this extraordinary film’s horrific aspect.

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE (Victor Sjöström, 1920)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The Phantom Carriage is often disparaged as an inferior example of Victor Sjöström’s art, but it happens to be one of the few silent films of his that’s widely available. Part of the problem, I think, is the film’s immense popularity. Some take aim at it just because of that.
     For me, it is a finely realized piece of work. As with The Outlaw and His Wife, Sjöström himself stars, this time as David Holm, who, like Scrooge, revisits scenes of his derelict life—but at the stroke of New Year’s rather than on Christmas Eve. Through this narrative device, we ourselves become acquainted with Holm’s character and life. Although he began as a hard worker, the temptation of alcohol took hold of Holm, costing him his job, undermining his marriage, and leading him to crime and prison. His agency of redemption becomes the death of a Salvation Army nurse who has vowed to save him.
     The film’s narrative is, in fact, convoluted in the extreme, but this becomes correlative to the tangle of Holm’s life and the difficulty of his becoming free of it. The film is exceptionally gray, and this part of its visual aspect, as well as its detailed portrait of slum life, achieves a degree of observant realism that may strike Americans, at least, as Dreiserian. Holm’s shabby existence is thus linked to an unwholesome social environment. But it is for its fantastic and expressionistic elements that the film is famous, in particular, its use of double exposures, and its images of Death, eerily nocturnal amidst fog and by the sea, riding its phantom carriage and making its collections. Without doubt, Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), the most magical and brilliant of all horror films, owes something to Sjöström’s achievement here.
     Sjöström’s performance, incidentally, is tremendous.

DESTINY (Fritz Lang, 1921)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

We commonly call Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Destiny, but the German title actually translates as The Weary Death. The most spiritually refined film ever made, its seemingly endless outdoor staircase, a symbol of aspiration, reappears (along with Lang himself) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963).
     The pastoral opening movement is both enchanting and full of foreboding. Two young lovers, so shy they cover their goose in order to kiss, are all of a sudden chilled to the bone by what appears on the road: a gaunt, seemingly ancient being entering a carriage as an elderly woman quits it. This is Death; and, while this image of Death inspired Ingmar Bergman’s in The Seventh Seal (1956), somehow Lang’s is less susceptible to parody.
     Soviet silent films rarely have much story or structural complication; German silents generally have a lot of both. The scene shifts from country to town, from outdoors to inn, and to an unspecified past. The topic of conversation among men at the inn is Death, leading to a flashback—a flashback, hence, within a flashback—showing a gravedigger’s encounter with Death. Death, weary from its travels, buys a piece of land by the cemetery.
     The main plot involves a woman’s descent into the land of the dead in order to reclaim her husband. Three alternative destinies, however, all end with the same conclusion; but Death gives her another chance. She must find someone who is willing to die in her husband’s place. When this also fails, she chooses death for herself so she may rejoin her beloved. Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife, wrote the script.
     No matter. It is its magical visual aspect—there is, in fact, a magician in the cast of characters—that makes the film a towering achievement. Alfred Hitchcock decided to become a filmmaker after seeing Lang’s Destiny.

DIE NIBELUNGEN, PARTS I & II (Fritz Lang, 1924)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Dedicated to the German people, Fritz Lang’s five-hour medieval epic is awesome. The first part, “Siegfried,” remains the most starkly beautiful and darkly magical material Lang ever filmed. Siegfried, son of King Sigmund, is the apotheosis of the young hero, and his approach of the fire-breathing dragon through the dense, glistening forest is pure fairy-tale enchantment. In the lower foreground of one shot, a bifurcated trunk, in complete shadow, so frames the hero, who is in the background on horseback, that it appears the forest is giving birth to him—as indeed symbolically is the case. Siegfried slays the beast and bathes in its cascading blood, in order to render himself invincible. By soberly recording fantastic imagery at a middle distance with a fixed camera, Lang artfully nudges myth into a realistic realm while retaining fantasy’s delight. Lang grasped what Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), failed to grasp.
     Outdoors, huge rocks and trees, and expanses of sky, dwarf humanity. King Gunter’s castle, where Siegfried goes to win Kriemhild, is another matter. The architectural designs project the fierce psychologies of the characters, who embroil “invincible” Siegfried in a plot that ends in his death, leaves Kriemhild insane in her bereavement, and sets the much more brilliant second part, “Kriemhild’s Revenge,” into motion.
     Barbaric, dynamic, sweeping, the remainder of Die Niebelungen portrays Kriemhild’s marriage to Attila the Hun and her terrible revenge against her brothers for Siegfried’s death when they visit, and against her own court, because Attila, caught between his obligations as husband and host, refuses to join her in this effort. The resultant bloodbath would remain unparalleled in cinema until the Night of the Long Knives in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969)—another “Twilight of the Gods.”