The Big Screen (9 page)

You need that screen or a white wall to show the process. But our responses to life and the screen are so different. The flow of images is a stream or a river that we want to swim in. But the screen—the helpless, blank surface—reminds us there is no river or stream; this entire operation has the potential for deceit or a lifelike lie. The picture is “believable,” but the screen is the warning guarantee of abstraction or removal. We are there and not there. It's cold with the German screen, not because the heating has been turned off, but because the implications are so unsettling.

A practical problem made life tougher as Decla came to film
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. The circumstances of 1919–20 were so bad that there were severe restrictions on electrical power—a huge problem for the film industry, especially when
Caligari
was to be shot during the winter, a season in which Berlin regularly suffers prolonged overcast. As soon as you look at the film, you feel this quality. The opening garden does not seem to be in open, much less fresh, air. It is like an arcade where a pale light has been refracted through glass. There is no health or vitality in the light—and there is not an open-air shot in the whole film. Indeed, Erich Pommer and the virtual director, Robert Wiene, yielded to the suggestion of their designers—Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig—that the film be made in a completely expressionist style where not only were the shapes and forms of the décor part of a mindscape (that of the madman), but shadows and light areas were actually painted on the décor.

Pommer didn't believe this would work. “Look here, boys,” he told his designers, “you're all crazy. It's impossible to put fantastic, unreal, flat sets behind real, solid people.” But when tests were made, it did work—and so, for the sake of argument, the prairie cabin where the Kanes live in
Citizen Kane
(1941) looks and feels like what it is: a carefully fashioned set on a stage with a diorama. So
Caligari
has houses like witches' hats, windows like squashed triangles, and alleyways that are simply illustrations of perspective. Cesare is a character from a ballet nearly, granted his black garb, the immense lemur circles around his eyes, and the druggy, stylized movements that Conrad Veidt employs in the part. The result is in many ways theatrical, yet the shaping of the story is uncanny and the anxiety set up by the film never disperses. You can see why the whole world found
Caligari
arresting in 1920.

Janowitz and Mayer were pained to discover the framing Pommer and Wiene had put on their story. But this sanitization actually had so little impact. For the “derangement” in the décor, the rather studied, art-school attempt to make everything in sight look like something seen by a madman, is pervasive and infectious. So it doesn't really matter whether the madman in question is Francis, “our hero,” or the Director. As it is, both Caligari and the Director are played by the same actor, Werner Krauss, and he is so creepy that we assume a natural affinity between the two figures. “Correcting” the action does not repair the suggestion—and this is an important point in film appreciation. Stories lead film and shape them, but atmosphere is the character—and the atmosphere is a matter of the chemistry between us and the film. No one can watch
Caligari
without uneasiness mounting, just as no one can experience
Citizen Kane
without hearing Kane's sigh, the lament of “Rosebud” that hangs over every frame and all the regrets of his life.

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:

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 accuracy 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.)