DIE NIBELUNGEN Movie Review

Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge
Die Nibelungen: Siegfried und Kriemhilds Rache

As hard as it may be to imagine Die Nibelungen as anything other than Wagnerian, Fritz Lang's great silent epic about the death of Siegfried and the revenge of his wife Kriemhild was based not on Wagner's operatic interpretation of the story but on the original legend, which Lang envisioned as a hot-blooded, spectacular epic fantasy. Filmed and released in two separate parts—one year after the other—Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge are adventure films on a scale that James Cameron can only dream of. Film historian Lotte Eisner has written definitively about the massive and monumental architectural design of Lang's epic, but the still images reproduced in her books can give only a hint of the overwhelming scale and the physical and dramatic symmetry of the most astounding interpretation of a mythological legend in all cinema. In part one, Siegfried attains invulnerability in battle by bathing in the blood of a slain dragon, only to later die at the behest of a wronged and enraged Queen Brunhild. In part two, Siegfried's wife, Kriemhild, who has sworn to avenge her husband's death, marries Attila the Hun and arranges for the massacre of all those who had a hand the death of her beloved Siegfried. (Attila is played to the hilt by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, best-remembered as Rotwang the inventor in Lang's Metropolis.) For a modern audience, it's impossible not to think, at least for an instant, of Kriemhild's enemies as “the heads of the five families,” but that's a tribute to the lasting power of Lang's vision, the influence of which can be seen in every subsequent epic film to touch on the themes of loyalty, betrayal, and revenge. (In 1933, nine years after Die Nibelungen's release and the year that Lang fled Germany for America, Hitler arranged for a re-release of Siegfried, yet found Kriemhild's Revenge a bit too rousing for the public, banning it until his death.)

NEXT STOP … Dr. Mabuse: Der Spieler, Metropolis, M

1923 280m/B GE Paul Richter, Margareta Schoen, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Georg August Koch; D: Fritz Lang; C: Carl Hoffmann, Gunther Rittau; M: Gottfried Huppertz.VHS, LV CVC, GLV