Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Die Nibelungen: Siegfried
1924 · Fritz Lang · Die Nibelungen: Siegfried on Sightlines
A man rides through a forest that never grew. Every trunk in it was built at Neubabelsberg and stood up on the studio floor, because Lang would not shoot in a real German wood. A real wood has opinions about where its branches go. These trees are spaced like columns. Light falls between them in even bars. Siegfried is riding through a hall, and the film has not said a word yet about kings.
Hold that shot, because the argument of the whole film is already in it.
Deleuze begins his cinema books with a distinction he takes from Bergson. Old art picked the pose: the single summit-instant that stands in for a whole movement, the wrestler caught at the top of his throw. Deleuze calls these privileged instants. Cinema is built the other way round. Twenty-four slices a second, none of them more important than the slice beside it, movement rebuilt out of perfectly ordinary moments. Any-instant-whatever, he calls those, and he thinks they are the thing that made cinema modern. Now look at what Lang does with the most modern image-machine of 1924. Paul Richter holds his gestures like poses. The cutting lets compositions stand long enough to register as designs. The rhythm is procession, then a sudden violent act, then a held reaction. Lang is using the machine of the ordinary instant to manufacture privileged instants again, deliberately, at enormous cost. That is his wager, and it explains why the film feels magnificent and airless at once. A legend has no ordinary moments in it. Everything in it is already a monument, and Lang built a studio world in order to make sure.
Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set: everything inside the shot counts as information, and the composition is a system rather than a window. Most films let a frame imply the room next door. Lang's frames are frontal, centred, symmetrical, and they tend to stop at the wall. Nothing enters from offscreen that the design did not schedule. The whole production exists to guarantee this. Build the forest indoors and the out-of-field cannot ambush you.
Then there are the people. Ranks of retainers flanking a central axis, arranged as living friezes. Deleuze has a word for a crowd that behaves as a single affect and divides without changing in nature: the dividual. Lotte Eisner saw the human figure here reduced to an architectural motif. Kracauer saw the mass ornament and drew a line from it to the parade ground. You can decline Kracauer's teleology and still not argue with the observation, which is simply true: people in this film are laid like masonry. Deleuze gives the formal name for what Kracauer described politically. The uncomfortable part is how beautiful it is.
On paper the story is pure action cinema. A hero, a dragon, a hoard, a rival, a murder. Deleuze's large form runs: a great encompassing situation presses on a man until he acts, and the act transforms the situation. He calls the encompasser the synsign, and here the encompasser is the architecture itself. But watch what the acts actually accomplish. Von Harbou's chain of oaths and reprisals moves toward a doom you can feel in the first reel; the scenes unfold with the inevitability of a legend the audience already knows. The act does not open a future. It fills a slot that the design left for it. That is why the blow always arrives framed by stillness on both sides.
Underneath the court there is a forest, a dragon, blood, and gold. Deleuze's naturalism describes exactly this stacking: a concrete setting, the derived milieu, sitting on top of an originary world of raw appetite. Worms has ceremony. The woods have Fafnir, who was a machine with technicians inside it working the body, the head, the breath, the blood. That is precisely the non-organic life of things that Expressionism was after, matter that lives without being alive. Hoffmann and Rittau carve the beast out of darkness and make armour and treasure gleam, working the light-and-shadow gradient Deleuze identifies as German cinema's own principle of montage. Lang keeps the gradient and straightens the Gothic line into geometry.
The middle of the film turns on a cloak. Siegfried puts on the Tarnkappe, subdues Brunhild through multiple exposure, and Gunther is seen to win her. Deleuze's symbol is the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and this is it. The Tarnkappe splits the deed from the visible body. Gunther is a weak, image-conscious king who needs a picture of himself as victor, and the film hands him one made out of another man's strength. In a movie that composes people as ornament, the fatal crime is a crime of composition.
And then Kriemhild dreams of falcons, and Lang gives the sequence away. Walter Ruttmann animated it as abstraction, nothing representational in it at all. Deleuze's onirosign is a dream circuit not anchored to any dated memory; this one is not anchored even to figures. One of the earliest integrations of avant-garde animation into a mainstream feature happens inside a dragon picture. Name the invention twice, then: the built forest, and the licensed hole Lang cut in his own design.
The debts are visible and specific. Cabiria gave the kolossalfilm its colossal architecture and the slow camera gliding through deep space; Lang keeps the architecture and stops the camera, which converts movement into design. Intolerance taught how to mass extras into decorative patterns; Lang squares the pattern up. Caligari proved a wholly constructed environment could act alongside the performers, and Siegfried monumentalizes that built world, which is also how it became the second point on Kracauer's line. Der Golem supplied the template of sculpted architecture, Germanic legend, hieratic gesture, and a practical creature played straight-faced. Anna Boleyn was UFA learning to discipline thousands into ornament. Der müde Tod was Lang and von Harbou's own fate-tragedy in frontal symmetry with the flaw already built in. Forward, the method goes straight into Metropolis with Pommer producing and Huppertz extending his leitmotifs, and then into a contested afterlife the film has never escaped.
What it did to the art is simple to state and hard to overstate. It proved a film could construct its entire world down to the last trunk and make composition, rather than performance or cutting, the primary carrier of meaning. Every fully designed studio film since is downstream of that proof.
The question it leaves open is the one it cannot answer about itself: what happens to a person inside an image that well-ordered? The film does answer, once, and not where you would expect. The design does not crack when the dragon dies or when Hagen's spear goes in. It cracks when two women argue about which of them outranks the other. Watch the queens' quarrel and the friezes come apart. Afterwards the geometry is still there, but it is holding a grudge. Next time through, stop watching the hero and watch for the places where the symmetry fails. That is where the film is alive, and Lang put them there.
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — Performance pitched so that gestures are 'held like poses'; editing that lets compositions 'stand long enough to register as designs'; the film built from an accumulation of strong static tableaux rather than Soviet-style montage
- the closed set (cadre) — The entire world built indoors at Neubabelsberg, including the artificial forest, 'so that every element of the frame could be controlled'; held, frontal, architecturally centred compositions
- dividual — Ranks of retainers arranged as living friezes flanking a central axis; Eisner on the human figure reduced to architectural motif, Kracauer on the 'mass ornament'
- montage-intensive-german — Hoffmann and Rittau's sculptural lighting carving the dragon from darkness, making armour and treasure gleam, isolating figures against vast blank walls; tinted release prints playing against the graphic compositions
- expressionism — Fafnir realized as a full-size mechanical creature worked by a team of technicians moving body, head and limbs and operating its breath and blood — matter given non-organic life; the designed architecture acting as an agent equal to the performers
- action-image-large-form — Dragon-slaying, the winning of Brunhild, the murder by Hagen — decisive acts inside a chain of oaths and reprisals whose outcome the audience senses from the outset, 'the inevitability of a legend already known'
- the encompasser — Symmetrical halls, massive stairways, patterned floors and the colonnade-forest that surround and pre-arrange every act; the rhythm of slow ceremonial procession, sudden violent act, held reaction
- originary-world — The ceremonial Burgundian court at Worms laid over the studio-built wood with its dragon, the blood-bath, and the Nibelung hoard
- symbol — The Tarnkappe: Siegfried, invisible via multiple-exposure work, subdues Brunhild so that Gunther — 'a weak, image-conscious kingship' — may be seen to claim her
- onirosign / dream-image — Kriemhild's premonitory Falkentraum, realized by Walter Ruttmann as a stylized non-representational animated sequence