Die Nibelungen - 2: Kriemhild's Revenge - Wgtn Film Society

(Fritz Lang, Germany 1924)

Perhaps the most stately of Fritz Lang’s two-part epics, the five-hour Die Nibelungen is a courageous and hallucinatory work, a film in which every single shot might alone endure as an exemplar of visual art. In Part Two, Kriemhild’s Revenge, Siegfried’s widow travels to the remote land of the Huns to wed the monstrous Attila, and thereby enlist his forces in an act of vengeance that culminates in massacre, conflagration, and, under the auspices of Lang, one of the most exhilarating and terrifying end-sequences in all of cinema. Adapted from the myth that served as the basis for Wagner’s Ring cycle (though not an adaptation of the operas themselves), Lang’s picture employs its own counterpoint through a systematic, viral series of deranged geometrical patterns and the arresting, kabuki-like quality of the actors’ performances. The result is a film of startling expressionistic power, and a summit of Fritz Lang’s artistry.
– Masters of Cinema.

Screened in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut.