Fritz on Fridays: Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

At the absolute maximum, there are but a handful of filmmakers in the history of the seventh art who have left a greater mark on the medium than Fritz Lang. I’m even hesitant to identify a single filmmaker with a definitive case for being more influential over the course of film history than Lang. He’s the most important artist from the German Expressionism movement, he all but invented the film noir, and he left behind several of the greatest films ever made — including the 1924 fantasy-romantic epic Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.

The first of two parts in Die Nibelungen (“The Nibelungs”) — based on the Old German epic poem Nibelungenlied, which composer Richard Wagner famously adapted into The Ring of the Nibelung (1869–76) — Lang’s Siegfried is one of the great achievements of the silent era.

The unflinching and handsome Paul Richter plays the eponymous Siegfried, son of King Siegmund of Xanten, who departs his forest home for the Kingdom of Burgundy after mastering the art of blacksmithing and announcing his intent to marry Kriemhild (Margarete Schön), the princess of Burgundy. Along the way, Siegfried encounters a dragon, becomes “unwoundable” and finds a magic helmet. While the structure of fantasy epics long predates the film and even its centuries-older source material, the aesthetics of Die Nibelungen more or less defines the feel of the genre from George Lucas’s Star Wars to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.