Idiots, stupid, mind-numbing, trashy, inadequate-- Eisenstien, Gance, Griffith, Lang. Hopefully there'll come a point-- preferably before you finish college-- when you realize how you sound, and what a basic hurdle it is in life you've not yet vaulted when hoping for a discussion on aesthetics... making unqualified sweeping nuclear pronouncements, using nothing but your own subjective taste.lubitsch wrote:
DER MÃœDE TOD is a simple legend which is padded with three exotic episodes. It's not such a big affair in the intellectual department, is it?
DR.MABUSE is a trashy novel with enough plot complications and hollow characters to keep three films going. To represent the crises and many varying problems of the Weimar republic via a master criminal is probably the silliest imaginable idea, it certainly is an inadequate one.
I know the DIE NIBELUNGEN quite well having just made a presentation about them in a advanced seminar which dealt with the reception of the medieval epic in history.
You kindly left out the other silents, especially METROPOLIS is a mindnumbingly dumb film,
With M and sound something different begins though TESTAMENT harks back to the silents. Maybe it's sound, maybe it's a budding awareness of the mounting problems of the time.
But until 1929 Lang's films are NOT intelligent. He shares this trait with other remarkable visual silent directors who were idiots if you deal with the scripts alone. Eisenstein's OCTOBER, Griffith's BIRTH and Gance's NAPOLEON are just the most obvious examples for communist, racist or fascist propaganda. Being a gifted picture maker, doesn't mean at all that you have any intellectual grasp of the world around you It's the same with music, with painting or sculpture. And you shouldn't forget that his films were written by his not overly bright wife and not by Lang himself.
I could say "Yes, those silent Lubitch custome melodramas, as well as those of Germany's favorite actress crush the sum of the above," but I like Lubitch's work here & there, it's fun lite entertainment. A little silly sometimes, even frivolous-- but sometimes that's enjoyable.