Nightmare Fuel 2018: Day 53 – Destiny

Our current international tour leaves the friendly confines of Asia (wait, what!?) and heads west for the unruly shores of Europa.  Specifically, we’re dipping right into the heart of the subcontinent (fight me) and plowing straight into good ol’ Deutschland.  More than that, we’re headed way back in cinema’s timeline, back to the days when sound was relegated to local music.  We’re talkin’ ’bout Fritz Lang’s 1921 silent film, Destiny.

Otherwise known as Der müde Tod: ein deutsches Volkslied in 6 Versen (translated as [The] Weary Death: A German Folk-Story in 6 Verses), Destiny centers on a pair of star-crossed lovers.  Whilst out in the country, Death claims the soul of the man, leading the grief-stricken woman to plead Death for his return, believing to her very core that love is more powerful than Death.  Death makes a deal with her:  He’s got three lives currently hanging by a thin thread; if she can save just one of those lives with love, he’ll return her man.  The woman is transposed into the stories, jumping Sam Beckett-style into the sister of a caliph in Arabia, a Venetian noblewoman, and a magician’s assistant in China, always trying to save her lover’s life.  Quite the tall order, but she’s convinced love can, indeed, conquer all.

As the story goes, Lang (probably best known in the States for directing the classics Metropolis and M) was inspired by a childhood fever to design Death as a wan-skinned man draped in black and topped by a black wide-brimmed hat.  Further, Lang was inspired by the story of Savitri from the Mahabharata:  In short, the princess Savitri takes a husband whom she knows is destined to die a year from the date of their marriage.  Throughout that year, she diligently practices an ascetic life of devotion to her husband.  When Yama, Hindu god of death (you might remember him as the final boss in Spelunky), comes to claim the husband’s soul, Savitri follows him, impressing him with a series of speeches until he grants her lover’s life back.

Though initially a failure in Germany, it was a success in neighboring France, which eventually led to greater success in the Fatherland.  The film would go on to inspire a number of filmmakers, including Luis Buñuel (who included in Un Chien Andalou a scene of lovers being buried by sand as an homage to the Arabian segment), Douglas Fairbanks (who bought the rights to Destiny in order to basically rip off the flying carpet bit from the third segment for his Thief of Baghdad), and Ingmar Bergman (who ran with this depiction of Death in The Seventh Seal).

On the technical side, the film is pretty impressive, loaded with some iconic shots, including the flying carpet and, the best for me, the shots of Death’s room of candles, which exudes a palpable eeriness and plenty of visual wonder.  Bernhard Goetzke steals the show as Death, which he plays with the expected imposing grimness standard for the character, but with the addition of some subtle, background weariness and whatnot, to which the German title alludes.

As a whole, the film is a solid entry in Lang’s illustrious filmography, a nice treat for those who have seen the bigger silent flicks but haven’t gone too deep in their plumbing just yet.