Der müde Tod

‘Believe me: my task is a heavy one. It’s a curse. To see people suffer and be hated for my obedience to God has made me weary.’ These words are spoken by Death, a tired old man who does his job

reluctantly. He doesn’t want to tear people away from this life but, unfortunately, that’s his job. This personification of death is one of the surprises of Der müde Tod (released as ‘Destiny’ in English), a German expressionist allegory about love and death created by director Fritz Lang in 1921. In most films about death we see a grim reaper wielding a scythe, but in Der müde Tod he is a man who empathizes with his victims and is pained by the suffering he causes.

Can love conquer death? Of course not, but, as Fritz Lang proved, that doesn’t mean you can’t make an imaginative film about it. With Der müde Tod the ambitious director, 31 at the time, produced a great calling card, proving to be an early sample of his legendary talents. Two years later he made the moving masterpiece M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, followed by the spectacular showpiece Metropolis.

Der müde Tod opens with a couple of young lovers in a carriage, travelling to a city. After they pick up a tall, silent man dressed in black, the joyful, loving atmosphere turns ominous. When the stranger goes on to buy a plot of land next to the graveyard and builds a high, impenetrable wall around it, this is not a good omen either. Soon afterwards, the woman’s lover disappears with the silent man, who is revealed to be Death himself. When she finds him and begs him desperately to return her lover, Death strikes a deal with her: she will get her beloved back if, in one of the three historical periods he will send her to, she can save a boy involved in a forbidden love affair from a violent death. In medieval Arabia a boy is in danger of being killed by a caliph, in seventeenth century Venice by a ruling nobleman and in China by a jealous emperor. The darkly romantic film ends in a moving finale in which the lovers are reunited in death.

The three different historical settings included in Der müde Tod were a great opportunity for Lang to create different atmospheres. His interest in special effects and visual fireworks that came to full fruition in Metropolis is already clearly present in Der müde Tod. The film includes images that were amazing to audiences of the time, including a flying carpet and a flying horse, ghosts walking through walls, people transforming into pigs and a beer glass turning into a hourglass. Another impressive feat is the Chinese miniature army, which Lang created by superimposing images over each other. There was one aspect in which Lang, who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933, was not an innovator, however: like all his contemporaries, in Der müde Tod the perspective on other cultures is exoticizing and Eurocentric.

George Benjamin has accompanied silent films since his days as a student in Cambridge. It was a way for him to exercise his great urge for improvisation. As a child he could already spend hours on end improvising behind the piano. Benjamin is a great film lover, so this was an ideal way to earn some extra money. According to him, it also taught him a few things that came in useful later on in his career as an opera composer. These days he accompanies films only very rarely. The last time was in 2010, in the US town Ojai. He describes his approach as very simple: ‘Put yourself in the service of the film and become completely invisible in the darkness of the cinema.’