DER MÜDE TOD (1921). THE CONTEXT AND THE IMAGES

100 years after the release of Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod (The Weary Death, also known as ‘Destiny’), this article proposes an analysis of the first international success of the Austrian-German-American director, relating it to the context of the early 1920s, also in the light of the contemporaneity of 100 years later. After a consideration of the intra-textual features of the silent film (1. About the film), Lang’s work on the weary death is analyzed observing the first two decades of the 20th century, with particular attention paid to the consequences of the two main tragic events of those years: the mass-deaths caused by The First World War and the so-called Spanish flu (2. War and pandemic). Lang’s expressionistic poetics in Der müde Tod explores the theme of death through a peculiar use of dialectics between the autonomy of every image and its meaning within the sequential narrative of the film (3. Images: from technique to consciousness). In particular, this occurs through the representation of the the limes between life and death through a huge wall crossed by ghosts, whereby Death lives and where the passage to death is to be seen, which is also a central theme in other films of that period (e.g. Gance, Murnau). Although, without any explicit references, Lang’s portrait of the Agón between human will and death is strictly connected to the context of its period (4. Destiny and will) Nevertheless, this conflict also acts on a more universal level, since it represents what all cultures have in common in elaborating death: the attempt to gain ground in the face of its inexorability. This makes Lang’s film a true classic, capable of confronting both its contemporary and at the same time more universal questions; such as the archetypal human attempt to understand and make the mysterious event of death more acceptable.