Muenchhausen(1943)

In its first five minutes, everything seems wrong with the 1943 UFA extravaganza, “Muenchhausen”. The scene is an ornate palace where a formal ball is underway -- noblemen in wigs mince about and elegant women in colossal gowns swivel and tilt across the dance-floor like weirdly immobile automatons. The images are overlit -- some candles gutter in the foreground but they don’t seem to impart any light to the sequence, a curious defect, it seems, in a film from a studio that once was famous for using light as a vibrant living presence to shape and order space. The costumes are unconvincing and the leading man, Hans Albers with a half-demonic glint in his eye, seems far too old and mediocre and stolid for the part of the roguish hero. A Moorish servant in embarrassing black face sulks in the background. Nothing is convincing and the imagery seems strangely inauthentic and stilted -- of course, the viewer avid to find clues of Nazism in this film, Hitler’s attempt at a Teutonic “Wizard of Oz”, will interpret these defects as evidence of the pallid and clumsy philistinism of Fascist cinema. But, suddenly, one of the half-embalmed movie stars in the film, a starlet corseted and stiff, asks Muenchhauser to turn on a light and there is an insert of a hand on a modern electrical switch and we discover that this lackluster ball with its inauthentic minuets is, in fact, a costume party at a rich man’s house, that the Moor in blackface is one of the revelers, that the mincing fop is, perhaps, a Weimar-era homosexual, and that, in fact, we have been tricked, and well-tricked, and that the film will be far more complex and difficult to interpret than we might have expected. Fleeing her fiancée, the woman kisses Muenchhausen and drives away in a fast-looking sports car. Shot in Agfacolor and designed to within an inch of its life, “Muenchhausen” is a curious artifact -- it’s dull and talky at times, and cold as ice, but the picture has tricks up its sleeve and is filled with vivid and grotesque, if often, cruel inventiveness. The strangely middle-aged Muenchhausen, now in modern dress, sits in his garden with the young woman, the refugee from the party who tried to seduce him and her grimacing, fiancée, the depraved-looking Weimar homosexual. The set is dense and claustrophobic with a kind of jellied Maxfield Parrish color -- shallow focus and pastels of indeterminate hue, like withering flowers, pushing the characters close to the picture-plane. Close-ups are sudden, intense, obscurely motivated and have some of the force of an August Sander photograph -- the lens is too tight to the face and the colors aren’t exactly right: the pale lustrous complexions of the many beautiful women in the film have a leaden, arsenic-tinted appearance, the females seem corpse-like and the décor frequently has a strange burnished glint; the colors are petrified, like Watteau and Fragonard with all the warmth removed. In his humid, shadowy garden, a set a little like one of Hans-Juergen Syberberg’s inventions in films like “Ludwig” and “Hitler,” Muenchhausen proceeds to tell the story of his ancestor, the famous Baron Muenchhausen who was a contemporary, it seems, of Catherine the Great and, perhaps, the youthful Kant. Cagiolstro, a sinister magician, tempts the hero to exercise his power to capture Poland -- how did contemporary German audiences view a scene like this? -- but the hero, who is an adventurer and duelist and lover, is more interested in pursuing women than power. The scene is shot in huge, glistening and statuesque close-ups that are sinister and dream-like. Muenchhausen departs for St. Petersberg, portrayed as a wonderland midway between early Kandinsky and Chagall, all onion domes and Cossacks and wild men in gilded cages. He has an affair with Catherine the Great and fights a strange “cuckoo” duel -- a gunfight in a pitchblack room in which each man shoots when the other says “cuckoo”, the dark screen suddenly flashing tableaux-like images at us that are gone before we can interpret them, scenes glimpsed by the light of the flashing guns. A rifle can shoot a hundred miles and some garments bit by a rabid dog become rabid themselves, raging in an armoire until they are exposed and, then, shot dead, the maddened shirts and pants suddenly inert and fluttering to the ground like dead butterflies. Cagliostro has a painting of a beautiful woman that comes to life and winks at the hero. As the film progresses, the plot becomes increasingly extravagant: Muenchhausen rides a cannonball into a seraglio; the camera leers at naked harem girls and exotic tortures take place barely off-screen. He rescues a glacially indifferent Italian princess -- the women are all beautiful, ice-cold mannequins -- and visits Venice with her. An elaborate documentary style scene of a water-borne festival on the Grand Canal follows - I think the film shows the festival in which Venice marries the waters, the Sensa festival depicted in images that are a hybrid of Canaletto and Callot -- and, then, Muenchhausen departs skyward, riding in a golden tear-drop-shaped balloon up to the moon, a blue grotto pockmarked with craters that sputter with geysters. Cellos and violins hang from weird lunar trees and time moves at a vastly accelerated rate, seasons pass in the course of an afternoon and cherries on the trees ripen and wither in minutes. Muenchhausen's servant dies of old age and the baron has a peculiar colloquy with the severed head of a woman set atop stalks of asparagas-like lunar vegetation. The theme of the film is now revealed to have something to do with time -- perhaps, this material is self-reflective, a meditation on how film compresses or elongates time, or, even more, trivially, an essay on special effects made by slowing or speeding-up time or, by time-cuts, eliminating it entirely. We have seen time imagined as a foul-looking, crazed, and febrile slave, counting the seconds with a pendulum in the sultan's court -- the most memorable and alarming vision in the film. The moon with its deadly accelerated time, a kind of cursed version of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", symbolizes the morbid, dreadful empire of time, an empire that Muenchhausen seems to have escaped. At the film's denouement, we have returned to the modern rococo palace -- it is sunset and the pastel darkness, like something from Redon, dooms all the vistas. Inexplicably, and without much, motivation, "through (his) own voluntary act," a kind of "triumph of the will", Muenchhausen, who now seems like an avid-eyed vampire, renounces his immortality chosing to die with the woman he loves while the Weimar homosexual and his ghastly-pale beloved flee into the browns and golds of the Nazi night. The peculiarities of this film, which is episodic, bizarre, and, by Hollywood standards, not very good, may require vast amounts of explication, or, perhaps, none at all -- it is certainly peculiar and effectively made but one wonders what we would make of the picture if it were not a product of Nazi Germany. (And it is is, indeed, curious that the be-monocled Baron Muenchhausen looks surprising like Fritz Lang as he appeared in Hollywood and, indeed, as he looks in Godard's "Contempt". In some respects, the film can be read as Goebbels' revenge and lament for the loss of Weimar Germany's master film magician, Fritz Lang.)