A Lang Overdue Restoration: Roland Matthews welcomes a sumptuous re-release of Fritz Lang’s 1920s film epic ‘Die Nibelungen’

Review of Die Nibelungen, directed Lang, Decla-Bioscop, 1924, new HD restoration, 2012 (Eureka! Masters of Cinema, 2 DVDs/Blu-ray discs).

July 2013, Volume 7, Number 2, 68–71.

It may have become something of a cliché to say Richard Wagner would have embraced the visual and technological possibilities offered by the new medium of the moving image, but it is nevertheless the case that in the stagecraft of his music dramas he anticipated many devices and effects of the cinema age. He died, after all, a mere dozen years before the Lumière Brothers first dazzled audiences with filmed footage of workers leaving their Lyons factory. And half a century is all that separates the premieres of Wagner’s Ring and Fritz Lang’s five-hour silent film epic Die Nibelungen, still perhaps cinema’s most ambitious foray into the world of Germanic myth. Die Nibelungen had its first screenings in 1924 in Berlin when it was shown in two parts, Siegfried in February and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge) in April of that year.