Silence Is Monumental

In conjunction with a display of vintage posters from Germany’s fabled Ufa Studio, the Goethe-Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100, will present at 7 p.m. tonight and the next two Thursdays three different Fritz Lang silents: “Die Nibelungen” (1923-24) tonight, “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler” (1921) on April 15 and “Woman in the Moon” (1929) on April 22. All films will be accompanied by pianist Robert Israel.

The institute will present both parts of “Die Nibelungen” (“Siegfried” and “Kriemhild’s Revenge”), which were directed by Lang from screenplays written with his then-wife, Thea Von Harbou, from ancient German and Norse sagas.

“Die Nibelungen” is movie-making at its most monumental. Larger-than-life figures of legend, some of them possessing magical powers, enact Von Harbou’s theme of inexorable fate--”the inevitability with which the first guilt ends with the last atonement”--against a stupendous array of beautiful settings. Greek tragedy’s quality of inevitability permeates the films, which more closely resemble the multi-part Japanese period samurai spectacles.

In brief, the legend has to do with Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer’s ill-fated marriage to Kriemhild, the sister of Gunther, King of the Nibelungs. Before that marriage can take place, Gunther, acting on the advice of the Iago-like Hagen, wants Siegfried (Paul Richter) to win for him the hand of the athletic Icelandic queen, Brunhild (Hanna Ralph). Siegfried accomplishes this by a magic ruse, which ultimately costs him his life when it is discovered by Brunhild.

In the second part Kriemhild (Margarete Schon) marries barbaric Attila the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to exact bloody vengeance.

All this unfolds in operatic style (except when action sequences call for a brisker pace) as in a series of superbly composed tableaux. Both parts were filmed almost entirely in the studio. “Die Nibelungen” remains a high point in Lang’s career and is a landmark in what has become called the Golden Age of the German film. (323) 525-3388.

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The UCLA Film Archives presents Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., as both the second offering in its “Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today” series and the opening attraction in “The Vienna Effect,” a series of films set in the Austrian capital, with G.W. Pabst’s “TheJoyless Street” (a.k.a. “The Street of Sorrows”) in the most complete version yet of this heavily censored 1925 film that captures the economic and moral chaos of the early post-World War I era, a period when runaway inflation threatened to destroy the bourgeoisie of Austria and Germany.

Pabst depicts Vienna as much a site of frenzied gaiety as Berlin at the time, and it’s against this vivid, unstable background that Pabst tells a series of interlocked stories, centering on two women portrayed by Danish star Asta Nielsen, arguably the movies’ first great international actress, and none other than Greta Garbo, in only her second feature film appearance--the one that would take her to Hollywood. Nielsen plays a woman betrayed and seeking revenge; Garbo is the daughter of a disintegrating upper-middle-class family; and both women, in desperation, are tempted by an insinuating bordello keeper, played by cabaret artiste, avant-garde dancer and master mime Valeska Gert (later to menace Louise Brooks in Pabst’s “Diary of a Lost Girl”).

“The Joyless Street” features another major star: Werner Krauss as a brutish butcher who forces desperate women to submit to sex as payment. “The Joyless Street” offers a tumultuous panorama whose realism is heightened by the bold Expressionist style that marked the German silent cinema. Robert Israel will provide live musical accompaniment for the film. (310) 206-FILM.

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“Women Screenwriters in Early Hollywood” opens Friday at LACMA at 7:30 p.m. with a Marion Davies double feature, “Zander the Great” (1925), also to be accompanied by Israel, and “Blondie of the Follies” (1932). Frances Marion, the highest-paid screenwriter of her day, wrote the scenario for the first film and the story for the second, which has dialogue by another pioneer, Anita Loos.

Directed by George Hill, “Zander” is a silent charmer about a plucky young woman determined to reunite a small boy with his long-absent father. Davies is quickly caught up in adventure and romance with an erstwhile rum-runner (Harrison Ford, who bears a certain resemblance to the current star of the same name).

“Blondie” is a zesty, edgy Depression-conscious film in which the pretty, naive Davies and gorgeous but pretentious Billie Davies are Broadway chorus girls whose lifelong friendship is severely tested through their attraction to the suave, rich Robert Montgomery. In this uninhibited pre-Code picture, directed superbly by Edmund Goulding, we get tangy sense of the glittery but precarious existence of chorus beauties, who have no trouble landing sugar daddies but find real love elusive. Noted for her flair for mimicry, Davies does a hilarious spoof of Garbo--to Jimmy Durante’s John Barrymore.

Fay Kanin will moderate a panel discussion Saturday at 5 p.m., “Women Screenwriters in Hollywood Today.” (323) 857-6010.

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American Cinematheque’s terrific “Side Streets and Back Alleys: The First Annual Festival of Film Noir” continues Saturday at the Egyptian with “The Killer Is Loose” (1956), which screens with director Budd Boetticher and leading lady Rhonda Fleming on hand for post-screening discussions.

Fleming plays the devoted, beautiful wife of L.A. policeman Joseph Cotten, who is doing his best to keep her from finding out she is the target of a deceptively mild-mannered and elusive escaped killer (Wendell Corey), whose own wife had inadvertently been slain by Cotten while arresting Corey. The predicament is familiar enough, but Boetticher is an expert in generating suspense as Corey draws ever-nearer his quarry while Fleming single-mindedly urges her husband to forsake his duty until she gets a reality check from another cop’s wife (Virginia Christine). Fleming and Christine make this scene positively crackle.

Among the films screening Sunday is “The City That Never Sleeps” (1953), an inspired collaboration between director John Auer and writer Steve Fisher. Gig Young is a Chicago cop who is unhappily following his father’s footsteps and yearns to flee marriage and job with a rightly skeptical nightclub dancer (Mala Powers). But when Young starts succumbing to a chance to make some easy money from ultra-smooth, shady attorney Edward Arnold, he has no idea of how his life will be transformed. Marie Windsor is Arnold’s gold-digging trophy wife, and William Talman is her sinister lover. (323) 466-FILM.

The Cinematheque’s independent film showcase, Alternative Screen, presents tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian David Barker’s lean, elegant psychological drama “Afraid of Everything,” in which a visiting free-spirited teenager (Sarah Adler) proves a catalyst for the lives of her half-sister (Nathalie Richard) and her husband (Daniel Aukin), traumatized since a car accident cost Richard a leg.

Nettie Wild’s “A Place Called Chiapas,” which opens a regular run Friday at the Monica 4-Plex, finds Canadian documentarian Wild devoting June 1996 to February 1997 to making this probe of the strife-torn southern Mexican state. Wild reveals the plight of an oppressed indigenous population brutalized by the military, but his courageous film suffers from a lack of a sense of geography and chronology. (310) 394-9741.

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