Castaways of the Image Planet by Geoffrey O'Brien

Author:Geoffrey O'Brien [O’Brien, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619022515
Publisher: Counterpoint

Spymaster Lang: The Legacy of Spione

THE MASTERMIND IS PLAYING cat’s cradle with a string of pearls and the beautiful spy crosses her legs, just as the diplomat (in another part of the city) is completing his ritual suicide. Soon the sliding panels in the wall will open, the mastermind will roll forward in his wheelchair, the express train will begin its fatal journey into the tunnel, the dance band will strike up its last tune before disaster strikes, the clown will prepare to blow his brains out. It’s the same movie again—Fritz Lang’s Spies—and it feels as if I’ve been watching it all my life, a prolonged viewing occasionally interrupted by bouts of exposure to the external world.

No matter which episode is up, I’m at home, a familiarity that may have something to do with Spies having served as matrix for at least half the movies ever made. Around each of Lang’s meticulous images hover the wispy presences of movies yet unmade: there’s the bullet-in-the-book motif from The Thirty-Nine Steps, there are the gangsters in gas masks from Armored Car Robbery, there’s Shanghai Lily, there’s Mysterious Dr. Satan, there’s James Bond’s comically irascible supervisor M, all of them traveling the network of corridors and rails and superhighways that stretches from Alphaville to Gotham City. Indeed, you could imaginably take Spies, colorize it, dub in a dialogue track, add suitably cheesy synthesizer music, and sell it direct to cable as Terror Agents or something of the sort, perfectly at ease in a future it more or less invented.

The inexorable rhythm of the opening montage retains its power to hook the eye into a chain of images. Made in 1927, Spies was Lang’s first independent production, and in this stunning prelude he allows himself a bravura flourish to demonstrate his mastery. An intertitle flashes: “The same sort of thing was happening all over the world.” Hands open a safe. Hands slide a sealed document into a plain envelope. A goggled motorcycle driver drives madly away. Radio waves emanate from gigantic pylons. A headline flashes news of a theft. A diplomat riding in the back of a car is shot from a passing car; as he collapses, his briefcase is deftly lifted by the assassin. Bureaucrats surrounded by disorderly heaps of documents shout desperately into telephones. A uniformed agent strides into headquarters, salutes his superior, starts to speak: “I KNOW WHO—” A bullet pierces the window; the agent falls dead to the floor. His interlocutor looks toward the camera in horror: “My God, what can be the power behind all this?” Close-up of a bearded man with hypnotic eyes, his face wreathed in cigarette smoke: I! It’s a perfect demonstration of what movies do so dangerously well: create an inexorable visual logic out of images devoid of context or ultimate cause. You don’t need to be told how or why the man with the cigarette brought about these disasters, since you already believe it.

It takes about three minutes; if the movie stopped there it would feel complete.

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