As audience members gear up for the 2016 summer blockbuster season that will bring an infinity of new CGI extravaganzas, a film originally released almost 100 years ago would probably give any of them a run for their money in terms of creativity and the ability to create pure screen magic. Fritz Lang’s 1921 epic Destiny will have a theatrical run at Film Forum from May 20-26, where it will be presented in a 2K restoration selected as an Official Entry at the 2016 Berlinale. It’s the closest the film has been to looking like it did in 1921, the stunning restoration by Anke Wilkening on behalf of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, features tinted scenes and restored intertitles to help make better sense of the plot.
But Lang was a master of images, and his intertitles more often than not merely fill out details and add linguistic poetry to the proceedings. It takes just one look at the wonderful frames Lang composed to understand something that not a million words could convey. The plot at the center of Destiny is quite simple: Death (Bernhard Goetzke) takes away a young woman’s (Lil Dagover) fiancé (Walter Janssen) but upon realizing how deep her love for him is, he offers her a deal, he will present her with three tragedies involving romance, and if she can rescue the lovers from dying in one of them, she will get her own lover back.
The stories take place in exotic locales from Venice to Persia and China, and in all episodes the doomed lovers are played by Dagover and Janssen, reinforcing the film’s theme of our battle against fate. The episodes aren’t only varied in their setting, but also in the cinematic techniques Lang uses. The China chapter in particular shows a remarkable use of visual effects, with Lang perfectly showing a miniature army, a flying carpet and a man transforming into a tiger! When Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. bought the rights to distribute the film in the USA, he delayed its exhibition just so he could copy the effects in his own The Thief of Bagdad.
In Destiny one not only finds traces of the mystical storytelling that would identify Lang’s most renowned works, but also influences to everything from Kurosawa to Bergman. It’s an essential piece of filmmaking that has never looked better.
