Fritz Lang and Pierre Menard

Debra Paget in The Tiger of Eschnapur, part one of Fritz Lang’s Indian Tomb epic, 1959

Perhaps, or per­haps not, you have heard of Blue, a 2014 album by the vir­tu­osic jazz combo Mostly Other People Do The Killing. It is a note-for-note re-creation, or “cov­er ver­sion” of Miles Davis’ sem­in­al 1959 LP Kind of Blue. MOPDTK is known for, among oth­er things, an antic sense of humor that mani­fests itself in cheeky album cov­er art­work, as in the piss-take of Keith Jarrett’s sem­in­al The Koln Concert on its own 2011 disc The Caimbra Concert. That record also fea­tured this pro­voc­at­ive liner note: “In fact, every note and sound on this record­ing is a ref­er­ence to some oth­er record­ing or per­form­ance, real or ima­gin­ary. Enjoy!”

Blue is a record that raises all sorts of ques­tions bey­ond the ini­tial “Why?” It is use­ful to remem­ber that, its one-time repu­ta­tion as an ultra-suave makeout disc not­with­stand­ing, the record­ing by the Davis quin­tet was a sig­ni­fic­ant build­ing block for free jazz: in put­ting into action some par­tic­u­lar ideas pro­voked in him by the work of George Russell, and hook­ing impro­visa­tion to modes rather than chord changes, Davis was tak­ing down a par­tic­u­lar net, and one of the things Blue is ask­ing is for the listen­er to exper­i­ence the music of Kind of Blue in the expli­cit con­text of fifty years of the net being down. So it is apt that, for the liner notes to Blue, that dis­c’s book­let repro­duces in full the trans­lated text of Jorge Luis Borges’ droll and dizzy­ing short story Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote.

Trying to do in music what Borges’ Menard—a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter, we have to keep remind­ing ourselves—accomplished in writ­ing is, prac­tic­ally speak­ing, a whole dif­fer­ent enter­prise. Here are three key para­graphs from Borges’ story that illus­trate per­tin­ent prob­lems (the trans­la­tion, here as in the Blue liner notes, is Andrew Hurley’s): 

Those who have insinu­ated that Menard devoted his life to writ­ing a con­tem­por­ary Quixote besmirch his illus­tri­ous memory. Pierre Menard did not want to com­pose anoth­er Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to com­pose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one have to say that his goal was nev­er a mech­an­ic­al tran­scrip­tion of the ori­gin­al; he had no inten­tion of copy­ing it. His admir­able ambi­tion was to pro­duce a num­ber of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“My pur­pose is merely aston­ish­ing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theo­lo­gic­al or meta­phys­ic­al proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or uni­ver­sal Forms—is no more final, no more uncom­mon, than my revealed nov­el. The sole dif­fer­ence is that philo­soph­ers pub­lish pleas­ant volumes con­tain­ing the inter­me­di­ate stages of their work, while I am resolved to sup­press those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear wit­ness to that years-long labor.

Initially, Menard’s meth­od was to be rel­at­ively simple: Learn Spanish, return to CatholIcism, fight against the Moor of Turk, for­get the his­tory of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thor­oughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he dis­carded it as too east. Too impossible,!, rather, the read­er will say. Quite so, but the under­tak­ing was impossible from the out­set, and of all the impossible ways of bring­ing it about, this was the least inter­est­ing. To be a pop­u­lar nov­el­ist of the sev­en­teenth cen­tury in the twen­ti­eth seemed to Menard to be a diminu­ation. Being, some­how, Cervantes, and arriv­ing thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less chal­len­ging (and there­fore less inter­est­ing) than con­tinu­ing to be Pierre Menard and com­ing to the Quixote through the exper­i­ences of Pierre Menard. 

The mem­bers of Mostly Other People Do The Killing, aug­men­ted by a pian­ist, obvi­ously came to Kind of Blue via their own exper­i­ences as human beings, white men, musi­cians, jazz musi­cians, read­ers of music, read­ers of music the­ory and cri­ti­cism, and so on. But unlike Menard they were prac­tic­ally obliged to come to their Quixote, Kind of Blue, via all man­ner of medi­at­ing tech­no­logy, begin­ning with their music­al instruments. 

As with music, so, even more so per­haps, with film. I thought of Borges’ story, and of Blue, while watch­ing again, for the first time in some time, and with a con­cen­tra­tion sug­ges­ted by my thoughts about Borges and Menard and Blue, Fritz Lang’s two 1959 films The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, a two-feature quasi-serial. (I viewed them via the excel­lent UK import set from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, a Region B issue, alas.) The movie is a remake of a 1921 pic­ture that, I must admit, I have not seen: Das indis­che Grabmal erster Teil, anoth­er two-parter, silent, dir­ec­ted by Joe May, then a cine­mat­ic col­league and rival of Lang’s. The scen­ario of the film was a cre­ation of Thea von Harbou and, as it hap­pens, Lang. If I read David Kalat’s account (in his invalu­able 2001 book The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse) cor­rectly, the scen­ario was the first col­lab­or­a­tion between what was to become the husband-and-wife team, an adapt­a­tion of von Harbou’s own nov­el. Said nov­el, like the pop­u­lar “Westerns” of Karl May, trucked in German pop cul­ture’s fas­cin­a­tion with “the exot­ic.” (It is cru­cial, of course, that we con­tinu­ally loc­ate this fas­cin­a­tion in the first three dec­ades of the 20^th Century.) German film industry mach­in­a­tions led to May, and not Lang, hand­ling the dir­ec­tion of the film, which starred Conrad Veidt.

At the end of the 1950s Lang’s Hollywood career was wind­ing down as his eye­sight degen­er­ated. His final American-produced film was the severely pess­im­ist­ic 1957 Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, its death-penalty centered plot mak­ing it, among oth­er things, a mord­ant answer-film/companion piece to Lang’s U.S. debut, the gal­van­ic Fury, an anti-lynch mob par­able. Both Doubt and Lang’s pri­or While The City Sleeps took film noir fatal­ism into the realm of the police pro­ced­ur­al and depic­ted modes of mod­ern life cor­rup­ted in ways that Lang’s romantic Metropolis had nev­er fore­seen. According to Kalat, when German pro­du­cer Artur Brauner offered Lang a deal to remake the May film, he had no idea that Lang had been so intim­ately involved in the ori­gin­al: “Ironically, Brauner did not recog­nize what it meant to Lang: Brauner was unaware that Lang had been involved with the ori­gin­al and was ignor­ant of the entire story of Lang’s his­tory with Joe May. As far as Brauner was con­cerned, he was simply pair­ing a remake of a golden oldie with one of the lead­ing lights of the old school.” To Peter Bogdanovich, dis­cuss­ing the remake in 1965, Lang said simply “You should make a pic­ture you star­ted.” He elab­or­ated, reflect­ing that doing this at the end of his career was “like a circle that was begin­ning to close—a kind of fate.” 

I don’t know that Lang read Borges, or even that he saw Performance for that mat­ter; I can­not extra­pol­ate from Lang’s admir­a­tion of cer­tain Jess Franco films the extent to which Lang had any kind of great enthu­si­asms for meta-narratives. What is cer­tain is that the tropes which sup­port the entire scen­ario of what I’ll now refer to as a whole as The Indian Tomb had under­gone a cata­clys­mic con­tex­tu­al shift between 1921 and 1959, and Lang’s choice to ignore that shift in a sense rep­res­ents a sort of tri­umph of Menardian think­ing. Remember the way, in his story, Borges mar­vels at the two dif­fer­ent rep­res­ent­a­tions of the notion of his­tory being the moth­er of truth. In Cervantes, writes Borges, the phrase is “mere rhet­or­ic­al praise of his­tory.” In Menard, “the idea is stag­ger­ing.” So in Tomb, obser­va­tions con­cern­ing “Western” ideas, and dia­logue like “I’m a European; we count in hours” car­ries a charge that simply could not have been present in the ori­gin­al version. 

Written on water: Paget and Paul Hubschmid. 

The cast­ing of the Oklahoma-born Debra Paget as Seetha alone has implic­a­tions that could fill a doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion. Reputed love object of both Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes, not infre­quent play­er of “Indian” girls in Hollywood Westerns, her skills as a seduct­ively undu­lat­ing dan­cer were first (as far as I know) and most con­vin­cingly dis­played in believe it or not, the 1952 John Philip Sousa biop­ic Stars And Stripes Forever. In Tomb she is also a dan­cer, Seetha, and her moves, wit­nessed sur­repti­tiously by German archi­tect Harold Berger, bring about a change in the sculp­ted god­dess to whom she ded­ic­ates her dance. Soon the couple are on the run pur­sued by a venge­ful maha­raja. Paget, as it hap­pens, is the only truly vivid per­former in the whole movie; the rest of the cast, and Hubschmid in par­tic­u­lar, emit a gen­er­ic anonym­ity that’s actu­ally rather in keep­ing with their func­tions in what is on a sur­face level an ana­chron­ist­ic exercise. 

Lepers.

But as Tom Gunning points out in his invalu­able study, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity,  the German crit­ics who sav­aged this work on those grounds on its ini­tial release could not have been more wrong: “Lang’s con­trol of col­our pho­to­graphy […] rep­res­ents a truly mod­ern aspect of film-making. The non-realistic, semi-abstract plot and char­ac­ters would inspire the most advanced film­makers of the 60s, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Marie Straub.” (As we all know, Godard would also hire Lang to act, as him­self, in Le Mepris, and offer therein an impli­cit explan­a­tion as to why he shot Tomb in col­or but not in widescreen.) Reflecting on the enter­prise as a whole, Gunning writes that Lang’s “return to Germany from exile […] yields a pro­found sense of the untimeli­ness of his­tory, the know­ledge that noth­ing can ever truly be repeated, and that in repe­ti­tion lies not so much the prom­ise of rebirth as the har­binger of death. Repetition involves a pro­found mourn­ing for the pas­sage of time.” Seeing the lepers of Tomb and recall­ing the under­ground dwell­ers of Metropolis cer­tainly sup­ports this idea. But the exer­cise was not without its drollery. Paget’s dance, while in the con­text of the plot is meant to be part of a sac­red rite, can­not help but recall the dance with which the Robot Maria seduces the scions of the rul­ing class in Metropolis, and it’s kind of funny that Paget’s moves in the film wound up run­ning afoul of Hollywood prudery: they were cut from an American release of the film. Lang is not a dir­ect­or one cus­tom­ar­ily thinks of as play­ful, but we can see his pleas­ure prin­ciple at work in this, and in sev­er­al oth­er sequences of the film. In spite of the con­straints of the source mater­i­al, or maybe because of them, this movie feels like anoth­er example of Rossellini’s “film of a free man.” 

Kittie!

Menard’s Quixote, which, I will once again point out, nev­er really exis­ted, was con­ceived and only par­tially executed in the cir­cum­scribed sphere of Borges’ story, in order to answer cer­tain questions—some of which had not been in evid­ence at all until the “second” Quixote was mani­fes­ted. MOPDTK’s Blue was con­ceived and executed with a large num­ber of ques­tions already in mind; and the work is an expli­cit pos­ing of those ques­tions. Just hav­ing them out there in that form ful­fills the pur­pose of the enter­prise. Lang’s work, I think, falls some­where in between those of Borges/Menard and the jazz group. In a sense, this least sen­ti­ment­al of film­makers was going on a kind of sen­ti­ment­al jour­ney, sure. But there is also at work in every frame of Tomb a con­scious and dili­gent  test­ing of the elasti­city of form. In return­ing to the nar­rat­ive mode that helped make him one of the primary archi­tects of dra­mat­ic cinema as we still  know it today, Lang con­ducts an inquiry as to both its dur­ab­il­ity and wheth­er its inno­cence can be recap­tured. Except the second is a trick ques­tion; the movie lays bare the naïveté of the scen­ario von Harbou and Lang and Joe May con­cocted in the first place, and reveals that what so many view­ers pro­cess as inno­cence was in fact a con­triv­ance. It’s for that reas­on that Lang’s next and final film, The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse, so seem­ingly inap­pos­ite a fol­lowup to this ostens­ibly romantic saga, is really its inev­it­able next move. Its anti-televisual para­noia and vis­ion of a sur­veil­lance state fur­ther pulls the rug out from under Tomb’s attemp­ted romance.  And to expli­citly loc­ate Tomb between the brack­ets of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and Thousand Eyes evokes a fris­son that’s both undeni­able and undeni­ably unpleas­ant. But very Lang.