Dr. Mabuse, the player
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Dr. Mabuse, the player |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1922 |
| length | German version: 195 minutes, restored version: 270 (155 + 115) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Fritz Lang |
| script | Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou |
| production | Erich Pommer |
| music |
Konrad Elfers (new setting) Osmán Pérez Freire Michael Obst (new setting) |
| camera | Carl Hoffmann |
| occupation | |
| |
Dr. Mabuse, the player is a silent film by the director Fritz Lang in two parts, each with six acts. It was shot largely in the Jofa-Ateliers Berlin-Johannisthal in 1921/1922 , based on the novel by Norbert Jacques, adapted by Thea von Harbou . It is the first film about the fictional character Dr. Mabuse , others followed over decades. Claude Chabrol staged with Dr. M (1990) a remake .
action
Part 1: The Great Gambler - A Picture of Time (Premiere: April 27, 1922)
The doctor and psychoanalyst Dr. Behind the middle-class facade of his practice, Mabuse leads a criminal double life . He is the head of a ramified gang of criminals with mafia-like structures that have even infiltrated the police. At night Mabuse appears in changing masks and disguises in night clubs as well as legal and illegal casinos, where he manipulates his teammates through hypnosis while playing cards, enticing them to high stakes and allowing them to lose. In addition, Mabuse manipulates stock market prices through file theft and targeted false information , is involved in espionage cases, owns houses, cars, yachts, night clubs and even has its own counterfeit printer. He invested the fortune generated in this way in large smuggling operations. He is a master of mask and hypnosis and wants to establish a lawless reign of terror with his gang of criminals in Berlin in the 1920s, a “state within a state”, as he himself later put it.
A rapid beginning leads the viewer into the world of the superhuman criminal: A secret courier is knocked down on an international long-distance express train. His bag flies out of the window of the train and lands in the back seat of a car that is driven punctually through an underpass of the railway embankment by an accomplice. The bag moves from one hand to the other. Then the sensation is perfect. The theft of the secret treaty is published in the world press and leads to a stock market crash. Behind this is Dr. Mabuse, who is the only one to capitalize on the bear market . Prosecutor von Wenk, head of the special department to combat the passion for gambling, tracks down the demonic criminal. Despite the best efforts of the police, the evidence is insufficient to convict Mabuse, let alone arrest him. In a gaming room, Wenk meets Countess Told, whom he can persuade to work with. Dr. Meanwhile, Mabuse continues to abuse humanity for his own ends. His gaze is an order that nobody can escape. At the end of the first part of the film he is at the height of his power; none of his opponents can hold a candle to him.
Part 2: Inferno, a game played by the people of our time (Premiere: May 26, 1922)
The Countess Told, who on behalf of Wenks Dr. Mabuse's accomplice Cara Carozza was supposed to listen to her and followed her to prison, but failed in the face of her passion for the demonic doctor. To prove her true love to Mabuse, Cara Carozza takes her own life. Mabuse, for his part, desires Countess Told; he kidnaps her and systematically destroys her husband, a degenerate nobleman, by first driving him to cheat and then using his most powerful weapon, hypnosis, to commit suicide: in a trance, he cuts his throat. But the downfall of Dr. Mabuses is on the way: He wants to have Wenk, his remaining opponent, eliminated. The attack fails, and this gives Wenk the opportunity to counter. He's cornering Mabuse. Mabuse and his gang are besieged by the police at his home. He defends himself so doggedly that the state has to resort to the last resort, the use of the military. Nevertheless, he can escape one more time. He escapes through the city's sewer shafts and ends up in his counterfeit money workshop. Once there, however, he finds all other escape routes closed and the way back is also blocked - he is trapped like a trapped animal. Mabuse collapses, images run through his head, the ghosts of his victims haunt him. The police find him, insane , sitting in the middle of a pile of counterfeit money.
title
The term player is ambiguous. It applies to gamblers , actors or puppeteers , but also to gambling to pass the time. Dr. Mabuse is all of that at the same time: He plays games of chance in which he appears in disguise and manipulates other people with hypnosis. Playing with people, their feelings and their fates is the only thing that interests him permanently, as he says to Countess Told.
interpretation
Dr. Mabuse was a sensational film and a success. But the nerve of success here wasn't even in the sensational, which still remained somewhat in the background. It lay in the representation of the film as an image of time. The film should be a reflection of the Weimar Republic . Fritz Lang reflects on lawlessness, night clubs, gambling dens, orgies, anarchy and prostitution of that time.
In the characterization of Dr. Mabuse's reference to Nietzsche's Übermenschen cannot be overlooked. The figure of Dr. Mabuse is often interpreted as a mirror image of Adolf Hitler . However, this first Mabuse film does not yet offer any approaches for this. Only with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse , which was filmed shortly before Hitler came to power in 1932, suggested such an interpretation to Lang by putting numerous quotes from Nazi leaders in the mouth of the seductive figure of the great criminal. According to Lang, the early Mabuse from 1922 embodies the criminal anti-state , while Hitler stands for the strong state .
Reviews
“A word about the overall impression of this Mabuse film, which, despite its external dichotomy, forms an organic whole. The lasting impression that the Ufa-Palast was under on both premiere evenings proved that something great and strong has been created here through great skill, through virtuoso technique combined with artistic sensitivity. The director Fritz Lang and all the people who work with him have proven that a film based entirely on criminal motifs can become a work of content through the way the material is processed; Here, too, the motto is: the sound makes the music. "
"Fritz Lang's perfectly structured film, which ushered in the New Objectivity, also impresses with its criticism of lying citizen morality and pathological addiction to pleasure."
"Its importance lies in the partial anticipation of formal means of the modern crime film and in Lang's first turn to current phenomena of his time, the rigidly stylized processing of which should determine the entire further work of the director."
“Fritz Lang's two-part silent film 'The great player - a picture of time' / 'Inferno, a game about people of our time' proves beyond its melodramatic crime story to be a precise dramaturgical and formal construction, which in an almost documentary way not only differentiates the way of life Social classes and the lust for pleasure and decadence of the upper middle class and the petty nobility, but also shows the conditions under which a society between chaos and tyranny can succumb to a 'superman'. "
restoration
In contrast to many other German silent films of the 1920s, the two Mabuse films have been completely preserved and were restored by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in 2000 . The musical accompaniment of the restored version was newly composed and recorded by Aljoscha Zimmermann . There is no evidence of any specially composed music for the original version.
The Mabuse books - book template and film adaptation in one
In the original book Dr. Mabuse by Norbert Jacques crashes Mabuse at the end of the story, after numerous chases by car and boat finally out of an airplane. Lang felt this ending was too final and kept the back door open for a continuation by letting Mabuse succumb to madness at the end. Based on this phrase, the script for the “Testament of Dr. Mabuse ”, which Jacques then turned back into a novel based on the film. The author quickly halved Mabuse's height of fall and implicitly referred to the basically parodic short story “Doctor Mabuse at the Press Ball” from 1923 in which he had sounded out the water for a continuation of the Mabuse books. Another change in the film is the removal of the “Eitopomar” motivation for Mabuse - the dream of an island of their own that Jacques planned to return to in later stories.
The reference to time already played a major role in Jacques' Mabuse books, even if this is no longer so obvious from today's perspective. Cars, planes, ships, telephones and other technologies that were new at the time play a major role. Psychopathology and hypnosis were integrated as newly discovered areas of science as well as new discoveries in chemistry , e.g. E.g. in Jacques' Jules Verne- like prequel "Engineer Mars" (1923). The author was also used to using current newspaper articles as a source of inspiration, as can be seen from his notes on the unfinished "Mabuse's colony - or NJ seeks Kristina" from 1930, and it was not a shame to offer the publisher parts of the To provide the work with references to current events at short notice.
The last book in the series, "Chemiker Null" (1934, initially also under the title "Der Chemiker des Doktor Mabuse"), was equally up-to-date, but at the same time convinced with a surprisingly original ending, although it followed the trend of films (and books ) continued to reduce the doctor's performances himself.
Quotes
"What's happening? he always asked himself: He wanted to get up and let a game pass, to take a breath of air at a window and look out into the silence of the night, from which he hoped to be able to breathe a stream of calm for himself. But he sat as if tied on the leather, pressed his elbows on the red felt, and all thoughts fell uncontrollably out of him into the void, as in the dimensionlessness of a sleep. "
"Dr. Mabuse is a gamer. He plays cards, he plays roulette, and he plays with people, with the lives of those people, with death. At that time there was a poster in Berlin: Berlin, your dancer is death. "
“I could build a rifle that shoots poisonous air. With one shot it kills 50 people at 1000 meters. I could make it bigger than a gun and it would kill 500 people 100 kilometers away. I could build it as an automatic airship and it would kill 5000 people. But there are 1,500 million people to be redeemed. I also tried to make gases that can be emitted like radio waves. I found her."
“The souls of people must be frightened in their deepest depths - by unsearchable and apparently senseless crimes, which are of no use to anyone, which only have the purpose of spreading fear and terror; for the ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an unlimited rule of crime. "
literature
- Norbert Jacques : Dr. Mabuse, the player. Novel. With a dossier on Fritz Lang's film, film images and facsimile advertising material of the time (= Dr. Mabuse, Medium des Böse . Vol. 1 = rororo 13952). Drawings by Theo Matejko and an essay by Günter Scholdt . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-499-13952-9 .
- Rudolf Freund: Dr. Mabuse, the player. In: Günther Dahlke, Günter Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginning to 1933. A film guide. 2nd Edition. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-89487-009-5 , p. 75 ff.
- Andreas Blödorn: Dr. Mabuse - or the 'observed observer'. On an intermedial figure of reflection between film and novel in the early modern era. In: Andreas Blödorn, Christof Hamann, Christoph Jürgensen (eds.): Narrated modernity. Fictional Worlds in the 1920s. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2018, pp. 408-426.
- Ilona Brennicke, Joe Hembus : Classics of the German silent film. 1910-1930. (= Goldmann 10212 Goldmann Magnum. Citadel film books ). Goldmann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-442-10212-X .
Web links
- Dr. Mabuse in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Review on Sense of View
1st chapter:
- Dr. Mabuse, the player I: The great player. A picture of the times at filmportal.de (including contemporary reviews, premiere poster, advertising playing cards, photos)
- Dr. Mabuse, the gamer, Part 1 - The big gamer in the online film database
- 1. Part of the film (with English texts) as a complete film in the Internet Archive (102 minutes)
Part 2:
- Dr. Mabuse, the player II: Inferno. A game by people of our time at filmportal.de
- Dr. Mabuse, the player, part 2 - Inferno in the online film database
- 2nd part of the film (with English texts) as a complete film in the Internet Archive (112 minutes)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d FILM DR.MABUSE, THE PLAYER (GER 1922). In: filmhistoriker.de (online publication). Retrieved November 9, 2013 .
- ↑ Dr. Mabuse, the player. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed July 23, 2017 .