The only response to this 1921 silent movie by Fritz Lang, now restored and rereleased, is a kind of amazement – at its ambition, its enigma, its combination of innocence and sophistication. As so often with early cinema and silent cinema, you see the kinship with fable and fairy story, but also find yourself suspecting that it is somehow silent cinema that is truly aware of the medium’s possibilities; these seem to elude the more evolved, yet earthbound realist cinema that comes later.
Destiny is a parable fantasy: a young woman (Lil Dagover) is horrified when her fiance (Walter Janssen) is led away by the implacable figure of Death (Bernhard Goetzke) who has recently bought a plot of land that he has turned into a walled garden for his captured souls. The hatchet-faced figure is clearly an ancestor for Bengt Ekerot’s Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. However, perhaps weary of his endless duty as the bringer of mortality, Death offers her a deal: he will transport her to alternative realities – Persia, 15th-century Venice and China – in which they occupy alternative personae, in love and in peril. If she can save her sweetheart’s life in any of these, Death will spare him.
But it is a challenge that is to extend to a dilemma in the present day. Destiny, originally titled Der Müde Tod (weary death), is a deeply mysterious tragic melodrama that contrives also to be an expressionist satire, an absurdist opera about our hardwired day-to-day conviction that we, with our youth, health and strength, can overpower tired old Death. Love is greater than death, the woman proclaims, a line that echoes the (important) Woody Allen film. It is bizarre and captivating, an eerie dream of longing and fear.
