Spies
(Spione)
Screening on Film
With Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gerda Maurus, Lien Deyers.
Germany, 1928, 35mm, black & white, silent, 178 min.
German intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA
The brief prologue of Lang’s first independent production condenses the spy genre to a cascade of iconographic images: hands pilfering a secret document from a safe, a motorcyclist’s daring escape, newspaper headlines reporting the crime, the murder of a diplomat followed swiftly by the dispatching of the crime’s sole witness, and, irreducibly, the smiling visage of the criminal mastermind behind it all. Like that of Mabuse, Haghi’s power is a function of his ability to observe and control events across time and space, an emergent form of panopticism Lang details, almost lovingly, with crisp insert shots and a breathless pacing. With each discrete image threatening to pull the film into its own orbit, Spies gives ideal expression to the director’s insight that modernity can only be grasped as a series of converging simultaneities—an essentially conspiratorial vision forty years ahead of Jacques Rivette and Thomas Pynchon’s similarly elaborate narratives.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Metropolis
Harakiri
Spies
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
The Return of Frank James
Die Nibelungen I & II
Woman in the Moon
The Spiders
