Mabuse Film Analysis

Fall Take-home Exam

3) Tom Gunning writes: “Mabuse’s claim to be a state within a state not only expresses his megalomania but acknowledges the fragmentation of power, especially the control of force and violence in Germany after the Great War.” (p. 138)

Drawing specific examples from the film(s), demonstrate how Lang’s Mabuse illustrates the chaos of the Weimar era. How does the struggle between Mabuse and Von Wenk articulate the larger struggle within Germany?

Throughout the hardship that Germany faced during the Weimar Era, their power struggle remained the most eminent of their problems. Dealing with the hyperinflation, political extremists, and hostility from the victors of the war, Germany’s ability to keep its once growing
Because his power constantly grew and only declined at the very end of the movie, it is hard for Mabuse’s character to represent Germany’s struggle as a whole. Instead, Mabuse more accurately portrays the end of the Weimar Era in 1933 and the beginning of Hitler’s Third Reich. Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, conveniently released in 1922, illuminates the chaos of the Weimar Era because it exemplifies the Great War Germany had just faced. In Tom Gunning’s article he expands, “The images of warfare in the city streets, especially when the police force gives way to the military armed with grenades, certainly recall the battles between Freikorps and revolutionaries in various German cities. These, among the most realistic images in a film often classified as “expressionist”, strongly support Anton Kaes’s claim that for the Weimar cinema, as for Germany generally, the image of the war was traumatically repeated and never resolved theme” (P.138). More representation in the movie of Germany’s crisis in 1919 is shown through Germany’s struggle to escape their debt. This resulted in the printing of money, in which over time lost its
Both of the films present an actual period of history; use real people and real events. Bill Nichols incessantly expresses the concept of a documentary being a representation of reality rather than a reproduction. Nichols explains that if documentary were a representation of reality, the work would simply just be a replica or copy of something that already existed. As stated above, “documentary is not a reproduction of reality; it is a representation of the world we already occupy. It stands for a particular view of the world...." (Pg.83). The film Nanook Of the North is a 1922 silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty. The film was credited with being one of the first documentary films, in which reason it is a suitable example for the representation of documentary. Being filmed in the Canadian Arctic, it was made accurately to portray the traditional life for the Inuit’s. Flaherty managed to grasp the exotic culture of the remote location as well as the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family. Nanook ice fishes, harpoons a walrus, catches a seal, traps, builds an igloo, and trades pelts at a trading post. The family is portrayed as fearless heroes that endure severities that people say, “no other race could survive”. Until this day Nanook Of the North remains as a prototypical documentary. Its use of representation rather than reproduction is evident throughout the film