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Fritz Lang, Decla, 1921. A woman follows her lover into a walled garden that belongs to Death (Bernhard Goetzke) and bargains for three chances to win him back. The chances are short films inside the film: a night in Baghdad, a Venetian carnival, a Chinese court. Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig's architecture does more work than the titles. Lang is already thinking in monuments.
In two programmes
Lang's first monument: a wall with no door, and a woman who has to argue her way through it three times. The flying carpet in the Chinese episode is the one Douglas Fairbanks bought the American rights to sit on until his own Thief of Bagdad was out.
The Supernatural and the Occult
Death owns a walled garden and keeps a room of candles, each one a life. The wall of candles is the image, and the three stories are the argument. Herlth and Röhrig's architecture does the haunting. Goetzke plays Death as a tired man who would rather not.
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