Dr. Mabuses Testamente (1933)

---

---

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse Tyskland 1933 Regi Fritz Lang Manus Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang Foto Karl Vash, Fritz Arno Wagner Med Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Oscar Beregi Sr., Gustav Diessl 2t 01m Tysk tale, norsk tekst Aldersgrense 15 år

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was the second sound film made by Fritz Lang after M (1931). It is also the second adaptation in Lang’s trilogy based on writer Norbert Jacques’s Dr. Mabuse. The 1933 film is a sequel to the silent film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922).

From the early years of ‘talky’ films, Fritz Lang was a pioneer in exploring this new, sound-expanded cinematic medium, starting with M, and culminating with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000), wrote in an essay in 2004, for Criterion: “Lang understood that the sound film should actually be a film of sounds, not simply a talkie”.

Filmmaker Georges Franju (who made, among others, Eyes Without a Face) wrote in his article The Style of Fritz Lang, in the November 1959 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma: “In his next picture, Lang, still pursuing his constructive-destructive thesis, still aggressive and critical, turned once more to that awesome old tyrant Mabuse, and created an almost evangelical testament against the prejudices, incrustation, and basic injustices of the Nazis (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse).”
It is, however, quite debatable how much this testament genuinely had the Nazis in mind as its target, at the time it was made and was to be screened in Germany.
But an evangelical testament, indeed. And William Ahearne even argues for a biblically-adapted testament, in his 2012 essay on the film, where he claims that “the gist of Lang’s claim is based on Dr. Mabuse saying that he would create a criminal organization that would last for “a thousand years.” More than likely, Thea von Harbou [Lang’s wife at the time, and his frequent screenwriting collaborator] was making a biblical reference to the Revelations section where, after the battle of Armageddon, Jesus and the saints would reign on Earth for “a thousand years.” What gives credence to this theory is the fact that Adolf Hitler didn’t claim the Third Reich would last “a thousand years” until 1934, well after the film was made.”

In an interview in 1975 with William Friedkin, a year before Lang passed away, Fritz Lang said: “I personally think that I made my films with a kind of sleepwalking security”.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) can indeed be seen as the peak of Lang’s somnambulant creations before the filmmaker-émigré awoke from his sleepwalk state in Paris – then Hollywood – following the Nazi takeover in Germany.
The sleepwalking, at this point, became symptomatic of the eponymous phantom-revenant Mabuse, and his powers of hypno-manipluation. But Lang himself became another, unghostly kind of revenant to his Nazi-seized country, despite the unreliable self-exile escapade the filmmaker narrated over the years (one which he kept recounting only a couple of decades after the creation of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse). Michael Koller supports this argument in his April 2004 Senses of Cinema article on the 1933 film by referencing Patrick McGilligan’s analysis of the Joseph Goebbels-Fritz Lang encounter, in Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (1997): “many artists and intellectuals left Berlin immediately after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, yet, for several months after this date Lang gave credibility to the Nazis by attending official film functions organized by the Nazi Party hierarchy”.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is an addition to the chapter Trans/trance-facing from the Vampiric Projections series at Cinemateket Trondheim. In The Testament, Dr. Mabuse is able to hypnotize a mortal into a state of somanbular trance, making that mortal a vessel to achieve his plans for a new empire of evil.

An analysis with Oscar Debs, open to discussion, will follow the screening.