A Film Canon

Spiders 1 clarifies the adventure film's indebtedness to two genres - the serial and the ethnographic film. On the one hand, Lang's projected quartet (of which only two were ever made) gestures towards a serial imperative, as does the deflection of Feuillade's taste for secret passageways into a series of exotic trajectories (of a message in a bottle, a remote Mexican railway, a hot-air balloon), and his exploitation of the disguise's titillating ability to reconfigure bodies into a panoply of exotic gore. On the other, an ethnographic imperative is suggested not only by the opening citation ("Exotic sets and designs from the Ethnological Museum in Hamburg"), but by the elegant relationship between Incan exoticism, the more familiar orientalism of the criminal organisation around which the narrative hangs, and the polite society with which it is almost identified, given the profusion of eastern sculptures, paintings, curios and servants that suffuse the film's supposed centre of moral gravity. This all suggests that the adventure film may be the most appropriate medium from which to contemplate the extent to which a perceived primivitism, or exoticism, at the heart of modernity might be celebrated - a situation that remains unresolved in this installment (and, as the serial format might suggest, is essentially unresolvable if it is to continue to qualify as entertainment), as poetically encapsulated in the final narrative twist, in which Lio Sha (Ressel Orla), ringleader of the 'Spiders', murders protagonist Kay Hoog's (Carl de Vogt) Incan wife, to avenge her unrequited love. It's also worth mentioning Lang's depiction of the 'Spiders' network itself, which is both more ceremonial and impersonal than Feuillade, resembling nothing so much as a giant, well-oiled machine; that is, a bureaucracy, or government, introducing a political dimension previously absent from the serial, and gesturing towards the Dr Mabuse series.