A Film Canon

Despite being released as one giant feature, Lang's first Mabuse film is effectively a serial, and makes more sense when seen as the sum of its acts - although the division between the first and second parts also holds as an indication of their quite discrete thematic and stylistic concerns. The first makes an explicit case for an Expressionist version of Feuillade's narrative innovations, whose infinite play is further specified as an infinite gamble with "people and people's faiths". This finds clearest expression in the opening spectacle of the stock market, which the entire film seems anxious to both conceptualise and visualise, in a number of different ways. Most literally, it finds its analogy in the various card games that suffuse the narrative, and which progress from exhibiting the trace of some inexplicable rigging, to being the object of an explicitly supernatural manipulation, culminating with the poetic juxtaposition between a casino-in-the-round and a seance. This corresponds to the gradual elevation of the eponymous antihero (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) from a mere criminal mastermind, to a psychoanalyst-hypnotist with near-supernatural powers, to an embodiment of panoptic surveillance: "He lives above the town - great as a tower". Similarly, Lang extrapolates much of the film's aesthetic from the opening depiction of the stock market. On the one hand, its sea of top-hatted businessmen gives rise to a bobbing, jerking mass movement that pervades every subsequent group of people, as well as, more generally, a pervasive hyperactivity evident in the prominence of cars, the complaints of Mabuse's henchmen ("I can't do it any longer - this speed of 200 km/hour"), and Lang's distinctive ability to both open scenes and the film itself in media res. On the other, the literal and metaphorical expansiveness of the trading room gives way to the most expansive sets - and concomitantly, the most marked deep-focus - in cinema to date, reflecting Lang's background in architecture, and, at their strongest, managing to create the impression of a horizon within bounded space. In this way, the film suggests that the only registers within which the increasingly disorienting flow of capital can be properly apprehended are those of psychopathology (specifically, paranoia) and the paranormal (specifically, mass hypnotism); or, perhaps more accurately, a digital apprehension for which the film has as yet no adequate language, apart from a hyperbolic speed that finally gestures towards a qualitative, rather than quantitative, technological leap, or innovation.