A Film Canon

Kriemhild's Revenge takes Siegfried's sublimity to its aesthetic conclusion, featuring a far greater interior focus - or, alternatively, deflecting mountain haloes into a proliferation of arches - that, in turn, allows for an intensification of wide, stark, symmetrical compositions, and the hypnotically slow mise-en-scenes that they tend to engender. Even the outside world is given an interior character, thanks to Lang's collapse of the distinction between snowy plain and wintry sky, as well as his subsidiary characterisation of the pool concealing the Nibelungen's treasure as just another version of the icy, viscous medium in which statecraft seems to founder. Similarly, Siegfried's instantaneous collision of ice and fire, in the form of the Icelandic episode, is replaced with a gradual transition from ice to fire, most explicitly in the snowfields and inferno that bookend the narrative, but most poetically in the transformation of Kriemhild (Margarete Schon). This process is inextricably linked to the third act's taste for chaotic, crowded, assymetrical mise-en-scenes, whose ostensible departure from the preceding aesthetic simply serves to condense it into the sublime stasis of Kriemhild herself, explaining the hyperbolic, almost orgasmic, catharsis that her final act of revenge brings - the most emotional moment in the two films, and an indication that her desire to revenge Siegfried has even temporarily overwhelmed her ability to love him - and clarifying that revenge, and the marriage to Attila the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) that forms the pretext and preparation for it, as the process of testing her icy resolution by transplanting it from its native region to the heart of a furnace; that is, the attempt to envisage and refine an ice so pure as to be capable of fuelling, rather than quenching, fire.