SLIFF 2016 – Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (1921) with Music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra Nov. 5th

Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (1921) with Music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra screens November 5th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 E Lockwood Ave,) as part of this year’s this year’s St. Fritz Lang’s DESTINY Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE. 

There’s nothing better than seeing a silent film with live music and you’ll have the opportunity Saturday November 5^th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium. There’s a new restoration of Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (Der müde Tod 1921) a dizzying blend of German Romanticism, Orientalism, and Expressionism and Cinema St. Louis will be screening it at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival.  The film will be accompanied live by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra, who will debuting their new original score for the film.

DESTINY marked a bold step for Fritz Lang, then best known for “M” away from conventional melodrama and into the kind of high-concept filmmaking that would culminate in such über-stylized works as “Die Nibelungen” and “Metropolis.”There’s nothing better than seeing a silent film with live music and you’ll have the opportunity Saturday November 5^th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium. There’s a new restoration of Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (Der müde Tod 1921) a dizzying blend of German Romanticism, Orientalism, and Expressionism and Cinema St. Louis will be screening it at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival.  The film will be accompanied live by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra, who will debuting their new original score for the film.

DESTINY tells the story of a young couple in a small German village (played by Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen) and their encounter with the personification of death in a form of mysterious stranger (Bernhard Goetzke) that appears in a tavern and sits to their table indicating that the time is up for the young husband. After the death of her beloved the young woman is so desperate that she finally manages to enter the kingdom of dead and stand face to face with personification of Death himself (a major influence on Ingmar Bergman’s Death figure in the Seventh Seal later) and ask him to give her beloved back to her. The Death finally yields to her persistence and agrees to deliver back the life of her husband, but only if she manages to find any person that would give up his life in exchange. She desperately tries to convince various people to give up, beginning from a very old man and coming as far as Asylum for mentally ill but all in vain, for how bad the life of poor guys is, they are still very much reluctant to give it up, but it’s only the beginning, the center of the film being three different stories of lost love, told by Death to the young woman, similar to her own, but set in three different exotic locations such as: China, Venice and Turkey.

The great surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel once enthused: “When I saw ‘Destiny,’ I suddenly knew that I wanted to make movies. Something about this film spoke to something deep in me; it clarified my life and my vision of the world.”

Don’t miss Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (1921) with Music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra  November 5th at 7:30 at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium!