Spies First Draft

Complete first draft written for MUBI Notebook.

Though Fritz Lang might be best known for the extravagances of Metropolis, he was even more at home when working with the bare essentials, all the better to use his skills at artifice and suggestion. Case in point: the opening sequence of Spies, which uses only a few distinguishable settings, some animated text and drawings, and frenzied faces to thrust the viewer into the middle of the film’s world of crime. It is a realm of blanks and façades, pitting an espionage ring spearheaded by the inscrutable spymaster Haghi (Lang regular Rudolf Klein-Rogge) against the state that stands for order and luxury, primarily embodied by a man going by the nom de guerre Agent 326. Yet none of these people appear in the sequence, where the movement of figures and information is paramount, no trappings of individuality required. This is taken to its limit with the third shot, which serves simultaneously as a moment of clarity, after the first two shots and their sole focus on hands, and as a further obfuscation. For few other shots in film history are so thrillingly artificial, as Lang shoots at an impossibly low angle from below where the wheel would meet the pavement. The viewer knows that there’s no conceivable way the motorcycle is actually moving, either on a road or in a studio, but the deception of this image announces itself so readily that it becomes enthralling. And the rushing wind, steam, and fog; the bug-eyed goggles; above all the wild grin on the criminal, who appears in no other scene but whose pure malice lingers in the mind: like everything in Spies, the actual thing being stolen is of no importance, the act is all that matters. With these elements, Lang distills the dark heart, the mad glee of his visions.