Otto Rippert | Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague of Florence) / 1919

anatomy of renaissance florence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fritz Lang (based on “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe), Otto Rippert (director) Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague of Florence) / 1919

 

With set, costumes, and apparently a budget to match that Cecil B. DeMille would have died for, along with great silent actors such as Anders Wikmann, Erich Bartels, Marga Von Kierska, and Theodor Becker, and a matchless script by soon-to-be significant director Fritz Lang, Otto Rippert created one of the major early cinematic masterworks in The Plague of Florence of 1919. Only works such as The Birth of the Nation (1915), Filibus (1915), and Intolerance (1916) might match it in terms of its visual artistry. Yet today, despite a 2000 restoration, there is no major DVD distribution and so little critical writing about the film that you might imagine it has been lost, if not forgotten. Surely, as perhaps the first film made about a pandemic, today’s barely post-COVID critics and their audiences might find it of renewed interest.

     But this film hardly needs such a contemporary hook to reveal its importance. The film begins with intense images of the Renaissance Florence Council of Elders, headed the evil “potentate” Cesare (Otto Mannstädt), condemning a beautiful woman to death, she fruitlessly attempting to defend herself. And meanwhile, Cesare’s son Lorenzo (Anders Wikmann) complains to his father that since the council has come to control the city there’s no been partying, no dancing, or singing. The younger people, himself included obviously, protest! Indeed, one might argue his protests against the conservative religious society exemplified by the Council of Elders introduces the theme central to almost all of the LGBTQ films of the teens, a subject which will truly dominant the next decade in the cinema. And it is important to remember that cinema itself would serve as one of the most transformative forces for cultural change, particularly in Germany, until the Nazis took over the industry in the early 1930s.

     But this day, as Cesare reminds his lascivious son, is a feast day, a day in which such sinners as he will be sought out and punished. And immediately after, the film intervenes with its first grand depiction, a procession of townsfolk making their way through the city square, revealing the richness of this film’s artistic potential.

    It is in the midst of this grand procession, when a smaller procession of the beautiful courtesan Julia (Marga von Kierska) happens to cross the religious ceremonial one where both Cesare and Lorenzo discover the never-before-seen beauty, both being immediately awed. But it is there also where she meets up with the disdainful Cardinal (Franz Knaak), who becomes her foremost enemy for no other reason that she is a woman, beautiful, and young—all evils for the holy man. His conclusion: “She is too beautiful not to become a powerful adversary of the Church.”

     Lorenzo immediately sends his confidant (Karl Bernhard) off to discover who she is, just as the Cardinal sends out a monk to question the woman about her faith. Lorenzo’s friend is the first one back with news, reporting that she is a courtesan who has just arrived from Venice; Lorenzo sends her a necklace, requesting a visit with her that very evening. She refuses the necklace but agrees to accept his visit. At the same moment the monk awaits to talk to her, the Cardinal’s worst fears verified when she confesses that her God is love! As one might expect, Lorenzo is pleased, the Cardinal outraged by the news.

      Cesare, meanwhile, takes a far more direct approach, visiting Julia himself, catching her near her bath and terrifying her. If she grants his wish, he insists, she shall be the uncrowned ruler of Florence. She refuses, he responding that if she doesn’t want his love, she shall have his hate.

      Saved from the advances of Cesare by the arrival of Lorenzo, Julia decides to give a big celebration, bringing dead Florence back to life. While she and the people of the city celebrate almost a pagan ceremony, the religious figures and Cesare, the Council of Elders plot her downfall. Soldiers are sent off and she is arrested, taken away to the Council.

 

   

     Lorenzo meanwhile speaks to the citizens, rallying them around the cry that the Council hates joy and arguing for them to join him in a revolution.

      The gathered Council demands she ask for their forgiveness as the camera pans around the room presenting one of the ugliest group portraits of patriarchal power not seen in movies since D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, and the likes of which will not be witnessed again until Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). These misshapen, agèd men with bad teeth and constantly angry faces hate the world and everything in it accept their own sanctimoniousness. And they perceive everything that they are not—justice, youth, beauty, joy, and genuine faith—as their most potent enemies. The Cardinal is not mistaken in his recognition of Julia’s danger; he is simply wrong in believing that the values he holds are in accordance with the Biblical teachings. The God in which they believe is still the Old Testament figure of wrath and vengeance without any of the love argued for in the Apostles. Moreover, Julia and her followers do not even pray at their same alter. As Andrei Rublev perceived in his transformational encounter with the pagans in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie that bears his name, the pagans are far more loving than the Christians.

    Rushing through the streets, the everyday citizens of Florence break into the palace and free Julia, Lorenzo in the process fighting his father to his death. And at this point the narrative force of the film almost comes to an end, or at least standstill. For the next fifteen minutes, at least, director Rippert and his cast determine it’s party time; and, as the intertitles warn us, “For Florence a time of unrestrained pleasures began.”

     The cathedrals, the palace, the fountains, the woods, and the streets themselves all become locations of nearly non-stop debauchery, which for a few moments at least, as the Germans try out the tropes that Cecile DeMille and others will soon imitate, is quite entertaining—the masses gathering in flower-power-like love-ins not so very different from those that campy filmmakers such as Jack Smith would mock in Flaming Creatures (1963).

     Rippert’s version is mostly a heterosexual orgy, but even in 1919 filmmakers begin to realize that if they really wanted to show the wild sexual abandonment of their celebrants, they had to include a few lesbian kisses now and then, as well as frames every so often of handsome boys in tights with their arms around other boys of their age. In other words, if you want to get a good orgy going you have to bring on the queers to truly titillate your audiences. Fools, food fights, humping straight couples, and a threesome now and then is just fine, but the girls have to also act like lesbians, the boys behave like faggots if you intend to convince your viewers of your seriousness. Rippert tries a little bit of everything except nudity—which DeMille later added to his films in prurient delight.

 

     Except for Louis Feuillade’s A Roman Orgy of 1911 and a few scenes in Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia in 1914, there had been nothing quite like the scenes portrayed in The Plague of Florence. Almost like a script aside to remind the director and cast, Fritz Lang’s intertitle notes: “There was only one watchword: love and sensual pleasure.”

 

     Lorenzo sets himself up as ruler with Julia his queen. The priests and monks abandon the city and its churches. Dwarves, fools, and children become the new normal along with unremitting lust in every corner. In the screenshots I’ve collected in these few paragraphs you can see depicted an early love scene on the steps of the city park with various heterosexual lovers playing out intimate kisses and more raucous behavior in the front. In the second picture, two women kiss one another in the foreground. And in the last shot, young men show their affections for one another. It’s useful to remember that this portrayal of LGBTQ individuals occurred in the very same year as another German classic movie, the first film truly devoted to gay love, Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others.

 

     When finally we’ve had quite enough of the party and can bear no more, Lang introduces a hermit, Medardus (Theodor Becker), who lives in the mountainous woods above the city but evidently has heard of what is happening in Florence and travels down into the city to check it out. The moment after the lesbians kiss, Medardus passes by, the women pausing in their love-making. Even street children march along with him, knowing that he is there for some unusual purpose. As one unnamed commentator has observed, Medardus is “a dead ringer for Savonarola, the Dominican friar who held sway over Florence for a brief time.” Savonarola, enlisting the city’s youths—which perhaps explains the children walking with him down a narrow alley—instituted an extreme puritanical campaign, marching in torch-lit processions through the streets at night in what he described as “the bonfires of vanity.” Even the Vatican attempted to ban his preaching.

      In this film Medardus preaches that the citizens have created a Sodom and Gomorrah and predicts it downfall. The court celebrants mock his presence in their midst, but oddly enough, Julia seems utterly fascinated and enchanted with the hermit, moving toward him, despite his discomfort, as if in a trance. As she attempts to take his hand, he hurries off in utter terror, Lorenzo also being quite confused by Julia’s behavior.

     The hermit returns to the mountains with grave doubts about his faith, having visions of the courtesan in his cave and even, at one moment, seeing her appear upon the handmade wooden cross that is the centerpiece of his cave dwelling.

      From here on, the film shifts in its images, at least for a while, from its rich historical recreations to images that appear to foretell the Expressionist films of later in the decade and the 1930s. Entire scenes suddenly employ collaged and animated images imposed upon the original ones. At the same time, Rippert’s film begins to hint at elements that F. W. Murnau will introduce two years later in his Nosferatu, as Julia finds it impossible to sleep and longs to be outdoors; she orders her male servant to find out where the hermit lives and how she might meet him once again, as if she has been put under a spell by his very presence, admitting that she cannot get him out of her mind.

      He discovers Medardus chopping down a tree which the hermit refashions into a gigantic cross, surely in the hope that it may help to protect from further visions of the evil woman. As he carries the cross in the manner of Christ on his way to Golgotha, Julia and others from the castle gather for a hunting trip to the same woods in which the hermit lives.

      At a certain point, her friend points out the direction in which he has discovered Medardus, she separating from the others to find him at the very moment that he has planted his large cross into the soil. Once again, he is terrified by seeing her, perhaps imagining it as another hallucination. She lies, telling him that she has lost her way from the hunt, and is hungry and thirsty.

 

     He has no choice but to invite her into his cave and allow her to drink. But he attempts to warn her, nonetheless, of the error of her ways, reminding her that her current life leads away from God to Hell. The wonderful score by Bruno Gellert, created for the original film, has been providing a remarkable experimental sound field all along, but it now turns even more abstract as he we hear moving objects and whisperings voices, mirroring both the hallucinations of Medardus and the effects of the near magnetic pull he has upon her.

      Desperately praying for a miracle to happen, a wall of the cave opens leading to hell, he agreeing to be her guide to show her the world of unlimited pain and suffering, the world of the lost. There, among the tormented bodies, she encounters herself with Lorenzo. As she turns away from the vision of her own future seeking refuge in the hermit’s arms, he bends to kiss her, unable any longer to resist. She faints, and coming to soon after, immediately leaves both Hell and his hospitable cave, returning home to Florence.

     Both have been transformed by the experience, as he cuts down his tree-sized cross, and she refuses Lorenzo when he enters her chamber that night. Medardus returns to Florence this time in order to love the woman he can no longer resist.

      Lorenzo does not accept her rejection of him and begins to fight her, forcing her into love-making in a manner that we today would describe as rape. At that very moment Medardus arrives, having scaled the wall. Witnessing what is happening he is ready to fight Lorenzo, just as Lorenzo, seeing him suddenly in his own room, takes out a knife, prepared to kill the intruder.

      The men fight, each for moments dominating the other, until finally Medardus strangles Lorenzo, his body falling upon the bed next upon which Julia has remained. Seeing the body, she turns to the victor, hands out willingly attempting to embrace him, but he, still hoping to resist puts his hands into the air, before finally dropping them to her shoulders and pulling her in for a passionate kiss, the two them falling unto the bed in a deep embrace beside Lorenzo’s corpse. Medardus now realizes he too is doomed, fallen by love.

     Medardus now rules in Lorenzo’s place as the dancing, singing, and sexual swinging continues at an even “wilder” pace, the desecration of the churches increasing as we watch a drunken lout perform a mock mass. From traveling traders, word reaches the Vatican where the earlier church leaders have taken refuge. Excommunication is announced and the city of Florence cursed until they atone for the error of their ways.

      Law and order, so an intertitle tells us, had become terms without any meaning. “So the stones begin to speak.” Word arrives that the plague, black death, has already reached the outskirts of the city. Medardus demands that the city close its gates. Fires are set so that the plague won’t rise and spread through the city breezes.

     By most accounts the Bubonic Plague made its way from Pisa to Florence in early 1348. In the beginning 60 to 80 deaths were reported daily. Precautions were taken. According to historian Dorsey Armstrong, clothes of the sick were required to be destroyed instead of sold or passed on to other members of the family. All prostitutes were ordered out of the city, perhaps more for moral reasons than any logical concern of health. Travelers from the two other hardest hit cities, Pisa and Genoa were not allowed entry into the city. Yet the number of sick and dead continued to rise, by mid-June the special committee established to deal with the disease reported there were a hundred deaths daily. Most scholars agree by 1352 the population of Florence had dropped to half of what it was in 1348. Approximately 60,000 people in the city died, with many taking refuge in the countryside about, others, as this movie indicates, imagining they might be safe behind the palace walls.

 

    For the rest of this remarkable film, we are taken on a visual tour that basically lies outside of the plot—which later continues in the palace—of the horror and chaos of the plague itself, personified by a mad, dancing female (Julietta Brandt), at moments playing a violin, at other times simply walking the streets with a grin of horror upon her face, as she stalks the city, people dropping in place behind her. 

    The partying inside, in the spirit of memento mori, only increases in its frenzy, until finally, in remorse, Medardus determines to leave the city, taking us on a voyage into a different kind of underworld. In fact, in his search for a way out of the closed city, Medardus first enters the catacombs beneath the city where the dead are buried and stood on end along its walls. Surely, if there is any preparation for what he will soon encounter, it is this brief voyage through the city of the long-ago dead. That route, however, turns out to be, quite literally, a dead-end. And he is forced to return to the city, stalked by the image of the plague and death.

      Once he has found his way out, he observes the entire hillsides with corpses strewn about them, images that perhaps would not have been possible to imagine had Germany not just suffered similar visions in what was then described as the Great War. To the audiences of the day these must have appeared almost as eerie reminders of scenes recounted, photographed, and personally observed. Recent film and photography are here layered upon the fictional history of the 1919 movie, making it a far more significant statement for the times than we can recognize it as being today.

    

   In the following scenes, the audience with Medardus observe locals running from their own children, locking them out of their houses, and using large poles to push them away. A young girl finds herself in just such a position, Medardus coming upon her as she takes her last breaths and, taking pity, bending down to kiss her on the lips before she dies, sealing his own death since contact with a dying individual was perceived as certain death; those who have personally suffered through the AIDS pandemic will recognize that love itself can signify a shared fate.

 

   On other streets, the bodies pile up, carts retrieving them as quickly as they are tossed into the streets to dump them into a large pit. For a few moments Medardus joins with the body carriers, praying over the dead who are discarded like human waste. He enters houses and feeds the dying.

     Like some men in the AIDS epidemic, who, having survived, tried themselves to contract the disease which had killed their lovers and friends, Medardus, convinced that the germ of the plagues is now within him, becomes determined to bring the inevitable black death back into the gates of Florence himself as part of God’s judgment.

      Back in the palace, Julia herself is despondent, feeling ill and lethargic as the others attempt to coax her into her playful, celebratory former self. “The living belong to life,” her courtiers admonish her. She rejoins the party.

       Suddenly, seeing Medardus returned, she rushes to hug and kiss, he joining her in their final act of love-making as the Plague herself pulls the fiddle away from the player and takes up the tune herself, the two dying soon after, their fellow celebrants falling away as the great plague finally has made its way into the city.

       Early in my viewing of this film, I thought about it as a kind of extended contes morale, a cautionary moral tale, a warning, perhaps, of the dangers of putting the pleasures of life before one’s religious beliefs and faith. But, in fact, the film does not argue that; the religious remain at film’s end as despicable as they were at the beginning, Lorenzo as licentious, and only Medardus and Julia as the representatives of a true, joyful, and enduring love. Anyone living in Weimar Germany would realize that the plague did not torture only the city of the Florence but all of Europe and parts of Asia, and that, despite the belief of a minority of conservatives, that there was no relationship between a lack of religious beliefs and death by plague, a disease we now know was brought about by flea-infected rats (the bacterium Yersinia pestis), which by 1919 had already been presumed to have been the cause through research relating to an outbreak at the turn-of-the-century in Sydney, Australia.

  

      As I watched this film for a second and third viewing, it gradually dawned on me that it is one of a very few examples in cinema of a hybrid version of a Menippean satire or an anatomy, the most obvious example being Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), based on one of the earliest examples of the genre, Petronius’ work of the same name. But other examples might include the works of Armenian filmmaker of the various films of Sergei Paradjanov.

      Like most works of this form, the narrative, told from an urbane and almost pedantic point-of-view makes his way through an entire society, from the very lowest of the social strata to those of the highest, the two often mixing in spaces in which one might expect them to have met up. Their relationship to one another and differences, indeed their sometimes violent or, at least, heated struggles with one another is told not in the form of a coherent narrative but through images locked in a frieze or tableaux vivant (living statues) that represent meaning not through duration but through their emblematic signification.

      The action, such as it is, takes its figures from the godly realms to the underworld, from the highest courts, to the bedrooms of prostitutes. For the subject of many such anatomies or Menippean satires is love, Satyricon being a perfect example as is Djuna Barnes’ literary anatomy, Nightwood, and many of Wyndham Lewis’s fictions. Love, moreover, is presented in all of its forms from the most abstract to the bawdiest heterosexual, homosexual, pedophile, and even, on occasion, bestial being.

      We find almost all of those aspects in Otto Rippert’s truly astonishing Die Pest. If we recognize his own camera as being our pedantic narrator, he takes us from religious spaces of the cathedral and Cardinal’s quarters to the bedroom of a courtesan, while we meet everyone from the King and Prince to lowliest of hermits. We voyage from the Vatican to the underworld, even briefly visiting Hell itself. And in various guises we explore all sorts of love from the spiritual to heterosexual and homosexual lust (I haven’t mentioned the film’s animal scenes with lambs and pigs, etc.).

      The long portions of the film, moreover, devoted to processions, celebratory orgies, and friezes of scenes of the dying and the dead convey most of the deepest meaning of this work through their almost photographic stasis. There is hardly any normative dialogue between characters. What is spoken are commands, ordinances, oaths, and proclamations, which rarely lead to action. And yet, despite this we come to know a city at every social level and to watch the leaders’ and citizens’ actions from their youthful love affairs until death. In short, we are provided by the film director and his camera a complete anatomy of a city, getting to know nearly all aspects of Florentine society, discovering the secrets of how it functions, falls apart, resumes, and is finally nearly destroyed—in the process laughing and enjoying everything from its highest ideals to its silliest follies. The work nearest to Rippert’s, I’d argue, is another sort of cinematic anatomy of a city, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz that studies Weimar Berlin, based on Alfred Döblin’s 1929 literary anatomy of the same name.

     The Plague of Florence seems to have suffered for the obscurity of its very structure, just as other such anatomies have been recognized as oddities without sufficient coherence. But I’d argue this work was one of the most notable achievements of its time and ought to be given a second, third, and perhaps even fourth viewing by today’s critics.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).