Ludwig II – Glanz und Ende eines Königs (Helmut Käutner, 1954)

(Ludwig II: Shine and Ending of a King)

Out of all of the films I’ve watched about the short-lived king of Bavaria, who reigned from 1864 until his early death in 1886, the one directed in 1954 by Helmut Käutner and released in 1955 is probably the most sympathetic treatment of his figure and personality, although it doesn’t either overly idealize him (after all, he was a failure in several important aspects, and this fact is not hidden by the film) nor portray him as a madman (although he was diagnosed as such), or as a frivolous and capricious monarch.

As a very headstrong idealist, Ludwig II had inclinations and tastes which were not only considered unhealthy or inconvenient, but were also quite contrary to what at the time was considered “politically correct” or acceptable even for a king, especially since his eccentric behaviour was far from indulging in the eccentricities customarily associated with kings such as inciting war, sowing bastard sons and daughters, killing rivals for their throne, or hunting – and therefore was easily condoned, patiently tolerated and even taken for granted and implicitly allowed. His only characteristic kingly trait was spending huge amounts of money, something that became quite dangerous after the French Revolution, but that the presiding government consented – to keep the king happy and not too inquisitive or intrusive about their management of the country’s affairs.

But this queer king was a man with grand aesthetic views, who was not only fond of paintings, of landscapes – forests and lakes and mountains –, and of music (particularly the music which Richard Wagner, whom he truly admired, was composing at the time), but also of designing and building magnificent, luxuriant, fantastic fairytale castles, for which he would be remembered. He tried to avoid wars, never wished to send his subjects to fight, and when forced to do so, much against his will, was usually a loser and even the victory of his allies proved unprofitable for him or his country.

Käutner, a filmmaker which I consider the finest of all German directors starting their career since 1933 (and who never made a Nazi film despite directing nine between 1939 and 1945), and who could be seen as a sort of heir to Max Ophuls, both in subject-matter and in style, pays very moving tribute to Ludwig’s legendary frustrating (or rather impossible?) love for Sissi (delicately and magnificently played by Ruth Leuwerick). Some of the most moving and beautiful scenes of this relatively short film (115 minutes compared with 245 of Visconti’s 1972 Ludwig and 140 of Syberberg’s 1972 Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König) deal precisely and very romantically with this complex relationship between the two cousins. There is no doubt that king Ludwig II thought that he should have been born in an earlier time period and felt out of synch with the times that he had to live.

Käutner’s narrative strategy – since everyone watching the movie can be expected to know the outcome of Ludwig’s story beforehand – motivated him to start the movie with empress Elisabeth’s foreboding, as she wakes in the middle of the night, feeling that something has happened to Ludwig, immediately followed by the arrival of messengers bringing her the news of the king’s drowning in the lake they both loved so much. This instantly flavours the film with the mood of tragedy, not of melodrama, and calls for a retrospective reflection on the events that brought about that death, which are told in a long flashback; it also explains why there is a strong ellipse of about twelve years just before the end of the flashback and the return to the first images of the film, dated June 13, 1886, because these years were of inner exile, loneliness and almost total isolation, after breaking up with his most loyal friend, without any contact, even through letters, with Elisabeth, and deprived of all power, and were therefore years insufferably empty and monotonous, devoid of any illusion or hope, something very difficult to bear for someone so expansive, so enthusiastic, so fond of dreaming and imagining things on a grand scale, of beauty and purity.

In this sense, the film is extremely faithful not only to the character of the king, but even to what Ludwig II would have loved, had he had the chance to watch a film about himself (which he would have probably enjoyed): each shot is of a constant and shining beauty, neat and balanced in its composition and framing, and full of light nuances even in the darkest hours, playing with moonlight and sunlight, both in magnificent interiors and the no less magnificent outdoors, splendidly photographed by skillful British cameraman Douglas Slocombe (who died as I was writing this piece), with great art direction by Hein Heckroth and outstandingly played, with refrained intensity, by O. W. Fischer (an actor who was then overpraised, but is now sadly and unjustly underestimated and forgotten) and by practically every other actor that appears in the movie (including Marianne Koch, and even Klaus Kinski).

But for me, the true significance of this movie bears almost no rapport with the tragedy and frustrations of a 19th Century king of Bavaria – nor does it lie in the Glanz (shine, splendour) of the film’s subtitle – but with the quality I most value in German cinema (if there were such thing as a national style, which I very much doubt). This German cinematic style is not the famous expressionist style, which in fact only an extremely scarce number of films ever had (even in part) during a very short period of time, but on the contrary a kind of transparence or rather, translucence (Durchsichtigkeit) of the images, in which the shots do not merely let the light pass through them, but also irradiate light themselves, like the stained-glass windows at Paris’ Sainte Chapelle and many cathedrals in France or Spain, a quality which I find in the images of the films of Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk (or Detlef Sierck), Pabst, Peter Lorre, Karl Grune, Dieterle, Dupont, Pick, Hochbaum, Wisbar, Käutner, Staudte, Syberberg, Sanders-Brahms, Fassbinder, Petzold and Graf, and which one could say reaches its climax in Fritz Lang’s Indian dyptich Der Tiger von Eschnapur / Das indische Grabmal (FRG/FR/IT 1958/59) (in black and white) and his final Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (FRG/IT/FR 1960). It seemed as if this virtue had been lost since the ending of the Second World War, when it was suddenly fully, and brilliantly recovered by Käutner in Ludwig II – Glanz und Ende eines Königs.

Aportación al libro “Beloved and Rejected: Cinema in the Young Federal Republic of Germany = Geliebt und verdrängt: Das Kino der jungen Budesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis 1963”. Claudia Dillmann y Olaf Möller, eds. Deutsche Filminstitut Filmmuseum-Locarno Film Festival, 2016