Austrian-born Fritz Lang (1890- 1976) volunteered for military service in WWI; he started writing film scripts while recovering from war injuries. Hired by Erich Pommer as screenwriter after the war, he moved to Berlin and made his debut in 1919, directing three films that year of which Der Goldene See, the first part of the adventure serial Die Spinnen, is the only one known to exist today. Their synopses reveal all of them to be typical ‘Schundfilme’, cinematic equivalents of popular trash literature. Der Goldene See, scripted as well as directed by Lang, looks like the fantasy of a boy who has read too many books by Karl May and devoured all three volumes of Der Schatz der Inkas (1880) by Hermann Goedsche (alias Sir John Retcliffe): a treasure hunt leads to the discovery of an underground Inca city; a secret organisation Die Spinnen (The Spiders) is headed by a female villain (a humourless Musidora lookalike with the foreign name Lio Sha) threatens our Aryan hero with both her desire and evil designs. Meanwhile a captive balloon flight, cowboys and Indians, giant snakes and a love story with an indigenous priestess provide more thrills. Popular silent cinema has its stock characters: seductive Spanish dancers, jealous Italians, faithless artists. No Incas. So then why did many scenes of Der Goldene See feel so familiar – the crocodile pond, the entrance behind the waterfall? But yes, we saw them over and over as children reading Tintin’s adventures set in South America, in The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) and Prisoners of the Sun (1949) and… This intuition was confirmed when we read a recent book by one Bob Garcia, Tintin, du cinema a la BD (2019), based on his lifelong research into the influence of cinema on Hergé, who had been a passionate cinéphile and inserted in his cartoons hundreds of puzzle pieces lifted from the films he had seen – among them also Lang’s Der Goldene See. Garcia demonstrates brilliantly how Hergé fused two eminent cinematic devices in his work, pursuit and slapstick: we follow this suggestion by combining Der Goldene See with Dandy navigateur. Pommer had initially planned Die Spinnen to be an adventure serial in four parts, and Lang completed all the screenplays, but after the second episode, Das Brillantenschiff (The Diamond Ship, 1920), production was stopped, probably because the second part did not repeat the first’s great critical and commercial success. Indeed, it lacks most of the highlights of Der Goldene See, such as strong action scenes, spectacular sets and a convincing storyline. We had been eager to screen both parts, since multi-part films were so popular around 1920, but after viewing decided not to screen the second episode. The projection print from the Narodní filmový archív in Prague is a black-andwhite 35mm print, tinted in 2001 by Jan Ledecký, who uses a bath tinting process without splices. So enjoy this extraordinary restoration of Der Goldene See that will give you an authentic experience of a photochemical print.

 Karl Wratschko, Mariann Lewinsky