Sci-Fi & Fantasy Girlz discussion

Official book discussion thread

Since it's in the public domain, this book is available to download here on goodreads.

If you go to the book page: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... you will see a "Download eBook" option where you could get it in different file formats.

Yay! We like free....

This is probably one of the few books about which it is reasonable to say seeing the film before reading the book is the way to go. At the very least, it's going to be the way most of us went about it, given that I for one didn't even know there was a novel. The film so completely dominates the media and the images from it so iconic that there's really no avoiding it if one has functioning eyeballs and isn't living on a deserted island.

I put a link to the movie up on the Girlz Group home page. There are a couple versions out there. Apparently, it's one of those films that got chopped up after it was released and like The Magnificent Ambersons the original is something of a Holy Grail for film historians, so there are various versions as bits and pieces get found.

There're also a bunch of videos analyzing or describing the film on Youtube. Here's one that gives some of the background on the current incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLxe9...

I'm watching the film again now. A couple of thoughts:

1. Man, it's hard to rock the jodhpurs and not look like a doosh.

2. The special effects, of course, are dated by today's standards, but I can't help but notice how much they remind me of 70s, even some 80s effects. Compared to, say, Logan's Run or Rollerball or Death Race, I think Metropolis holds up pretty well.

3. Silent is silent. There's a lot we don't get. Of course, "Vater!" is pretty obvious, but my lip-reading skill isn't up to picking out too many details, and my junior high school German not quite up to the task even if it were. I'm particularly interested in the dialogue of the novel for this reason.

4. From a gender/sex standpoint, there's an awful lot of sci-fi standards: girls in skimpy outfits while guys wear pants, for instance. (Or jodhpurs....) That's a standard that would go right through Star Trek mini-skirts, of course. I'd forgotten all about the garden scene at the beginning of the film with the funky outfits on the girls there to "entertain Feder." Probably the funniest bit is later when we get "Machine Man" Maria doing her hoochie-koochie dance. The reaction shots of the men watching are roll-on-the-ground funny.

I think I'm going to skip this one. I tried watching the movie, got bored and fell asleep. Maybe I was just too tired, I will give it a try again soon.

But then I tried reading the book, yikes, that was worse than the movie!

So if I join the discussion, I will probably do it based on the movie. Wow, watching movies instead of reading the book, I don't know who I am anymore!

Since this is kind of a short one, I decided to do a whole multi-media experience while reading the book, watching the film in dribs and drabs as I go through the novel, and taking in docs on the subject in between chapters, so it's taken me a bit to get completely tooled up for that. However, to start off with, I'd like to note one of the perennial issues that comes up in literature (and history, and law, etc.) and that is the problem of translation.

I've read some translations that read perfectly well in English, but being a monolinguist, I don't know how much of that might be adaptive and how much not. Some things don't translate well, other things very well. I remember an anecdote told to me by a German guy that certain philosophers (Kant, Hegel) didn't make sense to him until he read them in English; the vagaries and ambiguities of German philosophical writing being too much for a native speaker to grasp when it comes to ontological arguments on metaphysics.

I'm reading a history on the Krupp family at the moment and it delves into the occasional German term with an English translation. Though I remember very little of the two years of German I took decades ago, the vocabulary does sometimes strike me as being more slippery than it is being presented. My go-to example for this kind of thing is the title of Hitler's work Mein Kampf which is almost gets translated to mean "my struggle" in English. But "Kampf" has a range of meanings from relatively benign like "operation" to "battle" and/or "war". To this day, people give Hitler the benefit of the doubt and translate his words in the mildest possible way, despite the glaring reality of history that followed or (having read that book myself) the contents of the text.

English is a Germanic language, of course, though I've read some recent scholars who like to argue that there are a lot more Celtic origins to English than is usually assumed. It is at the very least a mongrel tongue, "borrowing" routinely from anything and everything, particularly the American brand, which is sometimes shockingly inarticulate in sharp contrast to the supposed precision of German—a stereotype that I'd argue is illusory to begin with. Point being that there are a lot of etymological roots between modern English and German, so aside from the elaborate articles (die, der, der, die; das, dem, den, das...) if translation is going to work it's going to function between those two languages as well as anywhere more or less.

Where I think we run into bigger problems, however, might simply be with flow of the language when translated. In the copy I'm reading, for instance, we get

"But perhaps," he continued, without raising his voice, "perhaps you notice, you, my beloved creation, that you are no longer my only love. Nothing on earth is more vengeful than the jealousy of a machine which believes itself to be neglected. Yes, I know that... You are imperious mistresses... Though shalt have none other Gods but me. Am I right? A thought apart from you—you feel it at once and become perverse. How could I keep it hidden from you that all my thoughts are not with you. I can't help it, my creation. I was bewitched, machine. I press my forehead upon you and my forehead longs for the knees of the girl of whom I do not even know the name..."

Most of the translation I'm reading is smoother than that, though von Harbou's prose is rather florid, but that's the nature of the piece more than an issue of translation. It's an epic, operatic tale, after all. When she writes, "But high above the sea, which bellowed in the uproar of the waves, the stars of heaven danced the solemn, mighty dance" we pretty much have to just go with it.

However, sometimes a translated text loses its cadence and flow in translation, and sometimes its grammatical sense. And this happens throughout the translation I'm reading. The above quoted paragraph is a more egregious example.

"Nothing on earth is more vengeful than the jealousy of a machine..." means that jealousy is vengeful, not the machine.

"I thought apart from you—you feel it at once and become perverse."

I can't help but think there are one or two words there that might have been better translated, and the sentence restructured to be clearer. My thoughts wandered from you and you knew immediately, and grew envious.

In the sentence, "How could I keep it hidden from you that..." [emphasis added] the pronoun isn't necessary, and if you read the sentence without it, it flows much more neatly.

"I press my forehead upon you and my forehead longs for the knees of the girl of whom I do not even know the name..."

That one just hurts my eyes. Of whom? "the" name? Ouch. Maybe in German that trips off the tongue like marzipan, but auf Englisch? Not so much.

Most of the prose isn't that awkward, mind you, but it happens consistently enough that I'm reminded often that I'm reading a translation.

I happened on this video today. The click-bait-y title notwithstanding, there's some interesting biographical information about Fritz Lang in there, especially regarding the extremes to which he went to make his movies.

Personally, I'm not very sympathetic to the stereotypes associated with the "auteur" artist/director when it comes to films, especially when it gets used to absolve one artist or another for their behavior. Movies aren't reality. Sure, there are risky, manipulative, or even outright illegal or unethical things that might be "worth it" in the long run to get some piece of art made, but I'm talking about doing things like lying to an actor to get a more authentic reaction, or telling producers and executives that you have a particular plan then doing something else once they cough up a budget. Actually carrying on some sort of vicious abuse, betrayal or otherwise causing harm is another thing entirely, even if it's done out of incompetence rather than malice. (See, for instance, Tarintino risking Uma Thurman's safety for Kill Bill or Stanley Kubrick berating Shelley Duvall until her hair started to fall out.)

Fritz Lang had no such compunctions. In fact, it's kind of hard to look at his work and not get the impression that the cruelty was sometimes the point. The film also happened, but that was a byproduct of his ego rather than his talent. He could have made great films that didn't require child labor or live ammunition on sets... but simply put: he got a kick out of it. Movies--and most entertainment--are illusions in this sense. They are shadow puppets and mind games. That's been the case for thousands of years. Shakespeare's plays were performed on a square stage but evoked "fair Verona". Mystery plays did the lives and deaths of the saints, without actually putting performers through the suffering of the saints. The Greeks wore big, funky masks. Etc. Nobody need necessarily get their life put into danger to get that job done. Whenever you hear the argument that someone makes about "getting the shot" what you're really hearing is someone saying there are many ways to get a shot, but due to the limitations of their talent, they are choosing the risky, unprofessional one....

So, with all that said, here's the 8 most insane direction decisions by Fritz Lang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m0e4...