A Companion to Fritz Lang

By Joe McElhaney

This collection of critical essays offers an unrivalled and up-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life and vision of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

• The first edited collection of essays on Fritz Lang’s body of work in over thirty years
• A comprehensive assessment of one of cinema’s most influential figures
• Brings together key scholars, including Tom Gunning and Chris Fujiwara, to share their latest insights
• Features translated contributions from writers rarely rendered in English such as Nicole Brenez and Paolo Berletto
• Offers multinational and multi-perspectival analysis of Lang’s oeuvre, including all his key films

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118587232

Book preview

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Introduction

Joe McElhaney

The publication of A Companion to Fritz Lang marks the first English-language edited collection on Lang’s body of work in over thirty years. In 1981, the British Film Institute published Stephen Jenkins’s Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, a small volume (173 pages) comprised of one extended essay by Jenkins, written especially for the book, and four essays newly translated from the French but all of these having originally appeared between 1959 and 1978. Nonetheless, the literature on the cinema of Fritz Lang since then has not been lacking, either in volume or scholarly interest. In 1999, the British Film Institute published another volume on the director, this one entirely written by one scholar. Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity is, in contrast to the more modest scale of the Jenkins volume, a voluminous work, over five hundred pages of allegorical close readings. Over the last dozen years, Gunning’s book, with its seductive notions of the destiny-machine, defined by Gunning as a type of literal and metaphoric machine that is also a metonymy, a fragment which stands in for the whole systematic nature of the modern world (10), has exerted an enormous influence on Lang criticism. Many of the essays in this book are indebted to Gunning in some form or other. As important as Gunning has been, though, his work does not stand alone. Aside from the literature on Lang published since the 1950s by the likes of Noël Burch, Jean Douchet, Lotte Eisner, and Frieda Grafe¹ (as well as the publication of Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, and the massive collection of Lang documents assembled by Rolf Aurich et al. in Fritz Lang: His Life and Work), the last two decades have given us the investigations by (among others) Paolo Bertetto, Jean-Loup Bourget, Bernard Eisenschitz, Thomas Elsaesser, Anton Kaes, and Lutz Koepnick, all of them producing vibrant readings and, in some instances, unearthing major archival material. But more recent interest in Lang is not simply academic.

When this volume was in its earliest stages, the complete two-and-a-half-hour version of Lang’s silent epic Metropolis (1927) was being shown around the world. This version, unseen since its early screenings in Germany, was long believed to have been lost. But in 2008, a 16 mm print of this version was discovered. More than eighty years after its Berlin premiere, Metropolis was enjoying an extraordinary international success, through both theatrical screenings and in DVD/Blu-ray. The discovery of this version of Metropolis was a capstone in a series of restorations and reissues of Lang’s German films that had been occurring over the previous two decades, particularly through the efforts of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. Such Lang films as the two-part Spiders (1919 and 1920), Der müde Tod (1921), Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Spies (1928), Woman in the Moon (1929), M (1931), and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) were being widely shown in definitive (or near-definitive) versions for the first time since their original German release. A similar restoration was given to the films that marked Lang’s brief return to Germany after World War II: The Tiger of Eschanpur (1959), The Indian Tomb (1959), and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Such early rarities as Harakiri (1919), The Wandering Shadow (1920), and Four Around the Woman (1921), while not all surviving in complete form, are now also easily available. Lang’s Hollywood films were, on the whole, less subject to the precarious nature of film preservation. But today, virtually all of them are accessible in some form, as is the film that was the product of Lang’s brief stay in Paris, immediately prior to his departure for Hollywood, Liliom (1934). The cinema of Fritz Lang, then, is everywhere.

Part One: Looking, Power, Interpretation

A Companion to Fritz Lang marks another significant addition to what will doubtless continue to be one of the most voluminous bibliographies of any filmmaker. This is certainly fitting, as Lang is a seminal figure in film history, the example of his work the site of seemingly infinite possibilities for historical, aesthetic, and political understandings on the very nature of cinema. The essays I have gathered and commissioned testify to these possibilities. And yet this volume begins on a somewhat defensive, if not polemical, note with Raymond Bellour’s Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock. Bellour’s 1966 essay On Fritz Lang (available in Jenkins) remains one of the major general essays on the director. In On Fritz Lang, Bellour argues that for Lang, more than for any other filmmaker intent upon defining the essence of cinema, the cinema itself becomes the ultimate metaphor in which we find a moral system bound up with appearances but one in which the spectator is thrown back on a vertiginous duplication of the symbolic duality of the theme. With Lang, we have not simply a vision of the world but a vision of vision (On Fritz Lang 28). At the same time, and as his essay in this volume indicates, Bellour’s critical reputation has been significantly built upon essays that address another filmmaker, equally central to film history and ten years Lang’s junior: Alfred Hitchcock.

The names of Lang and Hitchcock have, for many years, been critically (if not mythologically) linked and for obvious reasons. Both filmmakers, in particular, frequently drew upon the spy and espionage genre, and upon various forms of the gothic. For Lang or Hitchcock, this occurred less through any particular investment in the genres themselves than through the possibilities to which the genres gave rise, in particular the genres’ emphasis on vision and the ambiguities of the act of looking. These, in turn, served as a pre-condition for an approach to the cinema that was at once formalist and metaphoric. Hitchcock cited Der müde Tod as a film that made a special impression upon him during the period before he had officially begun to direct, in 1925 (Truffaut 26). He also visited the set of Metropolis and quietly observed Lang at work (McGilligan 122). Nevertheless, Hitchcock was cautious about drawing too much attention to the connection between himself and Lang. When François Truffaut attempted to engage Hitchcock in a discussion of Spies, M, and the Mabuse films in relation to Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much Hitchcock was typically impassive: "Mabuse – that’s a long time back"² (Truffaut 91). Lang, though, could also reciprocate in terms of influence, often citing a sequence from Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca (1940), on his own Secret Beyond the Door (1947), both films part of a cycle of female-centered gothic melodramas being turned out in Hollywood during the forties. This did not, however, prevent Lang from privately sniping that Hitchcock copied his work (McGilligan 353). Hitchcock’s enormous commercial success after he arrived in Hollywood markedly contrasted with Lang’s own Hollywood reputation. In Germany, Lang was, along with F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst, its leading filmmaker. But his Hollywood reputation remained precarious throughout the two decades in which he made films in America, and he enjoyed neither the commercial success, creative control, or celebrity lavished on Hitchcock nor, in later years, the number of overt citations and homages in the work of other filmmakers. Moreover, even in academic circles, the literature on Hitchcock far outpaces that on Lang, and Hitchcock Studies (with its attendant literature, courses, conferences, websites) has become virtually a cottage industry.

With Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock, Bellour establishes the possibility of Lang as a filmmaker not necessarily superior to Hitchcock; rather, in Lang we find a cinema that at once remains within a social sphere of responsibility and detaches itself, alone, like a monolith. In contrast to Hitchcock, for whom everything in this cinema of apparent trauma and the psychoanalytical is oriented towards the past, in Lang there is a cinema that clings fiercely to the present. Suspense in Hitchcock is determined largely by its anchoring of point of view in relation to individual characters. Lang, on the other hand, responds by constantly capturing the anxiety of events, according to more or less discordant angles and viewpoints. In Lang, we find a social reality paralyzed by historical terror and in which the gaze, frequently unreliable and subject to the intervention of the gaze of the camera itself – as well as the virtual eye of the director – is always as if fractured, in proportion with the excess it conveys. More than in Hitchcock, for whom questions of the social and the political, even of concrete experience, tend to be somewhat ironically suspended and closed in on themselves (Bellour compares their very different conceptions of violence and murder), Lang is attached to a gaze that circulates endlessly in its desire to project and delineate the social and political, if not material and metaphysical, onto the image.³

It is the question of a gaze that is less psychological and individualized than it is social, political, and metaphorical that dominates the essays of this book’s first extended section. As Bellour and other Lang critics have noted, the act of looking in Lang’s cinema is marked by its ambiguous sense of agency. In "While Not Looking: The Failure to See and Know in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Frances Guerin takes this observation a step further. Guerin acknowledges the by-now accepted reading of the character of Dr. Mabuse as not simply a master criminal of many disguises. He is also a figure whose gaze upon the social and political landscape of the films is so all-encompassing that it serves as, on the one hand, a mirror of surveillance mechanisms and the institution of subjugation in modernity" and, on the other, an extension of Lang’s control over his own films and of the cinematic apparatus itself: Mabuse as the ultimate metteur en scène. But in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, the narrative drive of the film is paradoxically bound up not simply with Mabuse’s control but equally with his failures, his inability or difficulties in seeing, knowing, controlling, all of this tied to a circuitry of blindness. Guerin argues that in Lang, blindness and other forms of visual obfuscation are always the motivation and invocation of the cinema. It may be that this blindness is the twin that gives the cinema its visual power, that it is in a relationship of coexistence with looking, seeing, and revelation. While attentive to questions of editing and framing, Guerin takes particular note of the use of light and various optical devices (such as masking and iris effects) that likewise engage in forms of concealing as much as revealing, as well as taking note of the use of sound in Testament.⁴ In the latter film (Lang’s second from the sound era), Guerin argues that Mabuse is hiding behind a narrative driven forward by sounds and in a film in which we are confronted with a power that cannot be seen or touched.⁵ For Guerin, the Mabuse films, with their seriality and popular culture iconography, are engaging with (and symptomatic of) the conflicts and contradictions of seeing, bewitchment, and blindness specific to the modernity of the Weimar era.

In Symptom, Exhibition, Fear: Representations of Terror in the German Work of Fritz Lang, Nicole Brenez concerns herself less with the question of the look, per se, than with how power itself becomes figured in Lang’s crime films, films which include not only the two Mabuse works but also Spies (with another master criminal at its center, Haghi, and played by the same actor who portrayed Mabuse, Rudolf Klein-Rogge) and M. For what mobilizes Lang, Brenez writes, is not a man, a singular being, but a phenomenon. As with Guerin, Brenez locates this phenomenon in the immediate social and political climate of the Weimar era and Brenez, too, pays particular attention to serialized narrative as crucial to the formation of Lang’s cinema, with its emphasis on effect and an ongoing cause. Transmission and interception, Brenez points out, are the two major, complementary figures of Langian storytelling: every message becomes the object of a fatal interception; every message is a message of death. Brenez, though, more specifically isolates these Lang films in relation to associative forms of political activity and secret organizations that have much of their basis in European culture immediately after World War I. The rigorous and pessimistic character of the Hegelian dimension of these films is one in which the State never functions as a stable political entity threatened by hostile, terrorist forces but rather the State already contains within itself these very forces to which it is ostensibly opposed. Hence, for example, the parallel editing structure of M in which the world of the police and the world of the criminals become, through plastic and verbal rhymes, equivalent. But the impulse towards parallelism in Lang may also lead to a reconceived conception of the cinematic image, in which the image assumes the status of proof, bearing witness, and leading those who must observe such images to a state of madness. At the same time, these images for the spectator, images constantly being played against one another in ways to which the characters in the film are oblivious, become part of an exercise in deduction: Plastically, the shot becomes a page – the images turn like sheets of paper – and taking off from this metamorphosis, Lang constructs a pedagogy about false assumptions.

The issue of interpretation of the films themselves is central to the next two essays, both of which address the question of historical reception. Paul Dobryden’s "Spies: Postwar Paranoia Goes to the Movies" places Lang’s film within an immediate historical context. Richly drawing upon contemporaneous German literature on the film, Dobryden sees Spies as a work that is, in certain respects, symptomatic of German attitudes of the postwar period, a film betraying a deep anxiety about the international order after World War I and Germany’s place within it. Spies was released in the aftermath of a number of international treaties and cooperative endeavors which, while ostensibly designed to create a state of permanent peace, mainly served to exacerbate German anxieties that their country was being overrun by foreign interests, an anxiety upon which the Nazis were eventually able to capitalize. While nominally apolitical, Dobryden also argues that Spies is a contradictory cocktail of paranoia. In contrast to Dr. Mabuse, whose effects are essentially localized, Haghi’s criminal empire is international in scope and a war between nations is on the horizon. Haghi, then, is a far more modern industrial type of master criminal than Mabuse. Presiding over the Haghi Bank, he becomes a ubiquitous force, the face of rationalized corporate warfare taken to its logical conclusion: minimum force with maximum effect, hidden from an ignorant populace. For Dobryden, Spies, with its fascination for political theater, role-playing, and diplomacy, all of this masking the very real threat of imminent war and violence, is a "cold war film avant la lettre."

Olga Solovieva’s "Identifying the Suspect: Lang’s M and the Trajectories of Film Criticism" works across a broader historical canvas, from the film’s early reception up through the present day. Unlike Spies, M’s reception has been enormously varied and complex, a film destined not just to become a frequent object of study from many viewpoints but, first and foremost, to take on the unusual role of a catalyst of new theoretical and methodological approaches. In spite of the widely held belief that Lang’s German period represented a critical and aesthetic height to which his Hollywood career was never able to aspire, Lang’s German films, in fact, often drew sharply divided critical responses upon their initial release. Today, M is widely regarded as Lang’s masterpiece and it was Lang’s own favorite among his films. But as Solovieva demonstrates, M initially attracted a great deal of critical confusion, even from such formidable critics and historians as Rudolf Arnheim, Iris Barry, and Siegfried Kracauer, all of whom were puzzled by the film’s formal and political ambitions. The film’s conception, argues Solovieva, went so far beyond the limits of what the contemporary cinematic medium could handle technologically and so thoroughly contradicted expectations regarding what the cinema should do discursively, that the film immediately posed a challenge even to the most sophisticated film critics of its time. While the film’s reputation continued to grow in the years since its release, and by the 1960s it had acquired the status of an art film classic, Solovieva marks the appearance of Noël Burch’s writings on Lang in the early seventies as a watershed moment. Burch’s analyses were produced at the height of the structuralist movement in France and the influence of this methodology on Burch allowed him to produce an unprecedented level of insight into what Solovieva calls M’s non-representational, conceptual nature as well as its stylistic hybridity. Burch’s arguments about the film’s large scale form, its subordination of linear narrativity to the logic of the whole are continually tied to the film’s local structures. For Solovieva, Burch, through his analysis of M, introduced an alternative or correlative structural model for cinematic language. Subsequent analyses of the film over the years, drawing upon other methodologies, not only have brought forth additional insights into the nature of M but have also explored new possibilities in film theory and criticism: Thierry Kuntzel’s film-immanent analysis, which attempts to resist reducing the political or formal analysis of a film to a single meaning; Marie Ropars-Wuilleumier on M’s montage as a type of cinematic écriture, dependent upon gap, incongruity, conflict, and open-ended diversification of meanings; Maria Tartar’s situating the film in relation to the methodology of new historicism; and Tom Gunning on M as an allegory of modern urban space. Solovieva’s enormous undertaking here concludes with M’s potential in relation to scholarship in the digital age, again confirming her argument that M should be seen as a film that advanced cinematic criticism to new stages of consciousness and helped expand the discipline of film studies into the broader areas of culture and media.

With David Phelps and The Medium’s Re-Vision (Or the Doctor as Disease, Diagnostic, and Cure) we return to Mabuse but move ahead in history, to the end of Lang’s career with his final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Whereas Guerin situates the metaphoric acts of not seeing in the first two Mabuse films in relation to questions of Weimar modernity, Phelps takes his cue from a different kind of not seeing found in the last of the Mabuse installments: a false blindness perpetrated by a Mabuse imposter intent upon recreating the acts of the first Mabuse (who went insane at the end of der Spieler and who dies early in Testament) as well as his penchant for disguise. (One of his disguises is to play the role of a blind psychic.) This, in turn, presents us with a film that is no less steeped in the immediate German political situation than the Mabuse films and Spies. But much has happened to Lang in between Testament of Dr. Mabuse and The Thousand Eyes, specifically his years spent in Hollywood. Phelps casts a wide net in his essay, drawing upon Lang’s earlier German films as well as much of Lang’s work in Hollywood as a way of situating The Thousand Eyes as the culmination of a 40-year passage into concerted disenchantment. In The Thousand Eyes, this new Mabuse operates out of the Hotel Luxor, a space constructed during the Nazi era and installed with a video surveillance system, allowing Mabuse to observe and manipulate a postwar political landscape for his own ends. But the new Mabuse seems to only be capable of repeating and restaging the activities of the old Mabuse and Lang himself, again an ambivalent metaphoric double for Mabuse, frequently duplicates his own formal strategies from the earlier films. As Phelps argues, such a disenchanted duplication may be seen as the only logical response to a postwar situation that not only adapted his technological networks of terror into state apparatuses, and so reclaimed a visionary art as institutional procedure, but had done so with such success that in the new surveillance state, men would become functionaries of the state’s visions without any possible recourse to their own. The absence of agency (in terms of narrative events, the look of the camera, the look of the protagonists) has never been as strong in Lang as it is in this final film, in which to exercise one’s will seems to have vanished from a world in which the characters move as if possessed by phantom powers. Yet this is entirely fitting for the postwar reality that the film is attempting to document. Phelps argues that in The Thousand Eyes an enactment of two interdependent, counterpointed images occurs: one of them the hypnotic spectacular image of seduction and the other the purely functional operational image, tied to inscription and recording but also, more fundamentally, a disposable image, one meant not to be seen because it is tied to a system of secrecy and surveillance. From spaces designed to be seen at the start of his career, Lang ends with spaces designed to be invisible altogether.

Part Two: Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions

Lang’s reputation as the creator and perpetrator of mythologies (in particular, mythologies built around the concepts of nation and history) and as an artist with a deeply tragic vision of the world, is central to this book’s second group of essays. The first essay, "Metaphysics of Finitude: Der müde Tod and the Crisis of Historicism," concerns itself with what is widely perceived to be Lang’s first major accomplishment. During the early 1920s, Der müde Tod was taken to be one of the central films that elevated the cinema to the level of a serious art form. It particularly resonated with other (or, at that time, future) filmmakers: In addition to Hitchcock, Nicholas Baer cites the testimony of René Clair, Georges Franju, and Luis Buñuel. Much of the praise for the film, both at the time of its release and in the literature on Lang over the years, has been for its aestheticism: its art historical references, its self-consciously tragic form (here Baer makes use of, as does Gunning throughout much of his book, Walter Benjamin’s arguments on the baroque, allegorical nature of the Trauerspiel), and its innovative, embedded narrative structure. All of these are devices that Lang would continue to use, to varying degrees, throughout much of his career. Without losing sight of the film’s importance in this regard, Baer’s approach is more closely aligned with Franju’s response to the film, seeing Der müde Tod as a work of philosophy. For Baer, Der müde Tod is a major Weimar-era text in its reaction against the crisis of historicism that dominated much German intellectual thought prior to World War I. Resisting the nineteenth-century tendency to regard each state and epoch as distinct moments in historical time, Lang’s film conveys a visual poetics of parallelism and homology, emphasizing trans-historical affinities and commonalities rather than distinct inner principles. Such a reading allows Baer to allow for and incorporate the film’s formal innovations within the film’s equally modernist interpretation of time and history. Baer links the film with a younger generation of Weimar modernist philosophers, who posited temporality and historicity as basic, inescapable conditions of human existence. In the film, death serves as an organizing principle of both time and narrative and is explicitly embodied in the figure of Death, a character whose graveyard wall functions as a spatiotemporal and metaphysical boundary. But Baer also sees in Death an indicator of the fraught positionality of Jews. Death becomes a type of Wandering Jew within the film’s broader thematization of alterity and non-belonging.

From Lang’s first major film, our next essay takes us to the final film Lang made during his twenty-year Hollywood career, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). This film, made on a low budget for RKO Radio studios, could, when placed against the enormous standing he had in Germany in the twenties, represent the nadir of Lang’s already declining reputation. While Lang publicly professed to dislike the film (the unhappy experience of making it enough for him to entirely stop directing in Hollywood), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt has been an object of constant attention and fascination among Lang critics since its release, with Jacques Rivette’s now-legendary 1957 essay on the film from Cahiers du cinéma, La main (The Hand), serving as a foundational text of Lang criticism. Rivette’s essay was part of a significant postwar rethinking by French critics on the importance of Lang’s cinema, particularly his Hollywood work. Some of these critics were not only on the verge of transforming themselves into the directors of the French New Wave but were also drawing upon the example of Lang’s cinema in their own films, most clearly Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard. In "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the Caesura" Chris Fujiwara not only cites Rivette’s essay (as do other writers in this book), but also engages in a dialogue with Rivette as much as with Lang’s film. Such an engagement produces a particularly rich insight into the film and into Lang’s critical reputation in the late fifties and early sixties in which Lang himself, the progenitor of so many filmed myths and legend, now becomes a type of mythical figure. This is most overt in Godard’s film Le Mépris (1963) in which he not only plays a version of himself but is majestically filmed by Godard as though he were a figure worthy to stand alongside the film’s numerous mythical references and iconic figures. Fujiwara situates Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and Lang in relation to this history. But the foregrounding of Rivette allows for Fujiwara to pursue the importance of tragic form to the film, a form also discussed by Baer in relation to Der müde Tod although in a different manner. As with most of the essays in this volume, Fujiwara places his chosen film in relation to a precise historical and cultural context, in this instance fifties America. This is a world dominated (as was Lang’s previous film, made the same year, While the City Sleeps) by the televisual and leading to a film whose bleakness, achieved through a dry, spare visual and dramatic style, becomes appropriate for the tragedy of this particular historical conjunction, which is unmistakably marked by fatigue, renunciation, and lateness. But Fujiwara links the film not only with the Rivette piece but also with two works of Friedrich Hölderlin: The Poet’s Vocation (whose lines about the absence rather than the presence of God serving to reassure Man are quoted by Lang in Godard’s film) and "Remarks on Oedipus. The latter essay is particularly central, in which Hölderlin’s arguments on the importance of caesura as a (citing Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) ‘counter-rhythmic interruption’ and ‘change of representations’" in the structure and rhythm of the tragic text becomes critical to Fujiwara’s reading of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In opposition to the classical Aristotelian notion of tragic catharsis, with the caesura we have a "shock that reveals representation itself, that is, the structure of representation. This disarticulation throws into question the way in which things are seen and indeed the very fact that things are being seen. In Lang, we find the most rigorous definition of the caesura in cinema" and with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, whose explicit theme is the struggle to determine innocence and guilt, we have a statement by Lang on cinema and its relations to truth and deception and to exoneration and punishment.

We return to Germany with two essays devoted to Die Nibelungen, a film that was the most sustained effort on the part of Lang and his screenwriter wife, Thea von Harbou, to create a work that would serve as a national epic for an economically and morally devastated Germany after World War I and whose dedication, To the German People (via an intertitle), could not be more explicit in this regard. In "Lang contra Wagner: Die Nibelugen as Anti-Adaptation," Thomas Leitch details the degree to which Lang and von Harbou created their film against Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, itself an adaptation of ancient and medieval texts, most notably the Nibelungenlied. As Leitch notes, by the time that Lang was making his film Wagner had assumed the status of both a quasi-Scriptural source for the story of Siegfried and an unofficial touchstone of German high culture. For Die Nibelungen, though, it is not a German high culture that Lang is implicitly addressing but rather a popular one, allowing the film to serve as the second panel of an epic triptych of Germany present, past, and future, preceded by Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (A Picture of the Times and A Play about People of Our Time as each episode of parts one and two, respectively, bill themselves) and followed by Metropolis. Moreover, such a strategy could conceivably serve to make the film an attractive international export item whose potential in this regard is, ironically, based upon worldwide exposure to Wagner’s opera. Leitch takes note of several strategies employed by Lang and von Harbou that engage in contravening and correcting Wagner. One of these is the highly elliptical use of deixis, leading in this instance to a film in which expository and character information (as well as character motivation) is notably sparse or is introduced very late in the unfolding of the narrative. As a result, Die Nibelungen attempts to chart a path between telling a story and alluding to it. In traditional forms of deixis, there is an assumption that many readers or spectators will already be familiar with the story and so certain gaps are allowable. Lang and von Harbou are at least partially practicing this, especially as such a gesture would go against Wagner’s tendency to render similar information in insistent and often repetitious ways. At the same time, the film will mystify those who are not already immersed in these sagas, a strategy of overt control over the spectator’s knowledge that will be increasingly central to Lang throughout the rest of his career. (It determines virtually the entire form of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, for example.) Another strategy employed by the film is its refusal to allow for conventional character development, part and parcel with the film’s stately, iconic nature. Such a dissolution of individuals into mobs or architectural elements of the décor [and] lack of interest in individual psychology [in order to] to represent the German national soul as both barbaric and heroic would, as Leitch notes, be a source of much controversy, most notably through Kracauer’s argument, in From Caligari to Hitler, that the film foreshadows Nazi propaganda and its grandiose rallies, the latter reportedly inspired by the mise-en-scène of Die Nibelungen.

Kracauer assumes a more central place in Steve Choe’s "Redemption of Revenge: Die Nibelungen. As in Leitch, Choe’s essay refers to Kracauer’s by-now famous arguments (one with which Lang was familiar even though he despised them) about not only the film’s visual style foreshadowing Nazi aesthetics but also how the film’s compulsory, cause–effect logic functions within a revenge narrative that would come to resonate within Nazi ideology. Choe does not so much dispute Kracauer’s reading as he opens up its terms onto a much broader historical and philosophical terrain. For Choe, the theme of revenge that will be so central to Lang’s cinema is thematized for the first time" in Die Nibelungen. The world of the film is not simply that of myth and legend. It is also an allegory for the modern world inhabited by Lang and von Harbou: the world of instrumental reason, of narrative cinema, and a world in which individuals are reified and quantified. As with Baer’s essay on Der müde Tod, Choe places the film within a detailed, post-World War I context. Here Lang’s film had a particular resonance for a German audience steeped in a culture of ressentiment, a term derived from a work of the same name by the philosopher Max Scheler, first published in 1915 and then reprinted four years later, in which Scheler is working upon Nietzsche’s notions, as articulated in The Genealogy of Morals, of revenge. In ressentiment, we find accumulated feelings of hatred and envy that cannot be expressed against those who are perceived to be superior in rank. The feelings of impotence that develop over a period of time among those who feel they are oppressed give rise, in a revisionist act of relinquishing guilt, to feelings of moral superiority over the oppressor, who is now regarded as evil: This revaluation is bolstered through a righteous herd mentality that collectively mobilizes against the moral exception. What is occurring in Germany at this time are the repercussions of what were believed to be the unreasonable demands for postwar reparations, sending the already crippled German economy into a tailspin. Choe’s allegorical reading of this film extends across a number of terrains. The stab-in-the-back murder of Siegfried by Hagen, for example, is seen as one driven by political proxy and the individual desire for power in relation to a number of recent events (including contemporaneous anti-Semitic propaganda). Nevertheless, and significantly departing from Kracauer, Choe also argues that Kriemhild’s desire for revenge against Hagen over Siegfried’s death may easily be seen by spectators as excessive and even repellent in its unyielding, cruel righteousness. The film’s apocalyptic finale leaves the viewer with an ethical dilemma: identification with or alienation from the vengeful. But Choe also addresses the film’s form. He echoes Kracauer’s argument that the film’s causal rigidity manifests itself in the film’s mise-en-scène. Instead of inanimate things becoming animated by the film technology for Choe the power of cinema succumbs to the stubborn demands of linear narrative. Yet Choe also points towards Lang’s own writings on the film from this period that address his self-conscious use of ornamentation and the reduction of the mass to that of an object. For Lang, though, this is an ‘ethical task’ and part of a larger project to bring the weight and power of German culture to the masses, for too long beholden to the sensationalism of American melodrama. The stateliness, length, and ponderous rhythm of Die Nibelungen are acutely tied to the specific experience of cinematic duration so that revenge also obeys the logic of modern, mechanical time. This notion of a capitalist time that is mechanized and spatialized forms a key trope in many of Lang’s films, in both Germany and America.

The same year in which Die Nibelungen was released, Lang made his first trip to the United States, a trip that included a visit to Hollywood. But it was not until the following decade that Lang moved to California and also began to more systematically explore his fascination with the American West. Phil Wagner’s Furious Union: Fritz Lang and the American West addresses two of the most neglected films in Lang’s body of work, the westerns The Return of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941), as well as Lang’s 16 mm home movies of the American Southwest. Because of their neglected status, the films in Wagner’s essay could just as easily have found a home in this book’s final section. But Wagner situates his essay within a complex, mythical reading of the American West, strongly filtered through the sensibilities of both Lang and the German pulp writer, Karl May, whose western tales captivated Lang for many years before he set foot on American soil. May (who did not visit the American West until late in life) developed an idiosyncratically German conception of the frontier that came to resonate for Lang (although Wagner is careful to avoid any one-to-one influence) as well as for a modern, industrialized Germany. May’s sensationalist storytelling methods (present not only in his westerns but also in his other adventure tales) are in some ways analogous to the modern sensorium [of] surprise, disorientation, and kinetic assault that would come to dominate Lang’s allegorization of modern life. Central here is the importance of disguise, the theatricality of modern (and, in this case, American) life, and a questioning of the very notion of authenticity. That the myth of the American West is, in May’s work, built upon a barely repressed acknowledgment of the projected savagery of civilization makes its way into Lang’s treatment of the West. Wagner argues that Lang’s first American film, Fury (1936), while contemporary in setting and more traditionally associated with anti-lynching melodramas of the thirties, could also be seen as a displaced western. The film’s scattered references to the myths and iconography of that genre ultimately become part of a much larger system at work in the film in which there are tenuously constructed boundaries between law and anarchy, civility and savagery, a world in which flung tomahawks and scalping knives [are] translated into fiery projectiles and dynamite. In the two more obvious examples of the genre, we find in The Return of Frank James a film that reflexively picks apart the social engineering of the Old West’s historical memory while it exposes its numbly reenacted blood rituals as well as an emphasis on the media’s cannibalization of violence and a commentary of the indistinguishability between news reportage and western myth. And Western Union resists the heartening analogies between perseverant settlers and the struggling national audience typical of Roosevelt-era super-westerns. In its place, we have a film in which hero and villain are not classically opposed characters and in which the specific political purpose of the telegraph is not given great elaboration. What we witness on this perilous journey, Wagner writes, are moments of immanent death with elusive significance to the project of America.

In "‘It Was a Horserace Sorta’: Fortunes of Rancho Notorious," Tom Conley addresses the one Lang western that has received more attention than Lang’s other works of this genre, Rancho Notorious (1952). Its western ballad refrain of hate, murder, and revenge (those particular lyrics heard at several points in the film, including during the credits) overtly thematizes a clear Langian concern stretching back at least as far as Die Nibelungen, another film in which the ballad form is central and in which that ballad becomes an oral tale in which history bleeds into myth. For Conley, the film’s interest is in the way it treats historical and cinematic time even as "other signs suggest that its narrative takes place in a world out of time." Such temporal matters, though, are not simply manifested in the form of the film itself but also in its reception. Conley frames his essay by referring to a history of French critical response to Rancho Notorious, with Raymond Bellour’s edited volume, Le Western, placed at one end of the essay and Godard’s Le Mépris and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988) at the other. Conley notes that for many French critics contributing to Bellour’s book, Lang figures in the pantheon of western film directors, in spite of the small volume of his contribution to the genre, and that Rancho Notorious, a dominant anomaly, has received notable attention. It is a film that "can be understood as a layered composition of historical moments – a stratigraphy, or a sedimentary landscape in which the camera becomes a narrative agent that cuts across manifold layers of time, couches as it were, of a difficult chronology. In terms of the film itself, Conley devotes much of his attention to the opening (including the credits) as well as three nimble flashbacks in which time becomes something that is perpetually out of synch, part of various patterns on the part of the film that underscore how elements are everywhere either in a state of anachronism or jarringly out of place. The film’s Wheel of Fortune serves as a marker of a fate that is above the contingencies of history." The afterlife of Rancho Notorious for Godard occurs via two works: a reference to Rancho in the dialogue of Le Mépris; an excerpt from the film in Histoire(s) du cinéma which shows Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich) and other saloon girls engaged in a type of horserace in which they ride men who crawl across the barroom floor. But the latter is accompanied by a false quotation from André Bazin that was cited in Le Mépris, pointing towards the film’s ambivalent historical and cultural associations, for both Godard and Lang. Rancho Notorious now comes forward uncannily, as if to recall how the backward movement of recall [occurring] in the forward motion of the race, calls the quotation into question.

Part Three: Matters of Form

The essays in the third section of this book are united by their emphasis on questions of aesthetics and by their attention to visual analysis (although, in virtually every instance, these essays situate such aesthetic matters in precise historical and cultural contexts). We begin with Daniel Morgan’s Beyond Destiny and Design: Camera Movement in Fritz Lang’s German Films. Morgan’s subject is a surprising one in that, as he acknowledges, Lang is not generally regarded as one of the masters of camera movement, even though he was a director working within the German film industry during a period when such films as F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and E. A. Dupont’s Variety (1925) were achieving international attention and influence. (Murnau’s gift for camera mobility would be central to his departure for Hollywood, almost ten years earlier than Lang’s.) In some films, such as Die Nibelungen, Morgan detects barely any camera movement at all. Nevertheless, he finds the camera movement in Lang’s German films to be, overall, extraordinarily rich and interesting. For Morgan, Lang uses camera movements to negotiate complex subject positions within the films and to create surprisingly open, fluid spaces, all of which creates a productive tension with his broader themes of destiny and design. Throughout these films, Morgan notes a recurrence of mobile shots that complicates the standard ways in which we might read such moments as marking clear character subjectivity. In Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler or Metropolis, Morgan isolates what he calls object-defined camera movements. These involve shifting subject/object relations in which what we are shown is centrally determined by style (manner of presentation) rather than perspective. For example, the sequence in Metropolis in which Rotwang chases Maria through the catacombs involves several spectacular camera movements that would appear to represent Rotwang’s point of view. But as the sequence unfolds, it is Maria’s anxiety that we experience as a viewer, an ambivalence that is a structuring element to much of Lang’s cinema, apart from questions of camera movements themselves. And throughout Metropolis, in a manner unprecedented during his silent period, Lang is able to create larger patterns and rhythms out of camera movements in order to develop thematic resonances across a film. In his later German films, particularly those that employ synchronized sound, the object-defined movements decrease and are replaced by a lived perspective – and more open sense of space – that shifts the dramatic and existential tension of the film. In M, for example, camera movement becomes part of a fluid, organic social space comprising a wide range of activities. The fascination with geometrical patterns from his silent films is still present but is placed within these more lived environments which, in turn, form part of a clear dynamic between open and closed spaces, the camera movements often serving to create complex spatial articulations.

While covering the same period as Morgan in her essay, it is not mobility that is the primary concern of Brigitte Peucker in Fritz Lang: Object and Thing in the German Films but rather (as her title implies) the preponderance of the object. This she sees as part of a collector’s drive that is central throughout the body of work, including the films he made in Hollywood. Using the object-filled decor of the apartment he shared with von Harbou as her starting point, Peucker situates Lang’s fascination with objects within the various discourses, as well as aesthetic movements, on this subject that were central to the first three decades of the twentieth century: early avant-garde cinema and film theory’s preoccupation with the camera’s capacity to magically transform objects; the Expressionist investment in objects indicating visionary states; the sense of contingency to the everyday or modern object central to the New Objectivity; and a broader German philosophical tradition involving a questioning of the use value of the art object. In Lang, we find that a surplus of significance is accorded to objects and things … more is always at stake. This more is temporality and death, as the objects come to represent an excess that is finally beyond representation. Here Peucker, working out of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, also draws links between Lang and Hitchcock, both of whom show an overinvestment in the thingness of an object that pushes it in the direction of an unrepresentable excess, an object tied to death that also looks back. But Lang goes beyond Hitchcock in that the movement between form and formlessness, between taking shape and dematerializing is foregrounded, moments when figure/ground relations are virtually indistinguishable. Moreover, throughout Lang’s work, an investment in the indexical is paramount. There is an obsession with the act of writing in Lang, with tracing, inscriptions, drawings, and in which the still photograph may assume a key function. Within such an indexical world, the hand becomes a central feature, not only through gesture but also through the relationship between hand and object. Citing Rainer Maria Rilke’s notion of the Handwerk, hands literally shaping or sculpting the world, Peucker sees in Lang’s persistent hand imagery a modernist gesture tied not only to representation within the diegetic worlds of the film but also to the act of creation, of making cinema, even as such a gesture is tied to erasure and death.

Near the end of "A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile, Anton Kaes notes the centrality of Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), the film’s protagonist, confusing the word memento with the word momentum. A single word again approaches what Peucker calls the status of things" but in an entirely different context. For Kaes, such an error is one to which exiles, attempting to learn a new language, would particularly respond. Fury is not only Lang’s first American film, made as part of a newly signed contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it is set in America as well. In spite of the enormous influence, described by Olga Solovieva in her essay here, that the writings of Noël Burch have had on Lang criticism, Burch himself was notoriously hostile to Lang’s American work. I shall not waste time, he writes, "demonstrating how and why M is not merely superior to Fury but belongs to an altogether different dimension (584). For Burch, this period of Lang’s career constitutes a silence lasting some thirty years (599). The brilliance of Burch’s formalist approach comes up short when faced with Lang’s American films, which would appear to require different critical tools that address questions that move beyond those of large scale form. Certainly the essays in this book on the American films, and the numerous writings on Lang’s American work elsewhere, testify to the richness of this period on various levels, including those of cinematic form. In his essay in this book, for example, Chris Fujiwara argues that the shot/reverse shot in Lang’s American work is often imbalanced because it rests on a lack, a withholding, a blindness. Moreover, the socio-political nature of Lang’s American period is certainly as compelling as that of his German. Kaes situates Lang’s work during this period as belonging to that of a cinema of exile, one shared by Lang with other refugees from Nazi Germany. What we find in this cinema is a juridical effectiveness and ethical urgency – film is not just entertainment but has the power to document history, set the record straight, and condemn the guilty. In relation to questions of form, artists such as Lang did not simply mimic the dominant strategies of Hollywood but instead utilized, poached, and often refashioned the existing visual and narrative language." Whereas Phil Wagner approaches Fury as a displaced western, Kaes situates it in relation to more immediate historical and cultural circumstances: Depression America when economic instability and overt expressions of racism were common and in which lynchings were a dominant feature of the social landscape. The barbershop sequence of the film, in which an immigrant barber is more knowledgeable about the American Constitution than a native, is an emblematic exiled artist moment for Kaes in that it engages in a double-edged critique from a vantage point that compares and judges the new against the old, the unknown against the known, the present against the past, the indigenous against the foreign. An exile such as Lang would be especially attentive to the incipient fascism in America, regarding the mob violence of America as nightmarish real-life enactments of scenarios he had created in the 1920s. While the screenplay for Fury preceded Lang’s involvement in the project, Lang’s contribution to it once he had signed on was significant. Joe’s isolation from his social environment was sharpened, turning him into a stranger and outcast in his own land. But Lang also does not abandon the tendency to myth and legend that was central to much of his German work. As the intended murder victim of a violent mob, Joe is transformed into an avenging God, adding a mythological profundity to this American fable, one whose structure echoes that of Die Nibelungen.

In spite of the critical acclaim that Lang received for Fury, the film was not a financial success and his contract with MGM was terminated. Will Scheibel addresses Lang’s second American film, produced independently, You Only Live Once (1937), in his essay, "Fritz Lang’s Modern Character: You Only Live Once and the Depth of Surface." As with Fury and the film that followed You Only Live Once, the extraordinary You and Me (1938), Sylvia Sidney was the female lead and her compatible relationship with Lang (who was otherwise regarded as a difficult figure) was largely responsible for Lang’s two post-Fury projects.⁶ Scheibel’s essay, like several other essays in this collection, is strongly indebted to the Cahiers du cinéma approach to Lang as it was being articulated in the fifties and early sixties and of which Rivette’s essay on Beyond a Reasonable Doubt serves as a focal point (as we have already seen through Fujiwara’s essay in this volume). This return to Cahiers is not a nostalgic gesture for Scheibel but a self-conscious attempt to make use of a more intuitive model for exploring the nature of the image in Lang. Scheibel takes note of the implications of Rivette’s argument that Lang is, above all, a "cinéaste of the concept. For Scheibel, this involves Lang’s surface-level attention to seemingly unimportant details of mise-en-scène and thereby allowing for Lang to be seen as both a filmmaker and a lover of cinema. In drawing upon this French criticism, Scheibel is interested in showing how the social engagement of a director may be less evident in subject matter, plot, and character development than in the conceptual or symbolic nature of surface details. There is a fundamentally modern character" to Lang’s films, present in both the surface effects of the image and in the conception of the characters themselves. The latter, such as Eddie (Henry Fonda) in You Only Live Once, possess a shallow identity reduced to the status of a surface or an object and reinvented by legal institutions and a capitalist, mass cultural public sphere. Scheibel finds You Only Live Once to be the most transparent example of the ways in which [Lang’s] work in Hollywood was shaped by and responded to socio-cultural questions about modern aesthetics and public consciousness. The sense of negation in Lang, a world of negative space and alienating social environments, results in an undermining of formal harmony and coherence, relinquishing classical control on the surface to a deeper, affective kind of fragmentation and abstraction that reflects an anxiety over epistemological certainty.

If Lang’s collaborations with Sylvia Sidney during the thirties were crucial to his early years in Hollywood, even more fortuitous was his work with Joan Bennett in the following decade. The success of their first two films together, Man Hunt (1941) and The Woman in the Window (1944), led to Lang, Bennett, and Bennett’s husband (and producer on You Only Live Once), Walter Wanger, forming Diana Productions, the only time in Lang’s Hollywood career in which he approached something close to the autonomy he had in Germany. For Diana, Lang and Bennett collaborated on two films, Scarlet Street (1945), widely regarded as one of the peaks of Lang’s American period, and the gothic melodrama Secret Beyond the Door, whose failure was so substantial that it brought an end to Diana Productions. Whereas much of the literature on Lang will argue that the actor in his films must submit to a pre-determined visual strategy that leaves little room for the actor’s autonomy, Steven Rybin, in Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance, sees Bennett functioning for Lang in a very different manner. Concentrating primarily on the films after Man Hunt, Rybin argues that Bennett does not merely submit to a pre-determined aesthetic or narrative logic. Rather, her performative energy, always existing in relation to the borders of frames and the temporal destiny of editing, resists being completely bound to any formal determinism. Working out of Leo Braudy’s open and closed notions of cinematic form and space (Daniel Morgan’s essay in this volume likewise draws upon this distinction of Braudy’s), with Lang’s films falling into the second category, Rybin sees in Bennett’s presence an intervention in the logic of a closed world. Rybin writes that Bennett’s performances do not "simply or only take place within the borders of a Fritz Lang film. Instead, Bennett also relates to the borders of works of art which exist within the mise-en-scène of each film," the works of art being painting and, in Secret Beyond the Door, architecture. The Bennett films after Man Hunt, in fact, are more strongly tied to questions of aesthetics, become allegories of art production while also being less immediately connected to socio-cultural and historical matters than Lang’s preceding American films. Rybin pays detailed attention to Bennett’s performances in all three films, in which her gestures have an active, rather than neutral, relationship to Lang’s choices in framing and cutting. For example, in relation to Secret Beyond the Door, Rybin argues that "Bennett is not so much contained by the film as living and thinking within it, creating a character who thoughtfully considers the objects and spaces which comprise the narrative." In contrast to Bennett’s characters in the previous two Lang films, both of whom worked within basic tensions of the open and closed frame that took their cues from the films’ respective diegetic paintings, Celia in Secret Beyond the Door is the prime mover of the frame itself, her searching thoughts and restless performance guiding the moving frame of Lang’s film. But it is also Bennett’s voice that is central to the film, a voice that caresses the objects, figures, and spaces to which her thoughts attend.

Scarlet Street is central to Vinzenz Hediger’s ‘I’d Like to Own That Painting’: Lang, Cézanne, and the Art of Omission. But it is not the star presence of Joan Bennett that is of primary concern. Instead, Hediger sees the film engaging in mirroring effects that are, on the one hand, related to Lang’s previous collaboration with Bennett, The Woman in the Window (in particular, through their shared concern with portraits of women in gallery windows), and, on the other, to Lang’s own biography. It is the latter of these that becomes especially central to Hediger. He draws upon an anecdote from Lang’s teenage years, in which Lang presented his mother, on her birthday, with an oil painting he claimed he had done. Lang’s mother was pleased but his father was not, preferring that his son pursue a more practical career, such as banking. Several days later, however, a shopkeeper arrived at the Lang home and asked for the painting to be returned: Lang had not done this painting at all but merely stole someone else’s work and attempted to pass it off as his own, a situation that becomes mirrored in Scarlet Street, when one nefarious character claims the paintings of another character as her own. For Hediger, Scarlet Street plays out the scenario of the passion of the clerk who would be an artist, one that mirrors the biographical anecdote of Lang the juvenile pretend painter. Seen in this way, the film is a form of autobiography in the form of a deferred action and in the mode of afterwardness or, more specifically, as an alternate history of Lang’s own life, a version of what could have been had the teenager not escaped the stern gaze of the father. But the film also may be read as being about the conflict between bourgeois life and art, a film that is a reflection on the pitfalls of becoming and being an artist, on the logic of truth and falsehood in devotion and recognition. Central to Hediger’s argument is the first extended scene in the film between the cashier/Sunday painter Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) and the prostitute Katharine Kitty March (Bennett), who will soon become a subject for Cross’s paintings. The dialogue itself here, comprised of a series of lies and evasions the two characters tell one another, built upon an intuitive sense of who the other person might be, achieves a paradoxical truth in that Chris and Kitty have left space for the projection of what they themselves wish to be, and what they wish to be perceived as. But they also discuss art and Cézanne becomes central to this discussion. Kitty (who has spotted one of Chris’s paintings in a Fifth Avenue gallery and proceeds to mispronounce Cézanne’s name) sees art solely in terms of its monetary value whereas Chris would like to own that painting. Chris’s declaration combines his admiration for the painting’s aesthetic power (although it is unlikely he even knows what that painting Kitty is referring to might be) and for Cézanne’s now-canonical status as a great artist. Given the style of the paintings that Chris produces in the film, though, Rousseau would be a more likely point of contact for him. But as Hediger notes, Cézanne, the son of a banker, was briefly forced to study law and economics by a father who disapproved of his son’s artistic leanings, before finally becoming successful as a painter: Cézanne, in other words, has accomplished what Chris never will, and while Chris’s paintings will soon be sold for almost as much as the paintings of Cézanne, the dream of both owning a Cézanne and being recognized on his own terms will forever elude him. Chris remains a worker, someone for whom life is lived according to a model where money is an expression of time and vice versa. Kitty and her pimp boyfriend Johnny (Dan Duryea) effectively steal Chris’s work and claim the paintings for Kitty, who publicly signs them and becomes a celebrated figure while Chris diligently works behind the scenes. But as Hediger points out, this ironically becomes a source of pleasure for Chris, in a film that addresses the void of mimetic desire in which we imitate the desires of others rather than draw on our spontaneous innermost feelings.

As with some other essays in this volume, Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s "Tumbling Blocks and Queer Ladders: Notions of Home in The Big Heat" focuses on the treatment of space. The Big Heat (1953), while only a modest success on its original release, is now widely regarded as one of Lang’s major achievements and, for many, his greatest film of the fifties (although its high standing today has as much to do with its status as a film noir than with