Fritz Lang, Film History and Fate

Aaron Cutler looks at the life and times of cinema’s key pioneers – the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang.

Film history frequently offers two versions of Fritz Lang: A maker of epic German tragedies and melodramas prior to Nazism’s rise, and a creator of lean, tight Hollywood noir films after leaving Germany in 1933. Yet this division placed within the great Austrian director’s half-century-long film career should be challenged. One reason why is that it overlooks the outliers, such as Lang’s lone film made in France, the splendidly gentle and sad supernatural romance Liliom (1934); his nineteenth-century adventure tale Moonfleet (1955), a CinemaScope work shot on the MGM backlot with an almost entirely British cast; and his final films, realized after he left Hollywood and returned to Germany. Another is that it ignores other major binaries and shifts in Lang’s practice.

For instance, major differences could easily be seen between silent Lang and sound Lang. The filmmaker was born in 1890, saw his first film when he was nearly thirty years old and worked at the forefront of the late silent period. He stated in interviews that, as sound films first arrived, he believed that they should utilize all kinds of noise, and not simply dialogue. Accordingly, we can balance the meticulously detailed and opulent visuals of silent films as diverse as 1919’s Harakiri (an adaptation of the Japan-set play Madame Butterfly that used period structures and costumes made with materials from the Hamburg Anthropological Museum) and 1929’s Woman in the Moon (a journey into the stratosphere that includes full, imaginative renderings both of a large spaceship and of a lunar landscape) with the plainer, barer settings of sound films ranging from M (1931) to his final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which characters walk along city streets while sounds point to possible offscreen dangers that fill both their imaginations and ours.

Fandor | Read the Full Article

Fritz Lang, Film History and Fate

Fandor | Read the Full Article

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