LANG, FRITZ (1890–1976)

Austrian filmmaker.

Born in Vienna, Fritz Lang moved to Berlin in 1919 to begin a career that would define the emerging art of film. He created indelible images that epitomize Nordic myth (Nibelungen, 1924), the city of the future (Metropolis, 1927) and the psychotic criminal (Dr. Mabuse, 1922; M, 1931). All of his twenty German films are marked by an ambition to advance the possibilities of film as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work amalgamating all traditional arts, including music and architecture. His American films, made in Hollywood during his exile from 1936 to 1956, are stylistically less daring because, unlike in Germany, none of the studios gave him complete autonomy. In addition, dialogue-driven sound films mostly steered clear of stunning visuals, and, in accordance with the strictly enforced production code, emphasized law, order, and morality. Lang never ceased battling the Hollywood production system, which in his view limited his artistic freedom, yet his return to Germany in 1956 was no solution either. He directed two German films in the tradition of his Weimar period, The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), but the post-war German audience rejected both films. Deeply disappointed, Lang returned to Los Angeles. In 1963 Jean-Luc Godard asked Lang, by then a legendary auteur, to act in his film Le mépris. Lang played himself, a film director in exile, and took the opportunity to rant against the compromises and corruption of Hollywood.

Although Lang's work encompasses many genres and displays remarkable stylistic versatility, certain themes reappear with obsessive regularity in both his German and American films: the inevitability of destiny, fascination with crime and guilt, and the allure of total destruction. His German period falls into two categories: lavish fantasies with imaginary settings—for instance, the realm of death in Destiny (1921) or the lunar landscape in The Woman in the Moon (1929)—and the "realistic" but visibly stylized psychological studies of crime and urban life. In the latter, there is a progression from the expressionist detective film Dr. Mabuse in the early 1920s to the semidocumentary style of the New Sobriety in M ten years later. The power-obsessed psychoanalyst and master criminal Dr. Mabuse is replaced by M, a pathological child murderer who cannot control himself.

Lang's most ambitious film, Metropolis, may also be one of the most quoted films of all time. A rebellious son challenges his industrialist father's world of machines after he falls in love with a worker's daughter. But it is not the story or the conciliatory ending, later dismissed by Lang as a fairy tale, that is remembered. Rather, it is the close-up shots of glistening pistons and moving cranks, the aerial shots of skyscrapers with airplanes flying between them, the special effects that capture explosions and biblical floods, and the creation of a female cyborg by a mad scientist. Endlessly recycled in visual cinematic culture (in Blade Runner of 1982 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines of 2003, among others), these images have indelibly etched themselves in popular memory.

Metropolis, the most expensive film ever made in the 1920s, bankrupted the UFA studio. Only a truncated version was released commercially and, even in the most recently reconstructed version, thirty minutes are still missing. In comparison to Lang's "monumental films" (a phrase of the time), a film such as M seems low budget. His favorite film, M is a documentary of the hunt for a serial killer in Düsseldorf in 1929–1930 but also a parable that demonstrates how fear can turn a collective into a fascist mob, a prescient motif two years prior to Hitler's rise to power. M was also Lang's first sound film. Always the innovator and modernist, he used sound as a new expressive tool and emphasized the tensions between sound and sight, seeing and hearing. For instance, the murderer betrays himself by the sound of his whistling (no silent film can show this), and it is a blind man who ultimately identifies him by aural clues, thus calling the act of seeing itself into question. Lang's exploration of crime, alienation, and the ambiguity of guilt makes M an influential forerunner of film noir. Lang himself reworked M in several films during his American period, relentlessly pitting, often with cruel irony, justice against the law, morality against fate, free will against social constraints, and desire for revenge against self-destruction. The Hollywood system required compromises, however. Lang's Fury (1936), Ministry of Fear (1944), Secret beyond the Door (1948), and While the City Sleeps (1956)—imply tragic double binds and deadly solutions, but end happily, as if to mock the studio.

See alsoCinema; Expressionism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Visions and Modernity. London, 2000. A series of authoritative readings of Lang's major films.

Kaes, Anton. M. London, 2000. A paradigmatic study of Lang's pivotal film.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, N.J., 1947. The classic study of Weimar cinema.

McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York, 1997. An exhaustive but controversial biography.

Anton Kaes