The Films of Fritz Lang

by Gunning, Tom

• ISBN13: 9780851707433
• ISBN10: 0851707432
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-28
• Publisher: British Film Inst

Summary

This study examines the early work of Fritz Lang, proposing readings of the entire output of one of cinema's foremost directors. It emphasizes Lang's reflection on modernity, and hones in on the problem of identity and subjectivity in a progressively more automated, impersonal world.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Standing Outside the Films - Emblems
The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand	1	(3)
The Screening Room: `Strange but True'	4	(4)
The Interview and the Clock	8	(7)
PART I: Reading the Text of Death -- Lang's Silent Allegories: Der mude Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927)
The Marchen: Der mude Tod -- Death and the Maiden
Who Tells the Timely Story of Death?	15	(7)
The Allegory of the Maiden: Reading and Desire	22	(8)
Final Figure: The Look at the Camera	30	(4)
The Decay of Myth: Siegfried's Death, Kriemhild's Revenge	34	(447)
Metropolis: The Dance of Death
The Allegory of the Machine	52	(4)
The Universal Language of Silent Film	56	(6)
Demons of Energy: Who Rules the City of Metropolis?	62	(2)
Gothic Modernism: Technology as Modern Magic	64	(4)
Oedipal Nightmares, Allegorical Riddles	68	(9)
Apocalypse without End, Endings without Conviction	77	(3)
Burn Witch Burn	80	(7)
PART II: The Mastery of Crime -- Lang's Urban Thrillers: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Spies (1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932)
Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination
The Sensation-film and the Spaces of Modernity	87	(7)
The Terrain of Modernity: Space, Time and the Mastery of Communication	94	(5)
The Mechanical Production of Counterfeit Identity	99	(9)
The Grand Enunciator and the Power of the Gaze	108	(5)
Playing with Time	113	(4)
Haghi
The Evil Genius/Mauvais genie	117	(6)
The Staging of Desire	123	(4)
Building Identity from Fragments	127	(7)
Finale: Bringing Down the House	134	(5)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
A Message, Condemned to Death, Has Escaped	139	(7)
`Pay No Attention to that Man behind the Curtain'	146	(9)
The Same Old Song, but with a Different Meaning (Since You've Been Gone)	155	(8)
PART III: Hinge -- M (1931)
M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire
`Oh Mother I Am Lost!' The Murder of Elsie Beckmann	163	(12)
Formed in Fright: The Topography of Terror	175	(9)
Der Schwarze Mann	184	(8)
The People vs Hans Beckert	192	(11)
PART IV: Fritz Lang's America - The Social Trilogy: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), You and Me (1938)
You Ought to Be in Pictures: Liliom and Fury
The Flight of the Refugee	203	(9)
Meet John Doe: Lang Arrives in America	212	(7)
A Whole Town of John Does: The Lynching of Joe Wilson	219	(7)
`You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town': Joe Wilson's Private Theatre	226	(9)
You Only Live Once
The Paradoxes of Vision	235	(10)
Identities Assembled and Expunged in a Carceral Society	245	(5)
The Re-educating of Joan Graham Taylor	250	(11)
You and Me
A `Cinematic Hash': Experimental Cross-breeding among the Hollywood Genres	261	(11)
You Can Not Get Something for Nothing	272	(11)
PART V: Framing Desire: The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River (1950)
The Woman in the Window: Cycles of Desire
Prelude to Nightmare: Shop Window Sweetheart	283	(10)
The Paranoid World Made of Glass	293	(6)
Eternal Return	299	(8)
Scarlet Street: Life Is a Nightmare
Mirror Images	307	(6)
The Fourteen-Carat, Seventeen-Jewel Cashier	313	(10)
The Artist's Signature and the Mourning Play of the Melancholy Baby	323	(9)
No Perspective: The Cancelling Out of Chris Cross	332	(8)
Secret Beyond the Door: Broken Frames and Piercing Gazes
Pastiche and Palimpsest	340	(9)
Speaking and Seeing: A Woman's View and Voice	349	(5)
Unlocking Bluebeard's Seventh Room	354	(8)
Architecture of Doom	362	(6)
Coda: House by the River
Effacing the Traces and Writing the Abject	368	(10)
The Flow of the Writer's Hand	378	(11)
PART VI: The 50s Exposes and Lang's Last Testament: The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Big Heat (1953), While the City Sleeps (1955), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)
The Blue Gardenia
Contradictions of a Decade	389	(6)
Off the Hook	395	(7)
Booking Cinderella	402	(6)
The Big Heat
Circuits of Corruption	408	(7)
The Construction of Authority	415	(6)
Rogue Cop	421	(7)
The Big Heat Falls Alike on the Just and the Unjust	428	(6)
While the City Sleeps/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The News is Made at Night	434	(5)
Television, Person to Person	439	(8)
Inside Out	447	(10)
The Circle Closes on the Last Mabuse
Return to the Scene of the Crime	457	(8)
Recycled Vision, Feigned Blindness, Total Exposure	465	(6)
The Site of Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modernity	471	(4)
The Death of Cinema, Cinema and Death	475	(6)
Notes	481	(26)
Bibliography	507	(12)
Index	519