The Films of Fritz Lang

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.

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

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The Films of Fritz Lang

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

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The Films of Fritz Lang

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Table of Contents

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