ESSAI Volume 14 Article 26 Spring 2016 Fritz Lang - An Auteur of German Expressionism Phil McCarron College of DuPage Follow this and additional works at: http://dc.cod.edu/essai Recommended Citation McCarron, Phil (2016) "Fritz Lang - An Auteur of German Expressionism," ESSAI: Vol. 14 , Article 26. Available at: http://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol14/iss1/26 This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in ESSAI by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. McCarron: Fritz Lang Fritz Lang - An Auteur of German Expressionism by Phil McCarron (MPTV 1113) ritz Lang, born in Vienna in 1980, would eventually become a father of German Expressionism in film, an influential pre-cursor to Film Noir, and leave behind a body of work Fsoaked in pessimism that exposes, as he saw it, the corrosive nature of society. Lang volunteered to serve in the Austrian Army during World War I. Afterward, while recovering from war wounds, both physical and mental, Lang tried his hand at writing screenplays, eventually getting the attention of UFA studios in Germany. His stint writing films was a brief one before he took on the mantel of director. From 1919 to 1933, Lang honed what would become his hallmark style of dark, striking visuals and themes of madness, corruption, and mob rule. After a personal threat from Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, Lang fled both his country, and his wife, for Hollywood. Lang successfully married his style of expressionism to the sometimes narrow artistic scope of the American studio system, which saw both critically and financially successful films earn him notoriety as a true artist in the medium of film.1 Lang's early, German films were shot at a time when Germany was in a self-contained artistic bubble.