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Copyrighted Material 1 Introduction Joe McElhaney The publication of A Companion to Fritz Lang marks the first English-language edited collection on Lang’s body of work in over thirty years. In 1981, the British Film Institute published Stephen Jenkins’s Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, a small volume (173 pages) comprised of one extended essay by Jenkins, written especially for the book, and four essays newly translated from the French but all of these having originally appeared between 1959 and 1978. Nonetheless, the litera- ture on the cinema of Fritz Lang since then has not been lacking, either in volume or scholarly interest. In 1999, the British Film Institute published another volume on the director, this one entirely written by one scholar. Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity is, in contrast to the more modest scale of the Jenkins volume, a voluminous work, over five hundred pages of allegorical close readings. Over the last dozen years, Gunning’s book, with its seductive notions of the “destiny-machine,” defined by Gunning as a type of literal and metaphoric machine that is also “a metonymy, a fragment which stands in for the whole systematic nature of the modern world” (10), has exerted an enormous influence on Lang criticism. Many of the essays in this book are indebted to Gunning in some form or other. As important as Gunning has been, though, his work does not stand alone. Aside from the literature on Lang published since the 1950s by the likes of Noël Burch, Jean Douchet, Lotte Eisner, and Frieda Grafe1 (as well as the publication of Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, and the massiveCOPYRIGHTED collection of Lang documents MATERIAL assembled by Rolf Aurich et al. in Fritz Lang: His Life and Work), the last two decades have given us the investigations by (among others) Paolo Bertetto, Jean-Loup Bourget, Bernard Eisenschitz, Thomas Elsaesser, Anton Kaes, and Lutz Koepnick, all of them producing vibrant readings and, in some instances, unearthing major archival material. But more recent interest in Lang is not simply academic. A Companion to Fritz Lang, First Edition. Edited by Joe McElhaney. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 0002178500.indd 1 10/8/2014 10:47:37 AM 2 Joe McElhaney When this volume was in its earliest stages, the complete two-and-a-half-hour version of Lang’s silent epic Metropolis (1927) was being shown around the world. This version, unseen since its early screenings in Germany, was long believed to have been lost. But in 2008, a 16 mm print of this version was discovered. More than eighty years after its Berlin premiere, Metropolis was enjoying an extraordi- nary international success, through both theatrical screenings and in DVD/ Blu-ray. The discovery of this version of Metropolis was a capstone in a series of restorations and reissues of Lang’s German films that had been occurring over the previous two decades, particularly through the efforts of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. Such Lang films as the two-part Spiders (1919 and 1920), Der müde Tod (1921), Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Spies (1928), Woman in the Moon (1929), M (1931), and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) were being widely shown in definitive (or near-definitive) versions for the first time since their original German release. A similar restoration was given to the films that marked Lang’s brief return to Germany after World War II: The Tiger of Eschanpur (1959), The Indian Tomb (1959), and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Such early rarities as Harakiri (1919), The Wandering Shadow (1920), and Four Around the Woman (1921), while not all surviving in complete form, are now also easily available. Lang’s Hollywood films were, on the whole, less subject to the precarious nature of film preservation. But today, virtually all of them are accessible in some form, as is the film that was the product of Lang’s brief stay in Paris, immediately prior to his departure for Hollywood, Liliom (1934). The cinema of Fritz Lang, then, is everywhere. Part One: Looking, Power, Interpretation A Companion to Fritz Lang marks another significant addition to what will doubtless continue to be one of the most voluminous bibliographies of any filmmaker. This is certainly fitting, as Lang is a seminal figure in film history, the example of his work the site of seemingly infinite possibilities for historical, aesthetic, and politi- cal understandings on the very nature of cinema. The essays I have gathered and commissioned testify to these possibilities. And yet this volume begins on a some- what defensive, if not polemical, note with Raymond Bellour’s “Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock.” Bellour’s 1966 essay “On Fritz Lang” (available in Jenkins) remains one of the major general essays on the director. In “On Fritz Lang,” Bellour argues that for Lang, more than for any other filmmaker intent upon defining the essence of cinema, the cinema itself becomes “the ultimate metaphor” in which we find “a moral system bound up with appearances” but one in which the spectator “is thrown back on a vertiginous duplication of the sym- bolic duality of the theme.” With Lang, we have not simply a vision of the world but “a vision of vision” (“On Fritz Lang” 28). At the same time, and as his essay in 0002178500.indd 2 10/8/2014 10:47:37 AM Introduction 3 this volume indicates, Bellour’s critical reputation has been significantly built upon essays that address another filmmaker, equally central to film history and ten years Lang’s junior: Alfred Hitchcock. The names of Lang and Hitchcock have, for many years, been critically (if not mythologically) linked and for obvious reasons. Both filmmakers, in particular, frequently drew upon the spy and espionage genre, and upon various forms of the gothic. For Lang or Hitchcock, this occurred less through any particular invest- ment in the genres themselves than through the possibilities to which the genres gave rise, in particular the genres’ emphasis on vision and the ambiguities of the act of looking. These, in turn, served as a pre-condition for an approach to the cinema that was at once formalist and metaphoric. Hitchcock cited Der müde Tod as a film that “made a special impression” upon him during the period before he had officially begun to direct, in 1925 (Truffaut 26). He also visited the set of Metropolis and quietly observed Lang at work (McGilligan 122). Nevertheless, Hitchcock was cautious about drawing too much attention to the connection between himself and Lang. When François Truffaut attempted to engage Hitchcock in a discussion of Spies, M, and the Mabuse films in relation to Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much Hitchcock was typically impassive: “Mabuse – that’s a long time back”2 (Truffaut 91). Lang, though, could also reciprocate in terms of influence, often citing a sequence from Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca (1940), on his own Secret Beyond the Door (1947), both films part of a cycle of female-centered gothic melodramas being turned out in Hollywood during the forties. This did not, however, prevent Lang from privately sniping that Hitchcock “copied” his work (McGilligan 353). Hitchcock’s enormous commercial success after he arrived in Hollywood markedly contrasted with Lang’s own Hollywood reputation. In Germany, Lang was, along with F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst, its leading filmmaker. But his Hollywood reputation remained precarious throughout the two decades in which he made films in America, and he enjoyed neither the commercial success, creative control, or celebrity lavished on Hitchcock nor, in later years, the number of overt citations and homages in the work of other filmmakers. Moreover, even in academic circles, the literature on Hitchcock far outpaces that on Lang, and Hitchcock Studies (with its attendant literature, courses, conferences, websites) has become virtually a cottage industry. With “Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock,” Bellour establishes the possibility of Lang as a filmmaker not necessarily superior to Hitchcock; rather, in Lang we find a cinema that “at once remains within a social sphere of responsi- bility and detaches itself, alone, like a monolith.” In contrast to Hitchcock, for whom everything in this cinema of apparent trauma and the psychoanalytical is “oriented towards the past,” in Lang there is a cinema that “clings fiercely to the present.” Suspense in Hitchcock is “determined largely by its anchoring of point of view” in relation to individual characters. Lang, on the other hand, “responds by constantly capturing the anxiety of events, according to more or less discordant 0002178500.indd 3 10/8/2014 10:47:37 AM 4 Joe McElhaney angles and viewpoints.” In Lang, we find a “social reality paralyzed by historical terror” and in which the gaze, frequently unreliable and subject to the intervention of the gaze of the camera itself – as well as the “virtual eye of the director” – is “always as if fractured, in proportion with the excess it conveys.” More than in Hitchcock, for whom questions of the social and the political, even of concrete experience, tend to be somewhat ironically suspended and closed in on themselves (Bellour compares their very different conceptions of violence and murder), Lang is attached to a gaze that “circulates endlessly” in its desire to project and delineate the social and political, if not material and metaphysical, onto the image.3 It is the question of a gaze that is less psychological and individualized than it is social, political, and metaphorical that dominates the essays of this book’s first extended section.
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