The Films of Fritz Lang
Allegories of Vision and Modernity
Published on 1. February 2000
Book
Paperback/Softback
528 pages
978-0-85170-743-3 (ISBN)
Description
ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.
More details
Edition
2000
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 32 mm
Weight
840 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-85170-743-3 (9780851707433)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
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07/2019
1st Edition
BFI Publishing
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E-Book
07/2019
1st Edition
BFI Publishing
€38.49
Available for download
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Tom Gunning
The Films of Fritz Lang
Book
02/2000
BFI Publishing
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Person
Tom Gunning is a Professor in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Film and Media at the University of Chicago, USA. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1993), and of numerous articles on early cinema.
Content
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Standing Outside the Films - Emblems
The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand
The Screening Room: 'Strange but True'
The Interview and the Clock
I. Reading the Text of Death - Lang's Silent Allegories: Der muede Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927)
1. The Maerchen: Der muede Tod - Death and the Maiden
Who Tells the Timely Story of Death?
The Allegory of the Maiden: Reading and Desire
Final Figure: The Look at the Camera
2. The Decay of Myth: Siegfried's Death, Kriemhild 's Revenge
3. Metropolis: The Dance of Death
The Allegory of the Machine
The Universal Language of Silent Film
Demons of Energy: Who Rules the City of Metropolis?
Gothic Modernism: Technology as Modern Magic
Oedipal Nightmares, Allegorical Riddles
Apocalypse without End, Endings without Conviction
Burn Witch Burn
II: The Mastery of Crime - Lang's Urban Thrillers: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ( 1922), Spies ( 1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932)
4. Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination
The Sensation-film and the Spaces of Modernity
The Terrain of Modernity: Space, Time and the Mastery of Communication
The Mechanical Production of Counterfeit Identity
The Grand Enunciator and the Power of the Gaze
Playing with Time
5. Haghi
The Evil Genius/Mauvais genie
The Staging of Desire
Building Identity from Fragments
Finale: Bringing Down the House
6. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
A Message, Condemned to Death, Has Escaped
'Pay No Attention to that Man behind the Curtain'
The Same Old Song, but with a Different Meaning
(Since You've Been Gone)
III: Hinge - M (1931)
7. M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire
'Oh Mother I Am Lost!' The Murder of Elsie Beckmann
Formed in Fright: The Topography of Terror
Der Schwarze Mann
The People vs Hans Beckert
IV: Fritz Lang's America - The Social Trilogy: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), You and Me (1938)
8. You Ought to Be in Pictures: Liliom and Fury
The Flight of the Refugee
Meet John Doe: Lang Arrives in America
A Whole Town of John Does: The Lynching of Joe Wilson
'You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town': Joe Wilson's Private Theatre
9. You Only Live Once
The Paradoxes of Vision
Identities Assembled and Expunged in a Carceral Society
The Re-educating of Joan Graham Taylor
10. You and Me
A 'Cinematic Hash': Experimental Cross-breeding among the Hollywood Genres
You Can Not Get Something for Nothing
V: Framing Desire: The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River (1950)
11. The Woman in the Window: Cycles of Desire
Prelude to Nightmare: Shop Window Sweetheart
The Paranoid World Made of Glass
Eternal Return
12. Scarlet Street: Life Is a Nightmare
Mirror Images
The Fourteen-Carat, Seventeen-Jewel Cashier
The Artist's Signature and the Mourning Play of the Melancholy Baby
No Perspective: The Cancelling Out of Chris Cross
13. Secret Beyond the Door: Broken Frames and Piercing Gazes
Pastiche and Palimpsest
Speaking and Seeing: A Woman's View and Voice
Unlocking Bluebeard's Seventh Room
Architecture of Doom
14. Coda: House by the River
Effacing the Traces and Writing the Abject
The Flow of the Writer's Hand
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)
15. The Blue Gardenia
Contradictions of a Decade
Off the Hook
Booking Cinderella
16. The Big Heat
Circuits of Corruption
The Construction of Authority
Rogue Cop
The Big Heat Falls Alike on the Just and the Unjust
17. While the City Sleeps/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The News is Made at Night
Television, Person to Person
Inside Out
18. The Circle Closes on the Last Mabuse
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Recycled Vision, Feigned Blindness, Total Exposure
The Slte of Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modernity
The Death of Cinema, Cinema and Death
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction: Standing Outside the Films - Emblems
The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand
The Screening Room: 'Strange but True'
The Interview and the Clock
I. Reading the Text of Death - Lang's Silent Allegories: Der muede Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927)
1. The Maerchen: Der muede Tod - Death and the Maiden
Who Tells the Timely Story of Death?
The Allegory of the Maiden: Reading and Desire
Final Figure: The Look at the Camera
2. The Decay of Myth: Siegfried's Death, Kriemhild 's Revenge
3. Metropolis: The Dance of Death
The Allegory of the Machine
The Universal Language of Silent Film
Demons of Energy: Who Rules the City of Metropolis?
Gothic Modernism: Technology as Modern Magic
Oedipal Nightmares, Allegorical Riddles
Apocalypse without End, Endings without Conviction
Burn Witch Burn
II: The Mastery of Crime - Lang's Urban Thrillers: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ( 1922), Spies ( 1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932)
4. Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination
The Sensation-film and the Spaces of Modernity
The Terrain of Modernity: Space, Time and the Mastery of Communication
The Mechanical Production of Counterfeit Identity
The Grand Enunciator and the Power of the Gaze
Playing with Time
5. Haghi
The Evil Genius/Mauvais genie
The Staging of Desire
Building Identity from Fragments
Finale: Bringing Down the House
6. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
A Message, Condemned to Death, Has Escaped
'Pay No Attention to that Man behind the Curtain'
The Same Old Song, but with a Different Meaning
(Since You've Been Gone)
III: Hinge - M (1931)
7. M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire
'Oh Mother I Am Lost!' The Murder of Elsie Beckmann
Formed in Fright: The Topography of Terror
Der Schwarze Mann
The People vs Hans Beckert
IV: Fritz Lang's America - The Social Trilogy: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), You and Me (1938)
8. You Ought to Be in Pictures: Liliom and Fury
The Flight of the Refugee
Meet John Doe: Lang Arrives in America
A Whole Town of John Does: The Lynching of Joe Wilson
'You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town': Joe Wilson's Private Theatre
9. You Only Live Once
The Paradoxes of Vision
Identities Assembled and Expunged in a Carceral Society
The Re-educating of Joan Graham Taylor
10. You and Me
A 'Cinematic Hash': Experimental Cross-breeding among the Hollywood Genres
You Can Not Get Something for Nothing
V: Framing Desire: The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River (1950)
11. The Woman in the Window: Cycles of Desire
Prelude to Nightmare: Shop Window Sweetheart
The Paranoid World Made of Glass
Eternal Return
12. Scarlet Street: Life Is a Nightmare
Mirror Images
The Fourteen-Carat, Seventeen-Jewel Cashier
The Artist's Signature and the Mourning Play of the Melancholy Baby
No Perspective: The Cancelling Out of Chris Cross
13. Secret Beyond the Door: Broken Frames and Piercing Gazes
Pastiche and Palimpsest
Speaking and Seeing: A Woman's View and Voice
Unlocking Bluebeard's Seventh Room
Architecture of Doom
14. Coda: House by the River
Effacing the Traces and Writing the Abject
The Flow of the Writer's Hand
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)
15. The Blue Gardenia
Contradictions of a Decade
Off the Hook
Booking Cinderella
16. The Big Heat
Circuits of Corruption
The Construction of Authority
Rogue Cop
The Big Heat Falls Alike on the Just and the Unjust
17. While the City Sleeps/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The News is Made at Night
Television, Person to Person
Inside Out
18. The Circle Closes on the Last Mabuse
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Recycled Vision, Feigned Blindness, Total Exposure
The Slte of Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modernity
The Death of Cinema, Cinema and Death
Notes
Bibliography
Index