A Companion to Fritz Lang

624 Pages·2014·6.01 MB·English

by  Lang, Fritz, McElhaney, Joe

A Companion to Fritz Lang
Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose
work together constitutes what we refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema
canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergman, Capra or the Coen
brothers, each volume, comprised of 25 or more newly commissioned essays
written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary, and/or controversial
auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multi-dimensional capacity. Individual
volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant
themes, well-known, worthy, and under-rated films; stars, collaborators, and key
influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency
in the scholarly world.
Published
1. A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann
2. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague
3. A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker
4. A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager
5. A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen
Vernon
6. A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus
7. A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau
8. A Companion to François Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain
9. A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julián Daniel
Gutiérrez-Albilla
10. A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, edited by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline
11. A Companion to Martin Scorsese, edited by Aaron Baker
12. A Companion to Fritz Lang, edited by Joe McElhaney
A Companion to Fritz Lang
Edited by
Joe McElhaney
This edition first published 2015
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc., excepting chapter 16 “A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s ‘Fury’ and
the Cinema of Exile” © 2003 Anton Kaes and Duke University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Fritz Lang / edited by Joe McElhaney.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-67097-2 (cloth)
1. Lang, Fritz, 1890–1976—Criticism and interpretation. I. McElhaney, Joe, 1957– editor.
PN1998.3.L36C77 2014
791.4302′33092—dc23
2014021669
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Fritz Lang, 1960s. © akg-images / Interfoto
Cover design by Nicki Averill Design & Illustration
Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
1 2015
Contents
Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xiv
1 Introduction 1
Joe McElhaney
Part One Looking, Power, Interpretation 31
2 Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock 33
Raymond Bellour
3 While Not Looking: The Failure to See and Know in Dr. Mabuse,
der Spieler and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse 43
Frances Guerin
4 Symptom, Exhibition, Fear: Representations of Terror in the German
Work of Fritz Lang 63
Nicole Brenez
5 Spies: Postwar Paranoia Goes to the Movies 76
Paul Dobryden
6 Identifying the Suspect: Lang’s M and the Trajectories of Film Criticism 94
Olga Solovieva
7 The Medium’s Re-Vision: (Or the Doctor as Disease,
Diagnostic, and Cure) 114
David Phelps
vi Contents
Part Two Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions 139
8 Metaphysics of Finitude: Der müde Tod and the Crisis of Historicism 141
Nicholas Baer
9 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the Caesura 161
Chris Fujiwara
10 Lang contra Wagner: Die Nibelungen as Anti-Adaptation 176
Thomas Leitch
11 Redemption of Revenge: Die Nibelungen 195
Steve Choe
12 Furious Union: Fritz Lang and the American West 219
Phil Wagner
13 “It Was a Horserace Sorta”: Fortunes of Rancho Notorious 242
Tom Conley
Part Three Matters of Form 257
14 Beyond Destiny and Design: Camera Movement in Fritz Lang’s
German Films 259
Daniel Morgan
15 Fritz Lang: Object and Thing in the German Films 279
Brigitte Peucker
16 A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile 300
Anton Kaes
17 Fritz Lang’s Modern Character: You Only Live Once and the Depth
of Surface 322
Will Scheibel
18 Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance 340
Steven Rybin
19 “I’d Like to Own That Painting”: Lang, Cézanne, and the Art of
Omission 358
Vinzenz Hediger
20 Tumbling Blocks and Queer Ladders: Notions of Home in
The Big Heat 371
Pamela Robertson Wojcik
21 Metropolis and the Figuration of Eidos 392
Paolo Bertetto
Contents vii
Part Four Rediscoveries and Returns 413
22 Not the End: Fritz Lang’s War 415
Lutz Koepnick
23 Classic(al) Lang: Conflicting Impulses in Ministry of Fear 430
Jakob Isak Nielsen
24 Multiple Reflections: The Woman in the Mirror in
Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger 458
Doug Dibbern
25 Suspended Modernity: On the Last Five Films of Fritz Lang 474
Carlos Losilla
26 The Limit: House by the River 494
Adrian Martin
27 Looking for a Path: Fritz Lang and Clash by Night 514
Joe McElhaney
28 Notes on Human Desire (Lang, Renoir, Zola) 536
Sam Ishii-Gonzales
29 Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon 554
Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew
Index 587
Contributors
Nicholas Baer is a PhD candidate in Film and Media at the University of California,
Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation focuses
on the intersection between film and the philosophy of history in interwar Germany.
Baer’s work was published most recently in Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and
Transculturation (Routledge, 2013), Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2013),
the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2013), and the Pordenone Silent Film
Festival Catalogue (2012). Together with Anton Kaes and Michael Cowan, he is also
currently co-editing a sourcebook of early twentieth-century German film theory
for the University of California Press. During the 2013–2014 academic year, Baer
was a DAAD Fellow at the Seminar for Film Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin.
Raymond Bellour is Director of Research Emeritus at CNRS, Paris. He is inter-
ested, on the one hand, in literature both Romantic (the Brontës, Ecrits de jeunesse,
1972; Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle Guillotine, 1990) and contemporary (Henri
Michaux, 1965; edition of his complete works in La Pléïade, 3, vol. I, 1998–2004,
Lire Michaux, 2011), and, on the other, by cinema (Le Western, 1966; L’Analyse du
film, 1979; Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, 2009). He is also inter-
ested in the passages, the mixed states of images – painting, photography, cinema,
video, virtual images – as well as in the relations between words and images (edited
collections: L’Entre-Images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo, 1990; Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image,
1992; L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, images, 1999; La Querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma – instal-
lations, expositions, 2012; exhibitions: Passages de l’image, 1989; States of Images:
Instants and Intervals, 2005; Thierry Kuntzel, Lumières du temps, 2006; Thierry Kuntzel–
Bill Viola: Deux éternités proches, 2010). In 1991, he and Serge Daney created the
cinema review Trafic, with which he continues to be involved.
Paolo Bertetto is Professor of Film Analysis at Sapienza-University of Rome. He
also teaches at University of Paris 8. He has been Scientific Head of the Museo
Nazionale del Cinema in Turin where he coordinated the project of the new