A Companion to Fritz Lang E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: WBCF - Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1496

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Companion to Fritz Lang

“Fritz Lang’s movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema, across genres, styles, and national contexts. With smartness and sharpness, the essays in this essential volume come from many angles to capture the richness of Lang’s cinema and bring great insight to its study.”
Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, NYU

Fritz Lang’s influence on cinema cannot be overstated, with a career that stretched from the silent era in Germany to the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s, from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, from Depression America to the McCarthy era. One of the best known émigrés from Germany’s school of Expressionism, Lang is also credited with influencing the emergence of film noir.

A Companion to Fritz Lang offers the first full-scale collection of scholarship available in English on one of the most important filmmakers of all time. Addressing much of Lang’s voluminous body of work, from Metropolis and M, to lesser-known titles such as Western Union and Clash by Night, this volume offers a superb overview of Lang’s cinema with revealing insights into his enduring influence on directors such as Godard, Scorsese, Chabrol, and Tarantino. The two dozen essays presented here are an unrivaled and up-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life and vision of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

Title page

Copyright page

Contributors

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Part One: Looking, Power, Interpretation

Part Two: Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions

Part Three: Matters of Form

Part Four: Rediscoveries and Returns

Works Cited

Part One: Looking, Power, Interpretation

2 Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock

Works Cited

3 While Not Looking

Other Critics, Other Senses

Lang and Popular Cinema in Weimar Germany

Lighting and Mise-en-Scène

Parallel Editing and the Blindness to Events Unfolding Simultaneously

Mabuse, the “Viennese Psychoanalyst”

Conclusion

Works Cited

Further Reading

4 Symptom, Exhibition, Fear

A Question of Iconography

Speculative Qualities of a Popular Form

Representation of the Cause, Dispersal of the Body

The System of Terror: Recapitulation

Gauging the Image: The Historic Function of Representation

Works Cited

5

Spies

Enemies on All Sides

Intrigue in the Industry

Mass Cultural Invasion

Conclusion:

Spies’

Cold War

Works Cited

6 Identifying the Suspect

Works Cited

7 The Medium’s Re-Vision

Dispelled Spells

The State of Hysteria

A Medium is the Message

The Resurrected Vision

The Secret of the Open Door

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

Part Two: Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions

8 Metaphysics of Finitude

The Crisis of Historicism

Time and Narrative

The Work of Mourning

New Worldviews

Perpetual Strangers

Metaphysics of Finitude

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

9

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

and the Caesura

Works Cited

10 Lang contra Wagner

Works Cited

11 Redemption of Revenge

The Queen of the Night

Cinema and the Politics of Temporality

Ambivalence of Vengeance

Works Cited

12 Furious Union

“A Return to Karl May”

Outfoxed?

Works Cited

13 “It Was a Horserace Sorta”

Works Cited

Part Three: Matters of Form

14 Beyond Destiny and Design

Object Lessons

Patterns and Perspectives

Works Cited

15 Fritz Lang

The Avant-Garde; Expressionism; the New Objectivity

Object and Hand

Indexicality and the Object

Pattern and Abstraction; Art Objects

Writing, Image, and the Thing

Works Cited

16 A Stranger in the House

The Foreigner’s Gaze

Dangers of Displacement

America on Trial

Rewriting Weimar

Imagined Alliances

The Insider as Outsider

Acknowledgments

17 Fritz Lang’s Modern Character

On “Pure Negativity”

Picturing Henry Fonda

The End of the Line

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

18 Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance

A Shift in Persona

The Woman in the Window

Scarlet Street

Secret Beyond the Door

Works Cited

19 “I’d Like to Own That Painting”