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On Fritz Lang

1974; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3684509

1527-2095

Raymond Bellour,

Cinema and Media Studies

An amazing fate, Fritz Lang's, and fraught with paradox. Like Stroheim, he was one of the foremost directors, yet not an actor embellished by the surprising prestige accorded every wretched performance; he was like Sternberg, yet without a woman like Marlene at his side; like Murnau, dying (forty years ago) a death wrapped in mystery; in a sense, Fritz Lang was the first in his day, solely for his work as a filmmaker, to have become cinematic legend. There is Welles, of course, again an actor, whose reputation (being at least mythic) rests upon having provoked America. And there is Hitchcock. But the myth here is concealed beneath a sociological facility, an imagery which hides the essential man. In a sense Lang alone incarnates, decisively yet abstractly, the concept of direction or mise-en-scene. Nor is his life foreign to this idea: his opposition to Goebbels, his flight from Germany and his disillusioned return after twenty years of exile in America; the way he visibly poses, from the filming of Siegfried, as scenarist of destiny -all this gives Lang a quality of violent compaction. This is the horizon which protects the pure and rigorous image of cinema par excellence. From Les trois Lumieres in 1922, each of Lang's films confirms his status as a great artist -the greatest, with Murnau, of the German filmmakers. Twelve years later he is in Hollywood. Enmeshed in the gears of the American machine, he produces twenty-three films: a little more than one per year. Even though he often turns down one project and chooses another, he films every possible Hollywood subject: psychological and social drama, detective and adventure stories, war films, Westerns; he does everything but American or musical comedy, and he touches on that in You and Me. Lang becomes a Hollywood director; the independent author of Metropolis reluctantly shoots a remake of La Bate humaine. He is a great director, praised for his exceptional rigor and keenness. Nothing more. The grandeur of Hollywood amply rewards the absence of critical distance.