Word: langã
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...pantheon of great directors, Fritz Lang is a bit of an anomaly. Unlike his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, who was canonized early on and remains a universally acknowledged god of cinema, Lang??€™s road to directorial fame was an oblique one. Although denounced by Siegfried Kracauer as a fascist in the forties, and then heralded by the French Cahiers du Cinema as an amateur in the sixties, his work has received a surprising dearth of critical attention. It has only been in the last few years that critics have begun to exhume many of his films and give...
...relatively consistent. Throughout his life, he bemoaned the helplessness of the individual in an age of increasing technological domination. German Language and Literature Professor Eric Rentschler, who is curating the upcoming Fritz Lang retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive in conjunction with his new course on Fritz Lang, emphasizes Lang??€™s sensitivity to the power of the media. “Fritz Lang??€™s films are films about how things look and how we see in the modern world, with modern means. They reflect on the problems of perception, a perception increasingly mediated by machines, institutions...
Metropolis is the film that Fritz Lang is best known for. Premiered in 1927, this incredibly ambitious and technologically innovative vision of futuristic purgatory practically bankrupted UFA, the enormous German film studio. The extraordinary beauty of Lang??€™s expressionistic city and the brilliant special effects of Eugen Schuefftan, overpower the argument that belittles Metropolis for its excessively maudlin, and at times incongruous plot. Metropolis was one of the first true science fiction movies, and its influence on films such as Alphaville and Blade Runner is very apparent. Lang??€™s Marxian depiction of capitalism and industrialism gone...
Metropolis has achieved a cult-like status thanks in part to Giorgio Moroder’s re-release of the movie with a new soundtrack in the 80s. But by focusing solely on Metropolis, viewers fail to realize the importance of Lang??€™s many other films. His great silent films such as Destiny (1921), Dr.Mabuse the Gambler (1922), and Die Nibelungen (1923-24) should not be ignored. Bunuel believes that Destiny opened his eyes to the poetic expressiveness of the cinema. This fantastical film, which is about the fight of the individual against the forces of death...
...Others leave Lang??€™s silent period alone, but criticize his Hollywood noir films for being sexually perverted and unnecessarily violent. His noir films are violent, but they are not unnecessarily so. And in comparison to much of what is made today, they are sexually innocent. Spies, Blue Gardenia, Scarlet Street and Woman in the Window are some of his more famous films in this second period. All of his noir films, however, continue to elaborate on the theme of what can happen when technology overpowers our existence. Images of cameras, telephones, clocks and other such modern devices reveal...