Word: lang
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only director really dealing with human intelligence, Lang consructed for Mabuse deep sets whose fantastic decor reveals the imaginations of the characters. The Countess's extremely broad and deep rooms are filled with African masks and huge primitive statues which she wonderfully explains in the words, "My brother is a cubist." We immediately sense a world, not exactly that of the early twenties on the Continent, but informed with the essence of that time. The mood current among the rich, joining malaise to brilliant cultivation, typifies a dying upper class that feels no threat in extinction. Their easy lives...
DURING THE ten years between this and the second Mabuse Lang's dramatic construction and visual style underwent radical changes, changes basically of social perspective. Leaving films full of personalities, he began to make long-shot Expressionist dramas without real characters: the two Nibelungen movies and Metropolis. Abandoning these fatalistic myth-abstractions, he returned in M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) to films that treated social reality directly in the actions of a few closely connected characters...
...secondary characters who in 1922 had so much dignity have become functionaries who receive their orders by telephone. As Lang suggests by crosscutting Mabuse's and Lohmann's organizations at work, it hardly matters whom the call comes from. These men simply work for someone else. They are small; they try through obedience to keep their jobs, their security. "He [man] places a high value on his individual life," says Mabuse. "He even regards himself as an individual, with free will...
...Lang's world supports this cynical statement. His framing is so tight that it chops off the tops of people's heads. Instead of revealing the depth in which the characters move, the frame has become a trap, as we see in an early tracking shot that closes in on a fleeing man. The studio in which Lang shot the film must have been a prison. The cells, psychiatric or criminal, in which characters are repeatedly locked completely differ from the one cell that appeared in The Gambler. That room realized the romantic plight of its inhabitant, Mabuse's mistress...
...THIS WORLD, as indeed in all Lang's subsequent films, one has little liking for anyone, where-as in the first Mabuse all were sympathetic. The little men are good Germans; the big ones pigs or psychopaths. The only breaches in the net of control over their lives are made by the absolutely desperate, who risk their lives on the chance of surviving. Yet these characters are no more deep or attractive than any others. One must endorse them only because fighting for control over one's life, fighting fascism, is the only human course of action. Lang suggests...