A Companion to Fritz Lang

Joe McElhaney is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, USA, as well as in the Theater Program at CUNY’s Graduate Center. A seasoned commentator on film, media, and the arts, Prof McElhaney is author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (2006), Albert Maysles (2009), and editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (2009).

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


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


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