Overview

ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.

Full Product Details

Author:   Tom Gunning
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   BFI Publishing
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.811kg
ISBN:  

9780851707433

ISBN 10:   0851707432
Pages:   528
Publication Date:   01 February 2000
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General/trade ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   In Print  
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Standing Outside the Films - Emblems The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand The Screening Room: 'Strange but True' The Interview and the Clock I. Reading the Text of Death - Lang's Silent Allegories: Der mude Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927) 1. The Marchen: Der mude Tod - Death and the Maiden Who Tells the Timely Story of Death? The Allegory of the Maiden: Reading and Desire Final Figure: The Look at the Camera 2. The Decay of Myth: Siegfried's Death, Kriemhild 's Revenge 3. Metropolis: The Dance of Death The Allegory of the Machine The Universal Language of Silent Film Demons of Energy: Who Rules the City of Metropolis? Gothic Modernism: Technology as Modern Magic Oedipal Nightmares, Allegorical Riddles Apocalypse without End, Endings without Conviction Burn Witch Burn II: The Mastery of Crime - Lang's Urban Thrillers: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ( 1922), Spies ( 1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) 4. Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination The Sensation-film and the Spaces of Modernity The Terrain of Modernity: Space, Time and the Mastery of Communication The Mechanical Production of Counterfeit Identity The Grand Enunciator and the Power of the Gaze Playing with Time 5. Haghi The Evil Genius/Mauvais genie The Staging of Desire Building Identity from Fragments Finale: Bringing Down the House 6. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse A Message, Condemned to Death, Has Escaped 'Pay No Attention to that Man behind the Curtain' The Same Old Song, but with a Different Meaning (Since You've Been Gone) III: Hinge - M (1931) 7. M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire 'Oh Mother I Am Lost!' The Murder of Elsie Beckmann Formed in Fright: The Topography of Terror Der Schwarze Mann The People vs Hans Beckert IV: Fritz Lang's America - The Social Trilogy: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), You and Me (1938) 8. You Ought to Be in Pictures: Liliom and Fury The Flight of the Refugee Meet John Doe: Lang Arrives in America A Whole Town of John Does: The Lynching of Joe Wilson 'You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town': Joe Wilson's Private Theatre 9. You Only Live Once The Paradoxes of Vision Identities Assembled and Expunged in a Carceral Society The Re-educating of Joan Graham Taylor 10. You and Me A 'Cinematic Hash': Experimental Cross-breeding among the Hollywood Genres You Can Not Get Something for Nothing V: Framing Desire: The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River (1950) 11. The Woman in the Window: Cycles of Desire Prelude to Nightmare: Shop Window Sweetheart The Paranoid World Made of Glass Eternal Return 12. Scarlet Street: Life Is a Nightmare Mirror Images The Fourteen-Carat, Seventeen-Jewel Cashier The Artist's Signature and the Mourning Play of the Melancholy Baby No Perspective: The Cancelling Out of Chris Cross 13. Secret Beyond the Door: Broken Frames and Piercing Gazes Pastiche and Palimpsest Speaking and Seeing: A Woman's View and Voice Unlocking Bluebeard's Seventh Room Architecture of Doom 14. Coda: House by the River Effacing the Traces and Writing the Abject The Flow of the Writer's Hand VI: The 50s Exposes and Lang's Last Testament: The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Big Heat (1953), While the City Sleeps (1955), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt ( 1956), The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) 15. The Blue Gardenia Contradictions of a Decade Off the Hook Booking Cinderella 16. The Big Heat Circuits of Corruption The Construction of Authority Rogue Cop The Big Heat Falls Alike on the Just and the Unjust 17. While the City Sleeps/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt The News is Made at Night Television, Person to Person Inside Out 18. The Circle Closes on the Last Mabuse Return to the Scene of the Crime Recycled Vision, Feigned Blindness, Total Exposure The Slte of Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modernity The Death of Cinema, Cinema and Death Notes Bibliography Index

Reviews

It's a complex web Lang weaves and Gunning is a perceptive and concrete guide to its richness. -- Sight and Sound

Author Information

Tom Gunning is a Professor in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Film and Media at the University of Chicago, USA. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1993), and of numerous articles on early cinema.

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