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Clever Fabrication | Rollberg Peter Rollberg The George Washington University Rgpeter@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu Clever Fabrication Patrick McCilligan. Fritz Lang: The Nature ofthe Beast. St. Martin's, 1997. (548 pages, $30.00) During his lifetime Fritz Lang made sure that writing his biography would be no easy task. He wanted to be remembered for his films alone and fought hard to uphold his monopoly on personal information. Contemporaries and researchers had noticed all along that the egocentric master was ever repeating the same anecdotes about crucial events in his life, while keeping strangely mum about others. Among Lang's most spectacular stories was how he fled from Berlin in 1933 after Goebbels had supposedly offered him the leadership of the German film industry. Patrick McGilligan traces the origins of this clever fabricationtaken for granted by many previous biographers—and plausibly explains its various alterations over the years. But the director had embellished, dramatized or falsified almost every other point in his life as well. Even the reasons for sporting his infamous monocle were to remain a mystery: was this Lang trademark necessitated by a war injury, or an accident while filming? Most likely—as McGilligan suggests— it was just another effective instrument of intimidation, particularly outlandish, and feared after Lang emigrated to the United States in 1934. The legends Lang created about himselfwere meant to lend an aura ofgreatness and political coherence, yet the facts—carefully reconstructed by the author of this masterful biography—show a man with hardly any principles at all. Lang's crucial problem was that, more than anything, he strove to be a winner in political eras: as the patriotic Austrian lieutenant in World War I, the nationalistic German filmmaker in the 1920's, and the ail-American director in Hollywood. Not surprisingly then, Lang promoted his own publicity but abhorred biographical research and cut off personal ties with all film scholars who refused to slavishly follow his own detailed instructions, or dared probing too deeply. But where others had given up, McGilligan obviously kept digging, and one can only imagine the biographer's unique pleasures when—after years of hard work—he would emerge with yet another little Lang lie exposed. No doubt, Fritz Lang was the most acclaimed film director of the shattered Weimar Republic. Quickly abandoning the breathtaking pace of his early thrillers such as Spiders (1920), in Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927) he indulged in majestic coldness catering to Germany's faddish antimodern sentiments. The ingredients of the Lang silents must sound strangely familiar to presentday American movie audiences: powerful secret societies, an evil genius hypnotizing the entire world, doom caused by supernatural abilities, and more entertaining nonsense alike. Amidst a disintegrating culture, Lang created a trivial and stylish world, subjective but equally reflecting the irrational moods of his time. Why, then, did Fritz Lang fail in Hollywood, where he arrived after a short Paris stopover , and—in spite of numerous pictures produced—never achieved a fraction ofhis German eminence? McGilligan, who is exceptional among biographers in being equally strong at fact-finding and cinematic interpretation, suggests various answers, most having to do with cultural miscommunication . Apparently, the Hollywood 1940s and 50's— with their melodramatic hypocrisy—were simply not Lang's time. Yet, had he lived to see the 1980's and even more so the 90's, he surely would have joined the contest in big-budget morbidity, silliness and technical sensation. After all, Spiders is close kin to Raiders ofthe Lost Ark (including open ethnic stereotypes), the Dr. Mabuse series stands at the cradle of global conspiracy flicks, and M— Lang's true masterpiece—is the prototype of present-day serial killer movies (albeit philosophically on an incomparably deeper level). After reading McGilligan's tome, one can safely say that the Fritz Lang of the Weimar Republic is both ancestor and ideal type of today's superstar-tyrant directors, the foremost creator of technical masterpieces in times of insecurity , with little room for subtlety and the human dimension ail-too often sacrificed to mechanical perfection The amount of patience and research that went into this book must have been enormous, its outcome for the old self-stylized Lang...

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