The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (review)

The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. Tom Gunning. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Pp. xiii + 528. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The 40 films directed by Fritz Lang span diverse political situations, geographical settings, and historical moments, from his monumental Ufa productions of the Weimar era to genre films in Hollywood and postwar Germany. As a corpus, they offer exemplary lessons in the possibilities of cinema, indeed they have helped define what we might expect of the medium in its most dynamic countenance. His mise en scène is one of complicated setups and disturbing prospects; its preferred spaces are urban haunts and subterranean reaches; its field of vision alternates strategically between panoptic gazes and partial views. His most renowned protagonist, Dr. Mabuse, is himself a metteur en scène who rules by remote control, rendering people and things an extension of his will. Lang's cinema is akin to the criminal mastermind's intrigues in its detailed precision, obsessive calculation, and analytical finesse. Even in the case of what appear to be the more conventional narratives of his American endeavors, his work is, with rare exception, consistently surprising and unceasingly elusive. There is, as many commentators have observed, something imposing and indeed remote about the films bearing his name. In The Films of Fritz Lang, Tom Gunning rises to the immense challenges of this singular corpus as no critic has before him.

The director constantly foregrounds his own perspective in stunning compositions, perverse emphases, and willful connections. Lang is there and yet not all there, claims Gunning, lurking "on the threshold of the work, evident in the film itself, but also standing outside it, absent except in the imprint left behind" (5). The interpretive task lies in comprehending the formal designs of the self-conscious intelligence that has so painstakingly laid out these traces. A profusion of signs (be it an "M," an "X," a stitch on a coat, a few peanuts) yields multiple and inconclusive meanings. Critics of these films must proceed like Lang's own (always harried and sometimes hapless) investigators and journalists, subjecting themselves to the riddles of often misleading evidence.

Gunning attends to the shapes of Lang's scenarios and elucidates the energies that drive them. A virulent fatalism holds sway here and it is a function of what the author terms the "destiny machine" (16). The director beholds a world governed by advanced technological tools, entities so omnipresent that people cease to realize they are human products and consider them facts of life. Lang discloses the history of human entrapment in modern creations, "revealing its possibilities as well as its actualities, uncovering its assumptions as well as its fantasies, its conditions as well as its desires" (477). His productions highlight the negative potential of instrumental rationality, showing how it causes confusion, brings abstraction, erodes memory, and destroys transcendence, putting the visual and formal possibilities of modern media on impressive display while at the same time providing a virulent critique of the deformative potential of these agencies--including cinema itself. Each chapter shows the abiding importance of the destiny machine in its multiple modalities (apparatuses of measuring and transcription, writing and dictating, and broadcasting and surveillance) throughout the artist's long career.

The range of Gunning's performance is impressive. He charts the different stations of Lang's career between 1919 and 1960, mindful of how this course in time coincides with and operates within the classical era of the cinema. Concentrating on exemplary texts, he provides close readings of 19 films and offers insightful comments on just about every title in the oeuvre. This is not a biography nor does it claim to be "a work of original research into the production and reception of films" (ix). It is a work of thorough, if somewhat selective, analysis. It has very little to say, for instance, about Lang's substantial accomplishments before Der müde Tod (1920...