Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Andrew Sarris once wrote that “If Adolf Hitler had never existed, Fritz Lang would
have had to invent him on the screen”. Sarris refers to the fact that Lang was not Jewish
and that his 1932 film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse would intentionally reflect Nazi
teachings. This explains the reason why Lang was called upon by Joseph Goebbels, the
then head of the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, to administer Nazi film
production. Lang was not, however, willing to accept this suggestion and decided to leave
Germany for Paris that same day. In 1933, his wife and screenwriter collaborator Thea von
Harbou divorced him, and joined the Nazi movement. Once in Paris, Lang released a
French fantasy film called Liliom, starring Charles Boyer and Madeleine Ozeray, in 1934,
and signed a contract with David O. Selznick of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This was when he
decided to move to Hollywood where he eventually stayed for over twenty years, working
on and directing films of diverse genres (thrillers, war and crime dramas, and Westerns).
In 1963 Lang appeared himself in the film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard,
released in the United States as Contempt. The film follows the tradition of Brechtian
deconstruction, as it is a film about filmmaking, and always reminding the spectator of its
artificial and manufactured design. Starring noir actor Jack Pallance, in the role of a vulgar
American producer called Jeremy Prokosch, Fritz Lang plays himself as a director of a
film remake of Homer’s The Odyssey, which Prokosch wants to make more commercial.
With Le Mépris, 78 also starring Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, Lang was awarded the
title of French Officier by the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He died in Beverly Hills,
California on August 2, 1976, at the age of 85.
The above examples from Lang’s career are relevant as they show how Lang
explored his personal fascination through cinema, using, as he states, “cruelty, fear, horror
and death”. Still today, his filmmaking style is essentially admired for the arresting visual
compositions and sound effects, all imbued with suspense and the use of minimalist
techniques to stir up horror in the spectator’s mind. His oeuvre in the world of noir is
particularly vast, always showing the dark side of human nature (some examples of his
films are depicted in fig. 64), with protagonists left at the mercy of the laws of fate. Patrick
McGilligan, in his Lang biography, also registers the director’s visions of the world of
human moral corruption:
78 The film was considered by Colin MacCabe in the magazine Sight & Sound as “the greatest work of art
produced in postwar Europe” (quoted from an article by Phillip Lopate entitled “Brilliance and Bardot, All in
One,” in New York Times, June 1997).
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