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

Irony of ironies, the man with the monocle was virtually blind. He was one of the
cinema’s greatest visionaries, this director who conjured a mythic world in Die
Nibelungen and created a fantastical future in Metropolis. His Dr. Mabuse was the
emblematic madman of Hitler’s Germany. In M he explored the depths of human
depravity. After rejecting a Faustian pact with Joseph Goebbels – if it really
happened that way – he came to Hollywood, where he found a second life exploring
the depths of America, and his own inner demons, in masterly films like Fury, You
Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat.
(McGilligan 1997:73)
The films mentioned in the quote above are indeed some of the major works from
Lang’s filmography, and, as the author stresses, Lang aimed at “exploring the depths of
America, and his own inner demons”. They also have features that strongly herald the noir
movement and which provide essential visual and thematic links between the German
Expressionism of the previous decade and American film noir which lay ahead. Some of
the picture insets below were taken from these movies and show Lang’s fateful visual style
and the alienation of his characters.
Figure 64. Different scenes from various films by Fritz Lang 79
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Due to Lang’s extensive noir filmography, I will focus only on two noir
productions that serve as an evidential basis for this dissertation regarding the world of
entrapment that characterises noir, Lang’s psychology of human weakness and his regular
recapitulations of the themes of crime and punishment. Through them, I also wish to
emphasise how his career constitutes a complete change in filmmaking and direction in the
history of cinema. The fact that he moved from one studio to another (at least seven
different ones) throughout his career shows the extent to which Lang was eager to
experiment new styles until when he managed to form his own production company. All in
all, Fritz Lang’s distinctive style remains very personal and subtle and not necessarily
aimed at mass audiences. Although films like Metropolis, for example, may be an
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Sequence of films (from left to right): M (1931), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), The Big Heat
(1953).
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