A Companion to Fritz Lang (eBook)

Joe McElhaney (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
9781118587232 (ISBN)

Infos

This collection of critical essays offers an unrivalled andup-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life andvision of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

• The first edited collection of essays on Fritz Lang’sbody of work in over thirty years
• A comprehensive assessment of one of cinema’s mostinfluential figures
• Brings together key scholars, including Tom Gunning and ChrisFujiwara, to share their latest insights
• Features translated contributions from writers rarely renderedin English such as Nicole Brenez and Paolo Berletto
• Offers multinational and multi-perspectival analysis ofLang’s oeuvre, including all his key films

Joe McElhaney is Professor of Film Studies at HunterCollege, City University of New York, USA, as well as in theTheater Program at CUNY’s Graduate Center. A seasonedcommentator on film, media, and the arts, Prof McElhaney is authorof The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang,Minnelli (2006), Albert Maysles (2009),and editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art ofEntertainment (2009).

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A Companion to Fritz Lang Fritz Lang s movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema, across genres, styles, and national contexts. With smartness and sharpness, the essays in this essential volume come from many angles to capture the richness of Lang s cinema and bring great insight to its study. Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, NYU Fritz Lang s influence on cinema cannot be overstated, with a career that stretched from the silent era in Germany to the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s, from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, from Depression America to the McCarthy era. One of the best known migr s from Germany s school of Expressionism, Lang is also credited with influencing the emergence of film noir. A Companion to Fritz Lang offers the first full-scale collection of scholarship available in English on one of the most important filmmakers of all time. Addressing much of Lang s voluminous body of work, from Metropolis and M, to lesser-known titles such as Western Union and Clash by Night, this volume offers a superb overview of Lang s cinema with revealing insights into his enduring influence on directors such as Godard, Scorsese, Chabrol, and Tarantino. The two dozen essays presented here are an unrivaled and up-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life and vision of one of cinema s greatest auteurs.

Inhalt

Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiv

1 Introduction 1
Joe McElhaney

Part One Looking, Power, Interpretation 31

2 Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock 33
Raymond Bellour

3 While Not Looking: The Failure to See and Know in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse 43
Frances Guerin

4 Symptom, Exhibition, Fear: Representations of Terror in the German Work of Fritz Lang 63
Nicole Brenez

5 Spies: Postwar Paranoia Goes to the Movies 76
Paul Dobryden

6 Identifying the Suspect: Lang's M and the Trajectories of Film Criticism 94
Olga Solovieva

7 The Medium's Re-Vision: (Or the Doctor as Disease, Diagnostic, and Cure) 114
David Phelps

Part Two Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions 139

8 Metaphysics of Finitude: Der müde Tod and the Crisis of Historicism 141
Nicholas Baer

9 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the Caesura 161
Chris Fujiwara

10 Lang contra Wagner: Die Nibelungen as Anti-Adaptation 176
Thomas Leitch

11 Redemption of Revenge: Die Nibelungen 195
Steve Choe

12 Furious Union: Fritz Lang and the American West 219
Phil Wagner

13 "It Was a Horserace Sorta": Fortunes of Rancho Notorious 242
Tom Conley

Part Three Matters of Form 257

14 Beyond Destiny and Design: Camera Movement in Fritz Lang's German Films 259
Daniel Morgan

15 Fritz Lang: Object and Thing in the German Films 279
Brigitte Peucker

16 A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang's Fury and the Cinema of Exile 300
Anton Kaes

17 Fritz Lang's Modern Character: You Only Live Once and the Depth of Surface 322
Will Scheibel

18 Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance 340
Steven Rybin

19 "I'd Like to Own That Painting": Lang, Cézanne, and the Art of Omission 358
Vinzenz Hediger

20 Tumbling Blocks and Queer Ladders: Notions of Home in The Big Heat 371
Pamela Robertson Wojcik

21 Metropolis and the Figuration of Eidos 392
Paolo Bertetto

Part Four Rediscoveries and Returns 413

22 Not the End: Fritz Lang's War 415
Lutz Koepnick

23 Classic(al) Lang: Conflicting Impulses in Ministry of Fear 430
Jakob Isak Nielsen

24 Multiple Reflections: The Woman in the Mirror in Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger 458
Doug Dibbern

25 Suspended Modernity: On the Last Five Films of Fritz Lang 474
Carlos Losilla

26 The Limit: House by the River 494
Adrian Martin

27 Looking for a Path: Fritz Lang and Clash by Night 514
Joe McElhaney

28 Notes on Human Desire (Lang, Renoir, Zola) 536
Sam Ishii-Gonzales

29 Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon 554
Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew

Index 587

Rezensionen

Review request 5/6/2013 - Katinka Klaas - MEDIEN
wissenschaft

US reviews:

Cineaste

Film Comment

Canadian Journal of Film Studies

Cineaction

Film Quarterly

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Literature/Film Quarterly

Velvet Light Trap

Bright Lights Film Journal

Cinemascope

UK reviews:

Sight and Sound

Screening the Past

Senses of Cinema

Quarterly Review of Film Studies

Screen

Positif

Cahiers du Cinèma

Framework

Filmkrant

Film International

"From silent cinema to the sound film, from early film to
new waves in art cinema, from Weimar to emigré Paris to
Hollywood, and across genres from the Western to the adventure
story to the epic to the spy tale to film noir, Fritz Lang's
movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema.
With smartness and sharpness, the essays in this essential
volume come from many angles to capture the richness of Lang's
cinema and bring great insight to its study."

Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, NYU

Textauszug

Contributors

Nicholas Baer is a PhD candidate in Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation focuses on the intersection between film and the philosophy of history in interwar Germany. Baer’s work was published most recently in Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation (Routledge, 2013), Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2013), the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2013), and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalogue (2012). Together with Anton Kaes and Michael Cowan, he is also currently co-editing a sourcebook of early twentieth-century German film theory for the University of California Press. During the 2013–2014 academic year, Baer was a DAAD Fellow at the Seminar for Film Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Raymond Bellour is Director of Research Emeritus at CNRS, Paris. He is interested, on the one hand, in literature both Romantic (the Brontës, Ecrits de jeunesse, 1972; Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle Guillotine, 1990) and contemporary (Henri Michaux, 1965; edition of his complete works in La Pléïade, 3, vol. I, 1998–2004, Lire Michaux, 2011), and, on the other, by cinema (Le Western, 1966; L’Analyse du film, 1979; Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, 2009). He is also interested in the passages, the mixed states of images – painting, photography, cinema, video, virtual images – as well as in the relations between words and images (edited collections: L’Entre-Images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo, 1990; Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1992; L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, images, 1999; La Querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma – installations, expositions, 2012; exhibitions: Passages de l’image, 1989; States of Images: Instants and Intervals, 2005; Thierry Kuntzel, Lumières du temps, 2006; Thierry Kuntzel–Bill Viola: Deux éternités proches, 2010). In 1991, he and Serge Daney created the cinema review Trafic, with which he continues to be involved.

Paolo Bertetto is Professor of Film Analysis at Sapienza-University of Rome. He also teaches at University of Paris 8. He has been Scientific Head of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin where he coordinated the project of the new museum in the Mole Antonelliana. He has written and edited many books and anthologies. Among his works: Fritz Lang: Metropolis (1991), L’enigma del desiderio: Bunuel, Un Chien andalou, L’Age d’or (2001 – Umberto Barbaro Prize), Lo specchio e il simulacro (2007 – De Lollis Prize), Microfilosofia del cinema (2014). In his second novel, Autunno a Berlino (2011), Fritz Lang is one of the main protagonists.

Nicole Brenez teaches Cinema Studies at the University of Paris 3–Sorbonne Nouvelle. Graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, agrégée of Modern Literature, she is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of several books and the curator of the Cinémathèque Française’s avant-garde film series. She has organized many film events and retrospectives, notably “Jeune, dure et pure, A History of Avant-Garde Cinema in France” for the French Cinémathèque, and curated series in Buenos Aires, New York, Tokyo, Vienna, London, Madrid, and Belo Horizonte.

Steve Choe is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (Bloomsbury, 2014). Choe researches and teaches courses on German cinema, South Korean cinema, and topics in film theory, philosophy, and phenomenology. Currently he is completing a book on contemporary Korean cinema.

Tom Conley Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual/Environmental Studies and Romance Languages at Harvard University, is author most recently of À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2014) and, lately, An Errant Eye (2011) and Cartographic Cinema (2007). A contributor to Wiley Blackwell Companions to Buñuel, Haneke, and Truffaut, with T. Jefferson Kline he has co-edited the same publisher’s A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard.

Doug Dibbern earned his PhD in the Cinema Studies Department at New York University. He writes film criticism for The Daily Notebook and his first book, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film, is due out in 2014. He teaches in the Expository Writing Program at NYU.

Paul Dobryden is a PhD candidate in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. His articles have appeared in Studies in European Cinema, Film & History, and anthologies such as The New History of German Cinema (2012) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21: Schlüsselfilm der Moderne (co-editor, 2013). He is at work on a dissertation titled “Vivid Images and Vital Spaces: German Silent Cinema and Environmental Design.”

Chris Fujiwara is a film critic, journalist, and editor. He is the author of Jerry Lewis (U of Illinois P, 2009), The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber, 2009), and Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). He is also the general editor of the anthology Defining Moments in Movies (also known as Little Black Book: Movies; Cassell, 2007). Fujiwara has written on film for numerous periodicals and anthologies and has lectured on film aesthetics and film history at Tokyo University, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and elsewhere. Since 2012 he has been Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Frances Guerin teaches in the School of Arts, University of Kent. She is the author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (U of Minnesota P, 2005), Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (U of Minnesota P, 2011); and co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower, 2007). Her book, “The Truth is Always Grey”: Painting from Grisaille to Gerhard Richter, is forthcoming. Her numerous articles have appeared in international journals, including The Moving Image, Screening the Past, and Cinema Journal.

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (U of Illinois P, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (BFI Publishing, 2000), as well as over one hundred articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism. With André Gaudreault he originated the influential theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” In 2009 he was awarded an Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, the first film scholar to receive one, and in 2010 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a book on the invention of the moving image.

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema at Goethe Universität Frankfurt. His research focuses on film history, film theory, and the history of film theory. His publications include Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam UP, 2009) and Nostalgia for the Coming Attraction: American Movie Trailers and the Culture of Film Consumption (Columbia UP, forthcoming). He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (www.necs.org).

Sam Ishii-Gonzales is Assistant Professor of Film in the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York City, where he teaches courses on aesthetics, media theory, and film production. He is the co-editor of two books on Alfred Hitchcock and has published essays on a number of artists and philosophers, including Francis Bacon, Henri Bergson, Claire Denis, Gilles Deleuze, and David Lynch. His writings have been translated into Hungarian and Italian. His current book project is entitled “Being and Immanence: Towards a Cinema of the Non-Actor.” It considers the different uses of the non-actor throughout cinema history (in works by such filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abbas Kiarostami, and Peter Watkins, among others) and the relevance of this figure for understanding the ethics and ontology of cinema. He is also currently developing a film project inspired by Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896).

Anton Kaes is the Class of 1939 Professor of German and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications in English include From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Harvard UP, 1989), M (BFI Publishing, 2001), and the award-winning Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton UP, 2009). He is also the co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (U of California P,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.12.2014
• Reihe/Serie: WBCF - Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Reihe/Serie: WBCF - Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Reihe/Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Adrian Martin • American Culture • American genre cinema • auteurship • ?Auteur theory • Carlos Losilla • Chris Fujiwara • cinema history • Clash by Night • classical cinema • Cultural Studies • film and media studies • film director • Filmforschung • Film noir • Film Studies • Filmtheorie • Film theory • genre and authorship • German Cinema • German Culture • German Expressionism • Geschichte des Filmtheaters • History of Cinema • Hollywood Studio System • Kent Jones • Kulturwissenschaften • Lang, Fritz • Metropolis • Nicole Brenez • Paolo Bertetto • Raymond Bellour • Reference • Scholarship • Thea von Harbou • The Big Heat • The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity • Tom Conley • Tom Gunning • Weimar cinema and culture • Western Union • Woman in the Moon
• ISBN-13: 9781118587232 / 9781118587232