Fritz Lang in America
Author: Peter Bogdanovich
Publisher: [New York] : Praeger
Published: 1967
Total Pages: 156
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An interview with Fritz Lang
Author: Peter Bogdanovich
Publisher: [New York] : Praeger
Published: 1967
Total Pages: 156
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An interview with Fritz Lang
Author: Charles River Editors
Publisher:
Published: 2019-12-25
Total Pages: 76
ISBN-13: 9781650819372
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading "I was something that is always hated in Hollywood - a perfectionist; nobody likes a perfectionist, you know." - Fritz Lang While it's easily forgotten today, during the early 20th century, various European countries had vibrant film industries, and even though Hollywood had already staked its claim as the forerunner of the international cinematic landscape by the 1920s, national cinemas in Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere throughout Western Europe enjoyed great power during this period. During that time, Germany's most renowned film directors were pioneering the genre known as Expressionism, and within it, Fritz Lang was known as the "Master of Darkness." Together with his eventual wife, Thea von Harbou, Lang wrote a number of acclaimed movies, including Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Woman in the Moon (1929). Eventually, a number of Europe's biggest movie stars and directors came to Hollywood, such as Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock, but Lang's course to America came under far different circumstances. As Adolf Hitler rose to power and strengthened the Nazis' grip over Germany, the party's coarse antisemitism took root across all segments of society. As Jews were further persecuted, German Jews from all walks of life went into exile, and the loss of so many bright minds has led historians to the conclusion that the exodus could have made the difference in World War II. As scientists like Albert Einstein made their way out of the country to safety, they served as further proof that in addition to being dogmatically racist, the Nazis were also incompetent and self-defeating. Coinciding with Hitler's rise, Lang was filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and it was quickly viewed as a biting commentary on the Nazi Party. On March 30, 1933, the Nazi regime banned it, and Lang later claimed that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels confided to him that he loved the movie. By then, Lang was known for noir films, especially M, a dark movie about a child murderer. Compelled to leave Germany, Lang made his way to Hollywood and quickly established himself there, leading to a career spanning 20 years. Continuing with the same themes as the ones he used in Germany, Lang helped establish noir as one of the most popular film genres of the 1950s in America, with influential works like Scarlett Street, and his most famous film, The Big Heat (1953). By 1960, however, his health began to decline, and thus so did his output, which was somewhat ironic because he brought the Mabuse series of films full circle with 1960's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which revived interest in Mabuse and led to more films being made for the series. As fate would have it, though, those films would be produced by German producer Artur Brauner, not Lang himself. Fritz Lang: The Life and Legacy of the Influential German-American Film Legend chronicles his career in front of the camera and behind it. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about Lang like never before.
Author: Joe McElhaney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2015-01-27
Total Pages: 623
ISBN-13: 0470670975
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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 émigrés 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.
Author: Michael Minden
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 350
ISBN-13: 9781571131461
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Providing a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolist (1972), this volume includes both standard critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time.
Author: Tom Gunning
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-07-25
Total Pages: 528
ISBN-13: 1838718850
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.
Author: Fritz Lang
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781578065769
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A collection of conversations about the filmmaker whose life and work spanned six decades of film history
Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013-09-01
Total Pages: 1135
ISBN-13: 1452940649
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The name of Fritz Lang—the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable films—is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends and his genius as a filmmaker? Patrick McGilligan, placed among “the front rank of film biographers” by the Washington Post, spent four years in Europe and America interviewing Lang’s dying contemporaries, researching government and film archives, and investigating the intriguing life story of Fritz Lang. This critically acclaimed biography—lauded as one of the year’s best nonfiction books by Publishers Weekly—reconstructs the compelling, flawed human being behind the monster with the monocle.
Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013-09-01
Total Pages: 1135
ISBN-13: 1452940649
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The name of Fritz Lang—the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable films—is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends and his genius as a filmmaker? Patrick McGilligan, placed among “the front rank of film biographers” by the Washington Post, spent four years in Europe and America interviewing Lang’s dying contemporaries, researching government and film archives, and investigating the intriguing life story of Fritz Lang. This critically acclaimed biography—lauded as one of the year’s best nonfiction books by Publishers Weekly—reconstructs the compelling, flawed human being behind the monster with the monocle.
Author: Chris Robé
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-11-29
Total Pages: 520
ISBN-13: 0292749902
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the 1930s as the capitalist system faltered, many in the United States turned to the political Left. Hollywood, so deeply embedded in capitalism, was not immune to this shift. Left of Hollywood offers the first book-length study of Depression-era Left film theory and criticism in the United States. Robé studies the development of this theory and criticism over the course of the 1930s, as artists and intellectuals formed alliances in order to establish an engaged political film movement that aspired toward a popular cinema of social change. Combining extensive archival research with careful close analysis of films, Robé explores the origins of this radical social formation of U.S. Left film culture. Grounding his arguments in the surrounding contexts and aesthetics of a few films in particular—Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, Fritz Lang's Fury, William Dieterle's Juarez, and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise—Robé focuses on how film theorists and critics sought to foster audiences who might push both film culture and larger social practices in more progressive directions. Turning at one point to anti-lynching films, Robé discusses how these movies united black and white film critics, forging an alliance of writers who championed not only critical spectatorship but also the public support of racial equality. Yet, despite a stated interest in forging more egalitarian social relations, gender bias was endemic in Left criticism of the era, and female-centered films were regularly discounted. Thus Robé provides an in-depth examination of this overlooked shortcoming of U.S. Left film criticism and theory.
Author: Kate Griffiths
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-02
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 1351194135
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the pages of Emile Zola from the earliest days of cinema. The ever-growing number of adaptations they have produced spans eras, genres, languages, and styles. In spite of the diversity of these approaches, numerous critics regard them as inferior copies of a superior textual original. But key novels by Zola resist this critical approach to adaptation. Both at the level of characterization and in terms of their own textual inheritance, they question the very possibility of origin, be it personal or textual. In the light of this questioning, the cinematic versions created from Zolas texts merit critical re-evaluation. Far from being facile copies of the nineteenth-century novelists works, these films assess their own status as adaptations, playing with both notions of artistic creation and their own artistic act. Kate Griffiths is a lecturer in French at Swansea University."