Fritz lang

Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (Vienna, December 5, 1890-Beverly Hills, August 2, 1976) was an Austrian naturalized German film director and screenwriter (he later resigned) and American who developed his artistic career in Germany and the United States.

During his German days, he directed classics such as Metropolis (1927), M, the Düsseldorf Vampire (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), for which, in its beginnings, it contributed to the German expressionist movement. Since the mid-1930s, after the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, he began working in exile in Hollywood, where he became one of the main architects of film noir, although he did not limit himself to that genre. He is considered one of the great filmmakers in the history of cinema.

Trajectory

He was the son of Anton Lang, chief architect of public works for the city of Vienna, and Paula Schlesinger, of Jewish descent. When Lang was ten years old his mother converted to Catholicism, her husband's religion, and tried to educate the child in that religion. However, Lang always stated that he had no interest in religions, and did not show special interest in his Jewish roots until the Nazis came to power in 1933, which conditioned his professional career and his life in the country. exile. For Jews, Lang would be Jewish, because his mother was (Jewishness is transmitted through the maternal line, a Hebrew law that derives from Deuteronomy), even though he had a slight Catholic upbringing in his childhood.

The frequent symbolic influence of Catholic themes in his films is evident. And although he wanted to be known as an atheist, he later described himself as 'born Catholic'.

In 1908 he began his architecture studies at the Technical University of Vienna, at his father's request; but he was inclined towards painting, so he interrupted these architectural studies to enroll in the Vienna School of Graphic Arts. His models were Klimt and especially Schiele, whom he admired for life. He then went to Nuremberg and then to the School of Fine Arts in Munich. Starting in 1909 or 1910, he left his parents' home and undertook a series of long trips, leaving the studies. He begins a time of continuous changes of residence and bohemian life (he worked in two Viennese cabarets, traveled all over the world). After an artistic stay in Munich, he finally settled in Paris, until 1914.

After the start of the First World War, he moved from Paris to Vienna. He enlisted in 1914 as a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army on January 12, 1915, but was immediately disappointed. Wounded during the war, while convalescent In 1916 he began writing film scripts.

German stage

Fritz Lang in 1969.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou on their Berlin apartment, 1923 or 1924.

Met Viennese and later German film director Joe May at his military hospital; he showed her drawings and several of his stories, so May hired him as a screenwriter. In 1916, he began writing scripts for the Universum Film AG (UFA) studios and premiered his first film as a screenwriter in Vienna in 1917: Die Hochzeit im exzentrik Klub, directed by May, currently missing. The result seemed unsuccessful to Lang, so he decided to direct his own films himself.

After the war was over in 1918, he left Vienna (a city from which he had actually left since 1908); Already a German citizen, he worked as a director on Halbblut (1919) and The Spiders ( Die Spinnen, 1. Teil: Der Goldene See ) (1919), which were well received. In the second, the first that has been preserved, his features are already perceived: dramatic talent, careful composition of images, remarkable sense of volume, crowds...

It was the moment of the emergence of cinema in Germany: it went from 28 films a year, before the war, to 245 in 1919 or already 474 in 1922. The rather terrifying fantasies of those years, with vampires, artificial beings, double lives, hidden sages or secret societies, femme fatales, give a general soap opera tone to German cinema (full of hysteria and despair, Lang will later say) of which his work was no stranger, for which reason he is seen in the ranks of expressionism. His first wife committed suicide in 1920, and Lang never wanted to give any personal details, even to serious historians (and friends of his) like Lotte Eisner.

Based on his own scripts and those of his second wife, the writer Thea von Harbou, he shot Das Wandernde Bild (1920), The Three Lights (1921), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Spione (1927) and then, at the request of the producers, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932), which continued the sinister adventures of that criminal. There a disturbing underground world appears continuously (with cellars, galleries and caves), mirrors that make the figures unfold, illusory or distorted visions, according to the delirious mind of Mabuse and other figures, as already in M .

The two parts of The Nibelungs (Sigfried and Krymilda's Revenge, 1924) are considered the best of their production in Germany, Metropolis (1927), The Woman on the Moon (1928) and, already in the field of sound, M, the Düsseldorf Vampire (1931).

At the end of The testament of Dr. Mabuse in 1932, he received a proposal from Joseph Goebbels to take over the leadership of the UFA, but Lang was totally opposed to Nazi ideas (he explained to Goebbels that although her mother was a converted Catholic, she was really Jewish, to which Goebbels replied that "We decide who is Aryan and who is not") so that same That night he fled to France, leaving almost everything he had and Thea von Harbou (with whom he no longer lived), the screenwriter of many films at the time and close to the ideas that dominated Germany at that time.

In Paris he filmed Liliom (1934), with little success, and that same year he went to Hollywood hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 1933 premiere of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned.

American stage

Fritz Lang tomb at the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

In the United States, his projects were rejected and it took him two years to make Fury (1936). His American productions had to accommodate the norms of the different genres, although he directed notable detective films such as You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Painting (1944), Perversity (1945), Secret Behind the Door (1947), The Bribeds (1953), Beyond a Doubt (1956), While New York Sleeps (1956) and others of another type such as Human Desires (1954), Moonfleet Smugglers (1955) and Concealer (1952).

On several occasions his social criticism was manifest and his doubts about justice were always present, as well as his reflections on the contemporary individual and his helplessness. In the late 1950s, partly because of the climate created by the investigations of the Committee on Un-American Activities and partly because of his rejection of commercial criteria, and also because of the offer of a European producer, he traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany to shoot The Tiger of Esnapur (1958), The Indian Tomb (1959) and The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), his last film.

He died in Los Angeles in 1976, admired by the Cahiers group in France. Godard himself had interviewed him and given a relevant role in one of his films, Contempt .

Acknowledgments

2010 Fritz Lang Star on the Stars Boulevard (Berlin).

On February 8, 1960, Lang received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 1600 Vine Street, for his contributions to the motion picture industry.

It is mainly the critics of the Nouvelle Vague who highlighted his figure as a filmmaker beyond some expressionist masterpieces. François Truffaut denounced that (American) film historians and critics did not recognize his genius when he directed spy films, war films or simply police films. Filmmakers who were influenced by his work include Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Luis Buñuel, Jesús Franco, Ignacio F. Iquino, Osamu Tezuka, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Luc Godard or Stanley Kubrick among others

Among the awards received, the awards for all his work from the Deutsche Filmakademie, Berlin, 1963 and the one from The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, Los Angeles, 1976.

Venice International Film Festival

Filmography

Additional bibliography

• Agnès Michaux. "Je les chasserai jusqu'au bout du monde jusqu'à ce qu'ils en crèvent," Paris: Éditions n°1, 1997; ISBN 2-86391-933-4. (in French)
• Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0. (in English) (See e.g. pp. 45–46 anecdotes on Lang's arrogance)
• McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997; ISBN 0-312-13247-6. (in English)
• Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood; Wien: Europaverlag, 1986; ISBN 3-203-50953-9 (in German).
• Shaw, Dan. Great Directors: Fritz Lang. Senses of Cinema issue 22, October 2002. (in English)
• Youngkin, Stephen (2005). The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2360-7. (in English) – contains interviews with Lang and a discussion of filmmaking M.