Retrospective: The Eye of Cinema – Fritz Lang

“What a stroke of luck to have an author in Lang whose cinematic beginnings are almost synonymous with the beginnings of cinema itself—a unique career path closely intertwined with the pivotal developmental stages of a new medium,” writes Frieda Grafe by way of introduction to her analysis of Fritz Lang’s work. Marking the 50th anniversary of his death on August 2nd, a three-part retrospective—spanning everything from the expressive imagery of the silent era and the “Golden Age” to the cinema of the German economic miracle—invites audiences to (re)discover Lang as both an aesthetic visionary and a seismograph of society.

People and Powers

There is arguably no other director who conceived of modernity so consistently as a struggle for order as Fritz Lang. Thoughts of his famous films from the Weimar Republic era conjure up images of vast metropolises, teeming crowds, and technological utopias—alongside the realization that the more sophisticated the systems created, the more uncontrollable they become. Between *The Spiders* (1919) and *The Testament of Dr. Mabuse* (1933), he sketches a panorama of modernity in which the promise of progress is inextricably linked to uncertainty.

Throughout his life, Lang remained remarkably reticent about biographical details. And whenever he did speak of them, his accounts were unreliable. After all, a good storyteller begins with himself. His studies in architecture and painting took him from Vienna to Munich and on to Paris, from where he was forced to return to his hometown following the outbreak of World War I. Even before the war ended, Lang—who had been wounded twice—moved to Berlin, where he found work as a writer and director for producers Erich Pommer and—briefly—Joe May. The earliest surviving films are still deeply imbued with the spirit of the serial cinema of the 1910s, which focused on spectacle and visual allure. With *Destiny* (1921), however, the Lang whose signature style would henceforth be unmistakable truly emerges. Beneath the fairy-tale narrative lies another major theme that runs through his entire body of work: the individual grappling with a power greater than themselves.

For Lang, however, “Fate” (if one chooses to call it that) is not a divine entity; instead, it reveals itself as an impenetrable web of overarching forces from which his characters try in vain to escape. The film’s romantic fatalism reappears in different guises in the futuristic visions of *Metropolis* and the dark urban landscape of *M*. Lang gradually shifted his focus from mythic subject matter to the contemporary world. Although he returned to a German epic saga with *Die Nibelungen*, he seemed less interested in the legend itself than in the architecture of power and dominion. Later, modern society became the primary setting for his films. Working alongside his screenwriter and wife, Thea von Harbou, he observed this modernity with an almost sociological eye, without ever losing sight of the metaphysical dimension. It is this combination that makes Lang’s early creative period so fascinating today: we may be increasingly capable of shaping our world, yet we can never fully master it.
(Florian Widegger)