gunning, tom - the films of fritz lang, introduction

7/24/2019 Gunning, Tom - The Films of Fritz Lang, Introduction

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Introduction

Outside the Films: Emblemsing

Hilf mir our maine Rolle zurOcklesen, bis zu mir selbst [ . . .]

Sieh, do such ich mich zu ereilen, aber ich loaf immer or mir

her and main Name hinterdrein . . .

Help me read my role backwards, till I reach myself [. . .]

See, there I am trying to catch myself, but I am always running

ahead of me and my name behind . . .

The Night Watches of Bonaventural

And so, my life is a running away, and I lose everything and

everything is left to oblivion or to the other man.

Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and Myself' 2

The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand

The screen offers us an image, somehow standing outside or on the cusp of the film

which is beginning to unroll. A graphic drawing of a hand reaches towards us show-

ing its palm, on which the simple tide of Fritz Lang's most famous film is inscribed,


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2 INTRODUCTION

the single letter M. It is as though the hand offers the him to us in this credit

sequence, as over this graphic image other letters appear, forming the names of the

film's various collaborators. We are in the liminal space that introduces nearly every

film, the credits which serve, to use Gerard Genette's term, as aparatext, the bound-

ary between the text and the world surrounding it and which acknowledge that

the fictional world we are about to see was made, produced by a number of people,

whose names now appear before us. This hand stands out in its non-photographic

quality as a visual emblem underlying all these names of the makers of this film, a

hint of what is to come.But in its rather contorted depiction, the hand does not really seem to make a

generous gesture of offering to the audience. Rather, it displays itself, a hand raised,

almost in a gesture of supplication or surrender. It recalls the convulsed and

deformed hands of German Expressionist paintings and graphics; its gesture

speaks of suffering as if the letter inscribed on it were a wound, an insignia

branded on the palm like an archaic punishment. As emblem of the film's story, it

anticipates a moment in which the criminals pursuing Hans Beckett (Peter Lorre),

just identified by the blind balloon seller as the child murderer the whole city is

pursuing, mark Beckett in order not to lose sight of him in the city night. To do so,

one of them inscribes the palm of his own hand with a large white M in chalk (M

for murderer, M6rder). This chalk mark is then transferred onto Beckett's shoulder

as the man pretends to stumble against him. The M proclaims Beckett's identity as

the murderer, the man sought throughout the Him, lifting him from the crowd of

anonymous backs that one might pass in a city street, the crowd into which he had

previously disappeared The mark, then, is the sign of singularity, of guilt, of beingpicked out from the crowd. But the hand that is inscribed with the M is, therefore,

not the murderer's hand, but rather that of the man who marks him. As an

emblem for the film, the im age of the hand serves as a transfer between the marker

and the marked, a common bond between murderer and pursuer, as much as a dif-

ferentiation. Lang's film works both to establish and to blur categories: between the

police and the criminal, the normal and the insane, the guilty and the innocent

Lang pointed out in interviews that the M inscribed in the palm simply traces

over an M already imprinted on the human hand from birth. The three major lines

of the palm - those which necromancy claims stand f or life, love and success - inter-

sect to form a figure like an M. Lang, therefore, identifies the M with the traditional

sign of fate, the lines imprinted on the palm which occult science allows us to inter-

pret. But whereas everyone's fate is different - and the differing lengths and shapes

of these lines were believed to encode and reveal an individual's destiny - the figure

of the M is nearly universal. The mark that has such a fatal consequence for HansBeckett in this film is a mark we all share.

There is another reference contained in this marked and marking hand. Lang has

indicated that he made frequent appearances in his own films, a practice we more

often associate with a director highly influenced by Lang and whose success Lang,

during his later career in HoHywood, would envy and try to emulate, Alfred Hitch-

cock. But whereas Hitchcock's appearances emphasized his highly recognisable

Bgure, Lang's appearances remain anonymous. He appears not as a face, or a carica-

ture silhouette, but in close-ups of hands, standing in for actors playing characters

in his films. Although we cannot identify with certainty which of the close-ups of

hands in Lang's films (and there are many of them) actually show his own hand

(presuming his anecdote is true), it is not unlikely that it is actually Lang's hand

which is marked with chalk in M.4

INTRODUCTION 3

This opening im age and its associations suggest a large number of the themes

that will be central to this book: inscription and identity, the ambiguity of gestures,

the body as a sign, the transfer of guilt, the interplay of individuality and universal-

it, of single character and mass - all these are themes that intertwine in Lang's films

throughout his career. But, primarily, this book seeks to plot the ambiguous figure

of Lang himself and his presence in his films. But what do I mean by the figure of

Lang? I do not simply mean the biological, biographical person Fritz Lang who

directed these films and with whom I once spent an evening in 1969. This book will

not be in any sense a biography. Patrick McGdligan's recent biography of L ang, 77/e

Nature of the Beast, has opened up new perspectives on Lang's life and I feel sure

more Lang biographies will be produced, perhaps questioning and modifying

McGilligan's findings The figure of Lang I seek to trace is constituted by an

exchange between this actual historical person and the films he made. Eventually

Lang merges with these films and therefore becomes both more and less than the

biological, biographic person. Rather than detailing Lang's life and times, I want to

capture the way Lang enters his own films, fashioning for himself his identity as a

him-maker, forging an image of himself which stands behind, or looms over, his

films and the discourses surrounding them. This figure of Lang seems to be, like a

credit sequence, part of his films, yet also outside them, connecting them to an

enunciating labour, to a source from which they derive. But it is a source whose

existence is indicated by the films themselves; a source we find only by reading

backwards from them, as though the films, or our careful viewing of them, create

the figure of Lang as much as vice versa. In what way did Lang imprint himself inhis films, or - to pick up on the reversal suggested by this image of the imprinting

hand which first must be marked itself - in what ways do Lang's films imprint him

on the audience, on film history?

Thxs is, therefore, a book that tries to tackle the issue of director's style and :

authorship in a somewhat novel manner. The critique of authorship which was '

launched in the 60s and 70s in literature and film studies, signalled by key texts

from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Peter WoHen, undermined the auteur 1

theory, which treated mm directors as authors, pronouncing it both methodologi-

cally naive and ideologically suspect. Naive because it lacked a true understanding

of the Hollywood m ode of production and the constraints placed on a director's

self-expression; suspect because it staked a meaningful interpretation on a theolog-

ical' account of the author-as-creator. Such a view of the author precluded a more

progressive assumption - that meaning is made by readers and viewers in an ongo-

ing interaction with texts whose energy should not be frozen by being referred back

to) an authoritative source.

If we approach authorship in terms of the director maintaining control over the f

production of a film, Lang stands out in film history. Lang's assertion of control

c)V,'r his European films is legendary, epitomized in the many stories describing him

as a tyrant, driving actors and technicians to extraordinary achievements. His

,,ttcnlpt to exert a similar degree of control over his Hollywood films is equally well-

known, as evident in its compromises and defeats as in its successes. But even a

passing study of Lang also reveals the vital role his collaborators played in his films,

ixuhxding directors of photography, set designers and, perhaps most importantly,

Ills scx`ct`nwritcr and wife, Thea Von Harbou. The credits of some prints of M, in

Lu.t, avoid mentioning Lang as director (although the first writing on the screen

,I,.,larcs w,` arc watching chin Fritz I,ang liim`). Instead the credits open with the


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4 I N 'I. Itl>l I L:'I IN

rubric dieser film outstand in gemeinsamer arbeit' - this him comes from a collec-

tive project - and then lists Lang's name first in a long column of collaborators.

Lang's image of himself as a director in these credits wavers between a claim of

ownership (`a Fritz Lang film') and apparent modesty (one of a collective). But just

as this book is not a biography, it is also not going to provide a Production history

of Lang's films, recounting the evolution of each Lang film and the various forces

which shaped its final form - as much as that book needs to be written, and as I

would love to write it. The focus of my work will remain for the most Part on the

screen. I will explore the complexity of Lang's imprint on his films through viewinghis films, rather than exploring their production.

Lang once characterised himself as aHandwerker, a craftsman, rather than an

artist. But, once again, with apparent modesty, Lang claims an important stake in

his work In Germany aHandwerker takes on the traditional value of direct Per-

sonal involvement with production, in contrast with the alienated and mechanical

labour of an industrial worker. Lang once again asserts the Priority of his own

imprint on his films through keeping his hand in the process. The hand leaves the

imprint of the maker. But the work process of a director of films - which are cer-

tainly complex industrial and technological products, created through a detailed

division of labour - makes a literal understanding of this imprint impossible. Lang

will never leave a simple fingerprint, but an imprint which resembles the mark left

on Beckert's back, a sign heavily mediated as it attempts to emerge from

anonymity.

The Screening Room: strange but True'

But what clasp is given us by this phantom hand, which is not physically Present there

in the text to greet the reader or viewer, but only leaves its mark, its imprint? The

author does not necessarily efface the reader's part; indeed, the author exists as an

invitation to reading The author, in film as well as literature, is, I would maintain, a

creature of the reader's or viewer's desire. Instead of providing the ultimate significa-

tion and meaning through presence, the author works by remaining absent. As Fou-

cault's essay what is anAuthor?' makes clear (as well as the writings of literary critics,

such as Wayne Booth, who have analysed the multiple registers of narration), the

author never simply speaks in their own voices Between the actual writer and the

reader a series of speakers intervene, such as fictional narrators, or what Wayne

Booth calls the implied author: all of which are contained in the writing and separ-

ate the reader from direct contact with the actual writer. As Foucault Puts it:

It is well known that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first Person

pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, i ts signs of localisation

refer directly t o the writer, either to the time that he wrote, or to the specific act of

writing. Rather t hey stand for a second self whose similarity to the author is never

fixed and undergoes considerable alteration in the course of a single book. It would

be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional

narrator; the author-function' arises out of their scission in the division and

distance of the two

Rather than achieving direct communication with a reader, by writing an author

splits off their own words so that they take on a life of their own. As forge Borges

states in his sketch Borges and Me', the author is always `the other mall` scParatc

I NTROD UCTION 5

from the living breathing person; the author is the one who writes, or rather who is

embodied in the writing Foucault calls writing a voluntary obliteration of the self':

`Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the r ight to kill,

to become the murderer of its author's Barthes, in fact, sees the death of the author

as not only the birth of the reader, but as the birth of writing, and of the writer as

scriptor, one who does not express himself, but rather, like MaHarme, abdicates, gets

out of the way, erases his I: in order to let language itself take Over.9In modern

literature, Barthes claims, from Mallarme through Kafka, Proust and the Surreal-

ists, there is no longer a person behind the text, but rather a play of signification, afabric of quotations% the force of language and writing itself which, as Foucault

puts it, creates an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears lo

Film studies, frankly, never lingered over these major theorizations of author-

ship.II It was often assumed any treatment of the author must follow the naive tra-

jcctory Barthes denounces: the author as god, as first cause and ultimate meaning of

the text to be discovered through the biographical author's person, his history, his

taste, his passions'. Barthes' proclamation of the death of the author, in the selective

manner it has been used in him studies, seemed to reduce the process by which a

reader or viewer encounters an author in a text to a hushed and submissive passiv-

ity. The possibility of a modern author dedicated not to self-expression but to the

play of discourse, particularly relevant in a medium like film where the auteur'

rarely speaks directly in his own voice but rather indirectly through sounds and

images assembled, performed and in some ways produced by collaborators,

retllains largely unexplored.

I see the author as precisely poised on the threshold of the work, evident in thehim itself, but also standing outside it, absent except in the imprint left behind I

will approach Lang as an author from this perspective, not simply (following Peter

W


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INTRODUCTION 7

to circumvent Lang's direction by hiring Paul Javal, a new scriptwriter (Michel pic-

coli), he seals the deal by writing a cheque on the back of his female assistant

(Godard would later use the cheques written for the stars and technicians of Tout va

bien as credits for that film,) declaring, when I hear the word culture, I bring out my

cheque book: a quote transformed from Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering who

threatened, when I hear the word culture, I take out my pistol.'

But perhaps the most complex quotation in the scene, and the one with the

most resonance as an emblem for the film director, comes when Lang quotes in

German (he speaks German, French and English in this sequence - the three lan-guages in which he made films - making us aware of the varied texture of language

and the need for translation) the last stanza of Friedrich H.olderlin's poem The

l'oct's Vocation':

Furchdos bleibt abet, so or es muss, der Mann

Einsam or Gott, es schuzet die Einfalt ibn

Und keiner Warren brauchts and keiner

Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilt.

/t ran slatedby Christopher Middleton as:Fearless yet, if he must, man stands, and lonely

Before God, simplicity protects him, no

Weapon he needs, nor subterfuge

'GillGod's being not there helps him.]

f"\fig then discusses the variants on the last line, that H `olderlin first wrote so lungedef c ;ott nicht do list which Francesca, Prokosch's assistant, translates for Paul as

"I`,mt que Dieu no fait pas default (as long as God does not fail him). Then, Lang

t"tcs, H`olderlin changed the verse to so lange def Gott uns nahe list (as long as

c;t>d is near to us). But the final version reverses these and describes man's aid

' I',ingfrom God's being missed, his failure (Gottes Fehl) or as Lang says in French,

`, scncc becomes the

tilt r `s liIblI st IllI>igtlt >us, hut powcrf ill, Ki[ t to f ile arcade.

6 INTRODUCTION

as film viewers. The search for the author takes place in a labyrinth in which at

times even the film director himself may have lost his way.

Perhaps there is no better exploration of the paradoxes of film authorship than the

screening room sequence in Godard's Contempt in which Fritz Lang plays Fritz Lang:

a German director, now making a film of Horner's Odyssey in Cinecitta for producer

Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). In this scene, Lang watches rushes from this film

which he never actually directed but his fictional character of the same name within

the film did. The sequence contains many references to Lang's career, to incidents that

Lang himself had reported in interviews. The key instance involves a struggle for con-trol over the film (and the nature of film discourse) with Prokosch. After knocking

cans of film across the room, Prokosch bears down on Lang, yelling, you cheated me,

Fritz', claiming the scene he shot was not in the script. Lang claims it is but refuses to

surrender his own copy of the script to the producer. When a copy of the script is

brought to Prokosch he flips through it and gruffly admits the scene is there, But it's

not what you have on that screen.' Lang responds, naturally, because in the script it is

written and on the screen it's pictures, motion pictures it's called.' Prokosch reads by

flinging more mm cans, this time in a parody of the classical Greek statue, Myron's

Discus Thrower (Lang comments: finally you get the feel of Greek culture').

The sequence re-stages an encounter Lang claims he had with Eddie Mannix, the

producer of his first Hollywood film, Fury. 13Therefore Lang is playing (or replaying)

Fritz Lang based on his own script. But the dialogue also makes an essential claim

about film authorship: it is not the script, the written words, that Lang has authored,

but their translation into images. Here we encounter Lang's own claim to being an

auteur, his attempt to control indetail the image as it appears on the screen. The sur-viving scripts of Lang's Hollywood films make clear how literal this authorship was,

with Lang's careful diagrams showing the camera angles and camera movement

within the set, the paths of the actors, with sketches conveying the framing and even

the gestures of the actors. The words were a libretto for which Lang supplied a full

orchestration into images. And as his anecdote makes clear, this control over mise-

en-scme did not simply add something to the words, but transformed them. Lang's

contribution is alchemical, a chain reaction of reinterpretation and visualisation,

opening up the film (and the viewer) to non-verbal meanings.

But this sequence of Godard's film also demonstrates the way a modern author

(or a cinematic author: Godard as well as Lang) creates a text out of Barthes' fabric

of quotations'. The film-maker functions less as a scriptor than a fashioner of

palimpsests, texts written over other texts creating new meanings from the superim-

position of old ones. Besides quoting Lang's life (or accounts of his life), the

sequence accumulates a thicket of references and quotations, including Palance's

parody of Myron's sculpture. Inscribed on the wall is a quote attributed (possibly

spuriously) to Louis Lumiere: the cinema is an invention without a future'. Scenes

from a cinematic adaptation of Horner's Odyssey are screened, accompanied by Lang

quoting in German verses on Odysseus - not from Horner, but from Dante - in

which the Italian poet placed his forebear's hero in the Inferno and had him recount

the voyage he undertook atterhis return from Troy. The film screened, although sup-

posedly directed by Lang, recalls, with its arcing camera movements around ancient

statues, Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (a film we see announced on the marquee of a

theatre later in the film and the plot of which, as many critics have pointed out, res-

onates with Contempt's story of the collapse of a marriage). Therefore, we receive

Horner's Odyssey as passed down through several hands: Dantc's scqucl and

Godard/Lang's cinematic adaptation with a how to Rosscllini. Whcn Prokoscll tries


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INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 9

A version Lang told to William Friedkin for an unrealized documentary, quoted by

McGilligan, adds these characteristic Langian details to the description of his walk

down the corridor:

{It} had great squares of cement, the walls were black - no pictures, no inscriptions.

The windows were very high [so] that you couldn't look out of [them]. I walked and

walked on these cement squares. Every step echoed constantly

Ghe interview with Goebbels varies little in the different versions, except in onedetail. In all versions Goebbels explains to him the need to ban The Testament ofDrMabuse because of the film's ending, but reassures Lang that the F.uhrer knows and

loves Lang's films and has proclaimed, This is the man who will give us the great

Nazi films.' Only in a few versions does Lang raise the issue of his Jewish heritage,

with Goebbels responding, we will decide who is a Jew.' Lang indicates he out-

wardly expressed delight to Goebbels while inwardly thinking in panic, How do Iget out of here?' 18

This concealed desire is brilliantly expressed in Lang's narrative by another char-

,'ctcristic (and cinematic) detail: a clock: outside the window there was a big clock,

,Ind the hands went slowly round'19 Lang's concern about the time comes from his

decision that he must leave Germany that very evening (saying to himself, This


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INTRODUCTION 11

ing The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, who thought he was a grandfather clock. In hisinterview with Peter Bogdanovich, Lang indicates he incorporated this figure into

the original version' of that film:

He stood there and made a movement with his arms like a pendulum - and I

dissolved to a grandfather clock; one day this man has a feeling that some of his

springs have fallen out - so he crawls on the floor and tries to fi nd them.25

Whether or not this figure ever actually appeared in a version of The Testament of

Dr. Mabuse, he does appear in the most interesting of Lang's unproduced scripts,

The Man behind You. This original story by Lang represents his attempt to make an

American version of his Mabuse films and its earliest version was one of Lang's first

American projects, one he continued to work on throughout the 30s. Here the

man-clock is presented exactly as Lang describes in the Bogdanovich interview, a

man who swings his arms like a pendulum and who is presented from the point of

view of Dr. Moran (the hi m'sMabuse-like master criminal) in a dissolve to an

image of clockworks which suddenly snap, as the madman crumbles onto the floor

in a fit. This patient will only respond to one question: what time is it?' and always

with the same answer (like the clock outside Goebbels' office): Too late.'

I end this introduction of emblems of Lang's authorship with this image of Lang,

like his fictional lunatic, acting out the mechanical motions of the clock. In Lang's

world (which includes his finished films, his scripts, and his accounts of his life, par-

ticularly as they tend toward the fictional) not only are characters threatened by the

I)cstiny-machine, but the very act of authorship as well within the agon or strugglewhich authorship initiates, the author becomes subject to systems beyond his or her

control, not only the tyrannical system of Nazi power, but also systems like the very

order of language which the modern author, described by Barthes and Foucault,

surrenders to as he vanishes. But this is not simply a contest of hero and opponent

with the stronger force overcoming the weaker. Rather authorship often slips into

III identification with the impersonal system. The man becomes the clock and

,aunts off the moments of his own fate. The author becomes captured by his own

story. Part of the drama that Lang's films enact is precisely the struggle between the

, claimsto power of an author-like figure and the real power of the impersonal

system of the Destiny-machine. In almost all cases the apparent master is revealed

it, have been a tool all along.

IO INTRODUCTION

If Lang is caught in the labyrinth of his own storytelling, the revealing image for

me comes in the slowly revolving hands of the clock outside the window. This clock

supplies the suspense of the story, the sense of the need for an immediate escape

(which the evidence of Lang's passport, with its numerous trips and returns to Ger-

many in the months following the apparent date of his encounter with Goebbels,

belies). The turning hands of the clock (McGilligan notes that in the version told to

Friedkin, Lang said the clock moved and moved and moved'), its relentless motion

stressing Lang's own immobility, stuck in Goebbels' office But the clock also

relates Lang to the world outside this office, a network of clock-determined dead-lines - the banks which will close, the train schedules which could take him out of

Germany. The clock hands tick towards the last moment you can be sure of getting

out of Germany'.23 In the only visual version of this story I have seen, a television

interview where Lang tells the tale in German, acting out the various roles, he acts

out the motion of the clock, turning his hand and arm one way to indicate the pass-

ing of time and his other arm in the opposite direction to indicate Goebbels' ongo-

ing speech.24 These gestures add a further dimension to Lang's drama: he is caught

between two implacable machines, one counting the minutes, the other voicing

Nazi ideology and offering the temptation of becoming the Film F uhrer'.

In the next chapter I will discuss the role clocks play in setting up a central device

of Lang's films which I call the Destiny-machine. To define briefly a concept I will

discuss in detail, the Destiny-machine determines the environment in which Lang's

characters struggle, serving in most cases as an obstacle this corresponds in many

ways to the theme of f ate or destiny (in Contempt Lang introduces his film of The

Odyssey as the fight against the gods') which has become such a cliche of Lang crit-icism that recent commentators have tended to treat it with scorn. But I think we

risk losing the mainspring of Lang's dramaturgy if we simply dismiss the idea of

destiny in his films as banal. The point is that for Lang destiny is not a metaphysical

concept (and actually not a fight against the gods) but a material one, less a mean-

ing than a structure. Destiny appears in Lang's films, not as a philosophy, but as a

machine, whose mechanical nature in most of the films remains very literal. This is

not to say that L ang's films are about a Luddite struggle against machines (although

Metropolis does dramatize such a revolt). The machine in Lang does stand for

something beyond itself. But, rather than a metaphor for a view of human nature or

metaphysics, the machine is a metonymy, a fragment which stands in for the whole

systematic nature of the modern world which Lang sees as a complex determining

destiny. In the following chapters I will show how this systematic nature of the

modern world is explored in Lang's films, but here in this self-fashioning anecdote

we find Lang himself pitted against the Destiny-machine, on the one hand the

unstoppable clock marking the boundaries of human social time (when banks

close, trains leave and human fates are given their last moment' when something is

possible) and the equally unstoppable machine of ideological discourse issuing

from one of the key inventors of modern propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

In his story Lang stands fixed between these two forces, immobilized But as we

have learned, Lang himself created this particular scenario, possibly as the only way

to make cogent the power the Nazi party heldat this moment over his identity and

future as a film-maker, or perhaps to camouflage his own more ambivalent reac-

tions to Nazi power. In narrating, or rather acting it out, his gestures not only indi-

cate his own actions and reactions, but the motions of the Destiny-machine, as he

revolves his arms to capture its mechanical progression. Lang's gesture summonsup an image he often recalled, of a lunatic he saw in an asylum when he was prepar

gunning, tom - the films of fritz lang, introduction

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