As the Hitchcock industry roars ahead, it is fitting that his
centenary celebrations should be followed by a major retrospective
of Fritz Lang at London's National Film Theatre. When Hitchcock gave
himself a serious film education at Ivor Montagu's avant-garde
screenings at the Film Society in London in 1926 and 1927 Lang was
an acknowledged influence. Although both directors subsequently
ended up in Hollywood - Lang in 1933, Hitchcock in 1939 - there is
little evidence they ever met. More likely, they eyed each other at
a respectful distance - while Lang admired Rebecca, he also
envied the younger man's success in the 50s when his own fortunes
were flagging. Their paths might be said to have crossed only in
Paris in the 60s when they became twin pillars of the Cahiers du
cin¨¦ma critics' ideal of "pure cinema". Since then, however, the
decline of Lang's reputation has been almost as notable as the rise
of Hitchcock's. A continuing interest in film noir, paranoia
movies and the femme fatale keeps some of Lang's American films -
Scarlet Street (1945), Secret Beyond the Door...
(1948), The Big Heat (1953) and The Blue Gardenia
(1953) - in repertoire. Meanwhile his German films have suffered
from too much muffled deference, with the possible exception of
Metropolis (1926) which somehow transcended its author to
become - thanks to Giorgio Moroder, Freddy Mercury and Madonna - one
of the most enduring cult classics of the 80s.
The case against German Lang has often been made, and nowhere
more damagingly than in Siegfried Kracauer's 1947 book From
Caligari to Hitler. According to Kracauer, Lang's cinema is
replete with authoritarian figures projecting
conservative-nationalist values. His overblown, mystic-mythical
iconography is underpinned by fables offering proto-fascist
solutions to economic and social crises. Human relations revolve
around power, control and domination and the individual is a mere
puppet of hostile forces, malevolent tyrants, master criminals or
super-spies. Patrick McGilligan's biography Fritz Lang: the
Nature of the Beast (1997) added to the charge sheet an
obsession with kinky sex and homicidal violence. Sex and violence
might open up inevitable parallels with Hitchcock, except that
Lang's fixations totally lacked the Englishman's sardonic sense of
humour or taste for the frivolous and the absurd. Lang's supreme
gift for dramatic irony, on the other hand, has probably always been
too cerebral for a genre-based film-maker to become popular, however
prized it once was among cinephiles.
A Hapsburg decadent as much as Hitchcock was an Edwardian dandy,
Lang had another major handicap throughout his 40 years' stay in
California: with his monocle he looked the Prussian officer, his
German accent grated on the actors who chafed under his barked
commands and he showed a haughty disdain for those who tried his
patience - a collection of personality traits Americans all too
readily associated with their idea of the F¨¹hrer, an image
ironically derived in part from Lang's own anti-Nazi films Man
Hunt (1941) and Ministry of Fear (1943). Lang did not
manage a box-office success after The Woman in the Window
(1944) and Scarlet Street, and these were modest hits by
other top directors' standards. To contrast Lang's and Hitchcock's
salaries in the mid 40s is a salutary lesson in the Hollywood class
system: Hitchcock, even when a contract director at Warner Bros, was
making $250,000 per film whereas Lang's usual fee was $50,000, a
pittance by studio standards and embarrassingly little compared with
the leading actors in most of his films.
Additionally, there was only cautious commerce between Lang and
his prominent Weimar contemporaries during their joint Californian
exile. Frankfurt School cultural theorist T. W. Adorno and Lang had
frequent contact, though mainly maintained by their spouses; with
Bertolt Brecht communication was cordial until they fell out over
their collaboration on Hangmen Also Die (1943). However,
underneath their professional differences there ran a current of
mutual esteem because alongside their disgust at Californian-style
consumer-capitalism they also distrusted so-called human nature,
which is to say they both rejected psychological realism. In Lang's
films, even more than evil, it is artifice that triumphs: a
fundamentally ironic strategy that earned him the reputation of an
anti-humanist.
Looking-glass worlds
The frosty climate of suspicion among the Hollywood ¨¦migr¨¦
community aggravated by frequent humiliations from the studio heads
must have pained Lang. Yet his self-protective misanthropy did
little to remind Hollywood how prominent he had been in post-1918
Europe. After Der M¨¹de Tod/Destiny (1921) and Dr
Mabuse der Spieler/Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922) each new
film was major international news, and each set itself steep
challenges, stylistic as well as technical. Destiny showed
off some jaw-dropping special effects (the US rights were bought by
Douglas Fairbanks, in order to copy the trick photography with
impunity for his Thief of Bagdad, or so the story goes).
Die Nibelungen (1924) made a magnificent two-part disaster
movie out of the nation's favourite boy's-own epic.
Metropolis was the most expensive film made in Germany for
decades to come. Spione/Spies (1928) and Frau im
Mond/The Woman in the Moon (1929) were blockbusters with
advertising campaigns as canny as anything seen today; M
(1931), cashing in on Weimar culture's morbid fascination with
serial killers, became one of the masterpieces of early sound
cinema, probing the psychology of the crowd as well as the darker
side of the urban flaneur thanks to Peter Lorre's unforgettable
portrayal of the cunning child-murderer Beckert. Lang's last film
before leaving for Hollywood, The Testament of Dr Mabuse
(1933), was banned by the Nazis and had to have its premiere in
Vienna.
The case for German Lang can be made other than by recalling a
technical wizard with an upper-class conservative social agenda.
Metropolis, an art-director's Aladdin's cave to steal from,
has
always kept the architect in Lang up front. Spies strikes
one for its acerbic look at conspiracies: criminal ones at the
ostensible plot level, but given how much Haghi the master spy is
made to resemble Lenin one wonders whether a political parallel was
not also intended. The Woman in the Moon, despite an all too
leaden-footed intrigue about professional jealousy, insipid romance
and the quest for gold, manages to incorporate very advanced ideas
about jet propulsion and rockets; Lang also claimed to have invented
the countdown when trying to figure out how to create a sense of
suspense around the launch. His approach to storytelling in that
film is that of an engineer: the pieces, pre-formed by pulp fiction
and sensationalist clich¨¦, are fitted together with the utmost
precision according to a quite beautiful abstract design.
Equally prescient is Lang's ambivalent attitude to surveillance
and the cinema's complicity in the militarisation of perception.
Die Spinnen/ The Spiders (1919), Destiny and Die
Nibelungen are complex vision machines full of proto- and
pseudo-cinematic apparatuses. In Destiny death plays magic
lanternist to the hapless bride. The adventure serial The
Spiders displays its folding mirrors, peepholes and spyglasses
as the tools-of-trade of femme fatale Lio-Sha, who doubles as
metteuse-en-sc¨¨ne. Here Lang makes himself the ironic
archivist of the pleasures and dangers of assisted sight. In the
epic family saga Die Nibelungen Alberich, the guardian of the
Nibelungen treasure, plays the projectionist of deferred desire,
taunting Siegfried with images of fabulous wealth cast on the smooth
stone wall of Alberich's underworld cave. Siegfried, the proverbial
Simple Simon, succumbs to the spell of this phantasmagoria,
stretching out his hands to grasp at the images. The contemporary
audience would have enjoyed the way Siegfried unwittingly mimics the
proverbial country bumpkin of early cinema, too unsophisticated to
realise these are mere representations. Yet Siegfried is a quick
learner: in the event, he wins by deviousness and deception. It is
as if Lang had decided to let the whole tragedy hinge on a trick
taken straight out of Georges M¨¦li¨¨s' box of movie magic, but played
out on a stage that foreshadows the looking-glass worlds of Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and John Le Carr¨¦'s Cold War
double crosses.
To see, to know, to believe: this is the triad whose contending
claims on perception and reason the radical sceptic in Lang plays
off against each other. Technologically, in that the trick effects
of the early films dazzle us with sights the mind knows are
impossible, thrilling us with cognitive dissonance that would have
made today's digital images a welcome addition to the Ufa
imagineers' arsenal. Politically, in that Lang's German films know
everything about advertising and how to build a brand-name image but
at the same time let us look inside the mechanisms of power and
persuasion that make such manufacturing possible.
Lang has often been regarded as the director of appearances that
prove to be deceptive, but this presumes to judge these appearances
by a standard of reality largely absent from the films. The
difficult delights of his work lie in the fact that, strictly
speaking, there never seems to be a solid ground from which the
realm of appearances might be asserted to be true or false. So
thoroughly do Lang's nested narratives and representations suspend
unmediated access to the real that each viewer is obliged either to
fantasise or metaphorise a meaning into the images and to decide on
the frame of reference. One of Lang's keenest critics of the 80s
Klaus Kreimeier sees in his German films a vortex of vertigo- and
paranoia-inducing images that always cite other images, while behind
them loom "chaos, abyss, hell, death": terms, however, that
accumulate in their negative connotations a 'positive' referent -
the Nazi regime. Kreimeier then subjects Lang's early adventure
yarns of hidden treasures to a Marxist analysis of the world economy
and its crises in the late 20s, against which the director emerges
as a political somnambulist, nostalgic for archaic, pre-capitalist
notions of money as gold and capital as the hidden hoard.
This lifts Lang out of the narrow proto-fascist groove. But what
legitimates the gesture that invokes these historical foils, in
order then to critique Lang's reactionary ideology? In Lang there
are always several worlds set in contrast, supporting each other
only in so far as they comment on each other. For instance, what
strikes one about The Spiders is how far each episode
contrasts the contemporary world of the motor car with the exotic
locations of the South American Incas, where aeroplanes pluck the
hero from a horse in the pampas or a Chinese opium den is equipped
with modern means of telecommunication. Such contrasting worlds
comment on each other ironically, each pastiching the other by an
act of repetition: the same stories, the same conflicts, the same
futility, each time merely in a different fancy dress. Dr
Mabuse - the first of Lang's trilogy of films completed in 1960
- introduces us to several worlds that already look false even
before they become real, or rather where the clever fake is that
which is most real about reality.
Master of disguises
Dr Mabuse was Lang's breakthrough film in Germany, as well
as an early example of a marketing ploy in which the serialised
novel and the film became each other's mutual selling points.
Announcing itself in its title as a "portrait of its time" (part
one: The Gambler) and "of its men and women" (part two:
The Inferno) it was loosely based on motifs from Norbert
Jacques' tabloid opus, peppered up with topical material by Lang and
his then wife, the successful novelist and Germany's top
screenwriter Thea von Harbou. The four-hour film starts at a furious
pace, with a meticulously timed train robbery leading to a
stock-exchange fraud. It then concentrates on Mabuse hypnotising a
young American industrialist into running up large debts at
gambling, after which the master criminal wins the favours of an
aristocratic lady, drives her husband to suicide and eventually
kidnaps her. Time and again outwitting the public prosecutor by a
mixture of brutality, practical jokes and agent provocateur
demagoguery, Mabuse is finally cornered in his secret hideout and
either goes mad or feigns insanity when he is finally captured.
The film is said originally to have had a pre-credits sequence
depicting street battles from the 1919 Spartacist socialist uprising
in Berlin, the assassination of foreign minister Walther Rathenau
and other scenes of disorder masterminded by Mabuse ("Who is
responsible for all this? - Me" was apparently the first
intertitle). Although this opening is now lost or was never made,
the various scams Mabuse is involved in (industrial espionage,
stock-exchange fraud, forged banknotes) as well as the felonies he
perpetrates (he runs a lab manufacturing cocaine, his gang controls
gambling and prostitution and plots assassinations) all vividly
point to the immediate post-World War I era, especially to Germany's
raging hyperinflation between 1921 and 1924 and its black-market
economy that pauperised the middle classes while creating a new
urban subculture of war profiteers, Mafia-like racketeer
organisations and vigilante units recruited from the growing army of
the unemployed. The political references were not lost on
contemporary reviewers or the censors, and even today Mabuse's
several disguises seem taken out of a catalogue of Weimar types
familiar from the drawings of Otto Dix and George Grosz: stockbroker
in a top hat, derelict drunk in a housing tenement, Jewish peddler
at the street corner, bearded rentier in a flashy limousine,
industrialist with monocle and moustache, pimp, psychiatrist,
hypnotist and opium-smoking Tsi-Nan-Fu in a gambling den.
Mabuse was taken to be modelled on Hugo Stinnes, a steel magnate
who from humble beginnings amassed a fortune and occupied a key
position in the post-World War I rearmament industries (illegal,
according to the Treaty of Versailles). But Mabuse also doubles as a
Houdini-like vaudeville artist, passes himself off as a soul doctor
from Vienna and even has a dash of the Bolshevik agitator in the
Karl Radek mould. The final showdown was modelled on the famous
shoot-out between the police and the 'Fort Chavrol' bankrobbers from
a barricaded house in the Parisian banlieue in 1921. In short,
Lang's "portrait of its time" gathers up a fair number of
contemporary references.
It was after World War II that Dr Mabuse in the eyes of
the critics took on a less topical and more overtly metaphoric mien.
As indicated, Kracauer ties virtually every significant trend in his
diagnostic psychogram of Weimar veering towards totalitarian madness
to one of Lang's films: "[Dr Mabuse] succeeds in making of
Mabuse an omnipresent threat that cannot be localised, and thus
reflects society under a tyrannical regime - that kind of society in
which one fears everybody because anybody may be the tyrant's ear or
arm." Lang later argued back, pointing out that if he had predicted
the rise of Hitler in his films, then Kracauer was pinning the blame
for the bad news on the messenger.
Evidently the film's immense popularity at the time and
subsequent status as a classic testify to a surplus of meaning, best
readable perhaps across the designation of Mabuse as "der Spieler",
meaning the gambler but also the dissembler or pretender.
Highlighting both playfulness and risk, a refusal of identity and a
slippage of reference, the epithet announces the question of what
kind of agency Mabuse embodies as he 'stands behind' events as well
as 'fronting' a conspiratorial gang bent on mayhem and mischief. One
could call Mabuse a disguise artist, dissimulating both identity and
agency, and suggest that he belongs to a rather large family of such
creatures in Weimar cinema, whose kinship, but also generic
diversity (Caligari and Nosferatu, Die Nibelungen's Hagen and
Spies' Haghi, Tartuffe and Mephisto), allow some conclusions
about the self-analysis of cinema during the Weimar period. Mimicry
as metaphor, metaphor as mimicry. If Lang's German films are
inventories of styles and if he provided much of the wallpaper for
Weimar Germany's national or avant-garde ambitions, he also showed
how flimsy it was. Take expressionism, the style intended to create
an internationally valid brand name for German cinema in the early
20s - as Mabuse himself says: "Expressionism! - it's a game of
make-believe! But why not? Everything today is make-believe." Mabuse
both implicates and distances himself, in a gesture that joins
mimicry and parody, a mottled person for a mottled ground.
There are many such moments in Dr Mabuse. One would be the
scene of Mabuse at the stock exchange in which he destabilises both
stock prices and currencies by selectively planting information
gleaned from the treaty captured during the train robbery. The scene
ends with the superimposition of Mabuse's face on the emptied stock
exchange, gradually surging from the background like a watermark on
a banknote held against the light, as if Lang had tilted the world
we have just witnessed and something else had become visible: not
the truth, but the recto of a verso. What is left is a kind of
hieroglyphic world, barely readable, strange, but consisting of all
but the most familiar elements.
A film-maker's mask
Given these meta-levels of meaning, Dr Mabuse is a prime
candidate for an allegorical approach: the different kinds of
mises-en-abymes suggest links between Mabuse as
metteur-en-sc¨¨ne and the metteur-en-sc¨¨ne of Dr
Mabuse, enfolding the director in the schemes of his
arch-villain and power-broker. Dr Mabuse would then be a
cautionary tale addressed to Lang himself about the ambiguous role
of the film-maker as master of the machinery of public power
fantasies. This is certainly how Lang saw the cinema and photography
in several of his American films, from Fury (1936) to
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).
But Mabuse's reliance on vision and disguise is contradictory,
not only because he is finally hoist by his own petard. Mabuse's
hard stare resembles a totemic mask, designed to terrify those who
look at it. However, the stare is not an expression of power but yet
another form of the disguise of power. Often Mabuse dons disguises
that make him blend with the urban fabric, becoming a Jewish peddler
or a drunken working-class husband berating his wife. At other times
his disguise wants to draw attention to itself, as when he plays the
buffoon, his clownishness focusing as well as dispersing the
onlookers' notice. In such cases one has a kind of Mabuse-Medusa,
explicitly in the scenes where he faces down von Wenk at the
gambling table and hypnotises him as Dr Weltmann. But as a kind of
ritual mask, the rigid face with the piercing eyes can also be a
form of disguise that hides the bearer from himself.
In its anthropological sense a mask is designed to ward off evil
spirits - it is the bearer's gesture of defence - whereas a disguise
that operates as camouflage is the currency the bearer tries to
acquire in order to enter into circulation. Disguise in Dr
Mabuse thus functions in a double system: it absorbs the look of
the other in the form of mimicry and camouflage and wards off the
look of the other in the form of the mask. Instead of foregrounding
the act of looking, as is so often claimed, Lang's cinema captures
looking in a set of devices that lend human sight the illusion of
new forms of mastery at the same time as they mock its
presumptions.
A relay of roles links the spectator, the film, the main
protagonist, his disguises and other characters as his dupes - and
over this relay presides the director, invisible
metteur-en-sc¨¨ne of all these roles and impostures. Yet the
"ultimate metaphor" of which Raymond Bellour once spoke would here
be Mabuse as metteur-en-sc¨¨ne of a world he intends to
control, capped by the film-maker Lang ensnaring his audience the
more firmly by first arming and then dismantling his hero:
demonstrating how it is done, while letting complicity trouble the
irony. Disguise artist, Übermensch and phallic
Übervater here implicate and complement each other, with the
director wearing Mabuse as his own mask, or rather as the stand-in
for an all-seeing eye.
Is Lang's cinema, then, the "ultimate metaphor" because it can
speak about the cinema as a locus of power and thus, through the
cinema, warn about cinema? It is an idea which, as Bellour has also
observed, joins the three Mabuse films: "The Mabuse series is,
within classical cinema, the most important reflection on the cinema
ever produced by a director (to the point that, with their 40-year
span, the films could be said to mark the beginning and end of the
classical period). The three films... deal with the central power of
vision and diffusion, defined by the three major phases of the
development of cinema: the cinema as such (silent cinema), sound
cinema, and cinema confronting video and television."
(Cin¨¦mAction 47, 1988)
In this respect Lang's Mabuse films are indeed essays on the
social symbolic represented by the new technologies of surveillance
as dissembling machines at once fascinating and frightening. The
first Dr Mabuse makes the homology between Mabuse as
metteur-en-sc¨¨ne of vision and the cinematic spectacle (at
one point the audience witnesses a film-within-the-film which shows
a desert caravan riding right through the auditorium). The social
dimension emerges in The Testament of Dr Mabuse: at the very
beginning of the sound-film period Lang singles out the human voice
via loudspeaker and gramophone to demonstrate how readily it lends
itself to the manipulation of presence (a dummy Mabuse, wired up to
perform sinister deeds of simulated authority, issues commands and
bellows instructions, intimidating his gang into believing him to be
the more powerful for being heard but not seen). Finally in The
Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) it is through the array of
television screens, video monitors and other surveillance devices
that Lang presses home the notion of a looking-glass world in which
sight is not only the sense most easily deceived, but also the one
most easily seduced.
The all-seeing eye
At another level the three films figure out what this implies for
the political function of cinema as an instrument of social control.
And here it also seems as if the direct look is not a look at all,
at least not in the sense that it gives access to power. For
instance, the opening scene of Dr Mabuse has Mabuse facing
the audience in an imaginary dressing-table mirror which is, of
course, also the screen. So like all the other looks that circulate,
Mabuse's own does not finally seem to belong to him, but is
'propped' on some other structure. Yet since Mabuse accedes to power
via the look and eventually loses power via the look, these must be
two kinds of look: the unmediated, imaginary one and the mediated,
symbolic one. His downfall is, classically, the consequence of his
rise in that he makes a tragic mistake: the further he rises the
more the look he relies on reveals its underside, namely of being a
look borrowed from the technologies of vision.
These technologies of vision, however, are blind. The empty look,
the frozen stare, the Medusa's gaze - Lang progressively descends
into some very cold regions of visuality in which apparently no one
is in control and yet everyone struggles for control over others,
which suggests that the question of cinema's vision machines poses
itself differently: no longer is the look to be thought of as a
metaphoric extension of power, but in fact power is that which
interrupts the exchange of looks, by which human beings signal their
recognition of each other. The cinema, taken to its (techno)logical
conclusion, is for Lang the ultimate metaphor not of social control
through the power of the look, but proof of the end of this
metaphor: the all-seeing eye of surveillance finally sees nothing at
all.
One comes back to the apparent contradiction between Dr
Mabuse as a "portrait of its time" and Lang's cinema as the
"ultimate metaphor". It resolves itself if we see Mabuse as a
metaphor not of political power - Nazi or otherwise - but of a
rebellion against power, in the idiom of imposture, the mask and the
disguise, with Lang rescuing his cinema from its all-seeing
blindness by aligning it with different modes of "enlightened false
consciousness" (Peter Sloterdijk's term for Weimar Germany's
different forms of open duplicity). In this sense the original Dr
Mabuse is a 'pastiche' of (expressionist) revolt, mimicking the
make-believe dandy stance of Weimar intellectuals, politicians and
artists towards their 'yes-but' democracy. Yet by wanting to stay
ahead of the game, the mastermind overreaches himself:
Mephistophelean spirit of the metropolis, he descends into the
fast-moving traffic in souls and goods, soon lost in a new kind of
social agency. Performative yet impersonal, it moulds a space out of
sight-lines and architectural prospects, stencilling
command-and-control figures out of its technologically assisted
theatricality. No wonder postmodern pop likes Lang, always poised to
strike the pose.
From www.bfi.org.uk
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