Fritz Lang

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Moore
Keyword(s):  
Reasonable Doubt ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Professional Relationship ◽  
Fritz Lang ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Major Period ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Weimar Cinema

A visual artist who studied architecture, Viennese-born Fritz Lang (b. 1890–d. 1976) began his career as a scenarist for UFA before moving into directing scripts cowritten with his eventual wife, Thea von Harbou. During this period, Lang made several masterpieces of Weimar cinema, including Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), The Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and his first sound film, M (1931). The second major period of Lang’s career was during the golden age of Hollywood. Lang had a tendency to self-mythologize and told many versions of a story in which Joseph Goebbels invited him to be the head filmmaker for the Nazi regime. Lang claimed he fled Germany the same night. While this narrative is largely disproven, Lang (whose mother was Jewish) did leave Germany in 1933, a departure that severed both his marriage and professional relationship with Harbou. Lang journeyed to Hollywood, where he would spend the next twenty years working studio to studio, directing twenty-two films with intermittent critical and commercial success. His first film there, Fury (1936), dealt with themes of law and justice, which carried through to his final film in Hollywood, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Perhaps his greatest contributions in Hollywood are his films noir, such as The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat (1953). Lang’s Hollywood period has been the subject of major critical debate. In the 1950s and after, French critics (both in Cahiers du Cinéma and elsewhere) argued for his status as an unappreciated auteur working in the Hollywood system, whereas other critics had argued that the quality of Lang’s output dramatically dropped after he left Germany. The New Wave filmmakers’ love of Lang perhaps reached its apogee in his being cast as a character called Fritz Lang in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). These critical reappraisals resulted in attempts to link Lang’s Weimar and Hollywood periods. He would return to Germany in the late 1950s to direct his final three films, all of which were related to his earlier Weimar-era work. Although Lang is now regarded by many as an auteur in the same vein as Alfred Hitchcock, until more recently he received considerably less (in quality) scholarly analysis than the British director. Lang continued granting interviews and sharing his own thoughts on his work and career until his death in 1976.

scholarly journals The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Emiel Martens
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Mumbo Jumbo ◽  
First Sound ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
Made In ◽  
Do So

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today.

Esfir Shub’s K.Sh.E. (1932) and the Movement of Energy

2020 ◽  
pp. 88-109
Author(s):  
Joshua Malitsky
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Latent Energy ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Cultures ◽  
The Invisible

This article contributes to the volume’s effort to understand the history of communist visual cultures by exploring the work of the pioneering Soviet woman documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub’s cultural contribution to the First Five-Year Plan for economic development. Shub’s K.Sh.E. (1932) focuses on the production and circulation of energy both inside and outside human bodies. Her first sound film, K.Sh.E., turns to synchronized and nondiegetic sound to make the invisible transfer of energy and the location of latent energy sensible. The article situates Shub’s work both in relation to earlier visual cultural projects’ use of energetics and contemporary photomontage practices. The period of the Plan was one when forms of nonfiction narration were highly contested; locating Shub’s film and the discourse surrounding it within this terrain allows us to see the range of allowable documentary abstraction at a time when efforts were being made to consolidate aesthetic practice more broadly.

Chaplin, Charlie (1889–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ria Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Gold Rush ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
The Us ◽  
First Sound ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Times ◽  
At Home

Charles Spenser Chaplin was born in London on April 16, 1889, and died on Christmas Day, 1977, at home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. He had been famous across the world since his Tramp persona first hit screens in 1914 and besides earning numerous film awards he was knighted in 1975. Chaplin took to the stage in 1898 and came to the US in 1910 on tour with a British vaudeville troupe. In December 1913 he joined the Keystone Pictures studio in Hollywood with whom he made hits like The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Nonetheless, Chaplin embodied the essence of modernism. The Little Review, where James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was first serialized, published an admiring article calling him "the Mob-God," a figure who embodied the gestalt of the times (1916). When WWI broke out Chaplin did not enlist, which momentarily dipped his appeal; he returned to popularity in the post-war period with hits like The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin grew restless with the Tramp persona and wanted to leave it behind (Casseres, NYTimes, 12/12/1920), but it was not until The Great Dictator (1940) that he abandoned it. This was also his first sound film.

Cannibals and Capital: George King'sSweeney Todd(1936) and Representations of Class, Empire and Wealth

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-588
Author(s):  
Gyllie Phillips
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Economic Experience ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Film Form ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The story of Sweeney Todd has its origins in the era of Victorian stage melodrama, a form with well-documented connections to critiques of Victorian class structures and economic hardship. As well, the musical versions of the story by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (1979), including the 2007 film by Tim Burton, have been identified with anti-capitalist sentiment. In all the discussions of Sweeney Todd and class, however, surprisingly little scholarly attention is paid to the first sound film version of the story, which appeared in Britain at the height of the economic crisis of the 1930s: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), directed by George King and starring Tod Slaughter. The King-Slaughter collaborations converting Victorian stage melodramas to screen were part of the body of 1930s films identified as ‘quota quickies’, which have been characterised as cheap and badly made. Scholars such as Rachel Low and, more recently, David Pirie dismissed the quota quickies as films unworthy of close attention, but this article joins the revisionist trend that takes issue with these judgements both of 1930s quota quickies and the films of King and Slaughter. King's Sweeney Todd responds to the bleak economic experience and anxieties of its audiences through its narrative and generic changes to its Victorian precursors, as well as through its limited but creative uses of film form. Specifically, King's film challenges the idea of the naturalised authority of the wealthy, questions the origins of wealth and the function of labour, and transforms the abject body of the horror genre into a metaphor for the circulation of capital.

Cinema's Doppelgängers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Dibbern
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Fritz Lang ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema – or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. The book attempts, on the one hand, to explore and expand upon the intrinsically creative nature of all historical writing; like all works of fiction, its ultimate goal is to be a work of art in and of itself. But it also aims, on the other hand, to be a legitimate examination of the relationship between the economic and political organization of nations and film industries and the resulting aesthetics of film and thus of the dominant ideas and values of film scholarship and criticism.

scholarly journals The Origins of the First Sound Animation: Songs Series by the Fleischer Brothers

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131
Author(s):  
Natalia G Krivulya
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Film Structure ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Story Content ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Cartoon Characters

With the invention of moving pictures, the creators sought to supplement them with sound. Even before the invention of cinemat, E. Reynaud in the optical theatre gave performances in which moving images were combined with sound. It was pre-cinema experience, which represented the theatre model of audiovisual show. The attempts to synchronize the dynamic images and sound were taken by T. Edison, S. Meshes, L. Gaumont, O. Kellum, E.Tigerstedt, J. Engel, G. Phocht and J. Massol. However, the systems suggested by these inventors were not perfect. An important step towards creation of a sound film was the appearance of the optical sound recording system Phonofilm designed by Lee de Forest. In 1923, he became acquainted with Brothers Fleischer, outstanding American animators. Together with H. Riesenfeld and E. Fadiman they organized Red Seal Pictures Corporation and began to shoot Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes, which consisted of a series of animated shots Sing-alongs (featuring the famous bouncing ball). It was a kind of multimedia shots, as there was no plot, no character and no narrative structure. They were created basing on popular songs, but did not illustrate them. The Sing-alongs shots were produced for the audience to sing their favorite songs before the session, while reading the text of the songs from the screen. The animated ball bouncing on the syllables helped them to follow the rhythm of the melody. These films became the prototype of the modern karaoke and music animated shows. The series were released from May 1924 till September 1927. The Fleshers created more than 45 shots, more than 19 of which using the Phonofilm. The first sound animated shots where the images were synchronized with the sound and recorded on the same media, were released in 1925. The film Come to Travel on My Airship was the first where the speech was heard, and in the shot My Old House in Kentucky the Fleischers managed to synchronize the speech with the facial expressions of cartoon characters as they were speaking. When the animating and shooting technology changed, the film structure underwent changes too. Detailed animation parts with the story content appeared. The text animation became variable as well. Since the 1930s, the shots have included scenes with singers and jazz-bands. The animated film series Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes shot by the Brothers Fleischer established the principle of movement and sound synchronism in the animation. They not only out paced the sound films by P. Terry and W. Disney, which were considered to be the first sound animation films for a long time, but also proved that the sound animation had been possible and the thirty-year era of the silent animation came to an end.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Technological Transition ◽  
New Perspective

The conclusion summarizes the book’s main points and themes, particularly the range of diverse responses to the arrival of synchronized sound film in France, and music’s significant role within those responses. It further suggests that examining the interaction between music and cinema during the critical technological juncture of the early 1930s not only nuances our understanding of 1930s French musical and artistic culture more broadly but also provides a new perspective on the development of poetic realist audiovisual practices, revealing “classic French” cinematic conventions as one among many possible directions that sound cinema might have taken. We can additionally reconsider postwar French cinematic innovations, particularly those of the New Wave, as outgrowths and developments out of these earlier audiovisual experiments. Lastly, it encourages a nonteleological approach to examining moments of technological transition, which can help us better understand artistic responses to contemporary and future media transitions.

Vaudeville

Eubie Blake ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin ◽  
Ken Bloom
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
On The Road ◽  
No Man's Land

This chapter describes Sissle and Blake’s career performing on white vaudeville. Unlike other black acts of the day, when appearing on stage, they insisted on performing without blackface and in formal clothing. Their act, including Sissle’s dramatic performance of songs like “On Patrol in No Man’s Land,” successfully drew on Sissle’s experiences in World War I. As black performers, however, they faced difficulties on the road and had to deal with the systematic racism of the day. The chapter also discusses the making of their first sound film for Lee De Forest; Eubie’s work making piano rolls; and initial recordings for Pathé. The chapter concludes with the foundations of their partnership with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, including their first meeting and their decision to collaborate on a Broadway show.

SOUND AND DESIRE: RACE, GENDER, AND INSULT IN EGYPT'S FIRST TALKIE

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-232
Author(s):  
Ifdal Elsaket
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Nation Formation ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Coloniality Of Gender ◽  
Film Market

AbstractThis article explores the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932. Through an analysis of the politics, economy, and memory of Yusuf Wahbi's filmAwlad al-Dhawat(Sons of the Aristocrats), it shows how the interplay between new sound technologies, the global film trade, and nationalist and racialized narratives of gender and resistance shaped the contours of ideal femininity and masculinity during the interwar period in Egypt. The article also shows how the film's representations formed at the intersection between the filmmakers’ attempts to challenge colonial stereotyping and their efforts to capture an ever-expanding global film market. Often neglected in cinema scholarship, early filmmaking in Egypt, I argue, is critical to understanding wider processes of nation formation and gendered characterizations.

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