Fritz Lang

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.

The Proto-Horror-Comedy: Waxworks

Westerdale’s chapter revisits the place of Waxworks within the canon of expressionist cinema emerging from Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Waxworks is among a key group of films, which also includes Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Carl Boese’s The Golem (1920), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), that frequently functions as metonymic shorthand for early Weimar cinema as a whole. As this essay argues, however, Waxworks is also significant for its contributions as a comedy. Though the episodes with Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper are predictably grim, the film’s longest sequence presents a Baghdad burlesque in which Emil Jannings’ lecherous caliph Harun al-Rashid is more clown than villain. Such an episode sits uneasily in the “historical imaginary” (to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s term) that continues to dominate discussions of early Weimar film.

The Unnatural in the Natural: Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s Early Weimar Film Backstairs

This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of Leni’s career and serves as a context for the chapters to follow. It covers Leni’s early work as an illustrator and theatrical set designer, and then it explores his eventual migration to the German film industry during the World War I period and his burgeoning career during the early phases of Weimar cinema. The introduction also surveys the transnational aspects of Leni’s filmmaking career, including his early collaborations with fellow European directors, his later work with American and expatriate casts, crews, and executives in Hollywood, and, to a limited extent, the global distribution of his films. Lastly, the introduction addresses gaps in the scholarship and offers suggestions for further research.

Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema

Centered on Richard Dyer’s model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series’ inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

From Weimar to Winnipeg: German Expressionism and Guy Maddin

The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.