Ctva 310. History of American Cinema: Readings Dr. John Schultheiss Department of Cinema and Television Arts

Lang also believed that human behavior is determined by emotional sub-currents that are only dimly understood. He probably derived this idea from Freud's theory of the subconscious. Lang thought that the process of artistic creation was essentially instinctive, and drew upon impulses which the artist probably couldn't explain rationally. "I think every director, subconsciously, imposes his character, his way of thinking, his way of life, his personality on his pictures." In his earliest German films, characters are neatly divided into good and evil, but by the time he made M, these traits are combined in a single personality who is unable to account for his "other self." In the American movies, double personalities are more common, and the characterization is more complex than the majority of his German works.

Lang is a master of that much-maligned genre, the melodrama. He preferred this form because it allows a high degree of abstraction in the story, without having to make too many concessions in the name of realism. Realism would distract him from his central purpose. Realistic film artists avoid melodramatic conventions because implicit in most forms of realism is a lack of overt manipulation of the narrative materials. Realistic plot structures are generally somewhat random in their development. Conflicts emerge unobtrusively; they aren't presented as donnés. Details don't always "mean" anything but are offered for their own sake, to heighten the sense of authenticity. The visual style of most realistic movies is artfully négligé, suggesting the casual clutter of everyday reality. Virtually all narrative artists must resort to some kind of abstraction, of course, otherwise their stories would be filled with the same dull stretches that typify everyday reality. The realist eliminates many––not all––of these un-dramatic elements as unobtrusively as possible.

The melodramatist not only makes no pretence at strict realism he actually heightens the artificiality of his genre in order to convey his vision more forcefully, without irrelevancies, as it were. Of course inferior artists in this genre are concerned with violence, contrivances, and sensation for their own sake. In the hands of a master like Lang, however, melodrama is a form of narrative distortion that can reveal underlying truths otherwise concealed beneath the surface disorder of reality. Lang's best movies are almost machinelike in their symmetry and suggest an air of inevitability. Details in his films are pointedly relevant to the action that follows. The images are seldom casually composed but represent precise symbolic ideas. "The typical Lang film is an exercise in the geometry of tragedy," Whittemore and Cecchettini have written. "Lang lays out his stories very carefully. Organized like mathematical proofs, his films lead toward a single conclusion. It is the careful precision of his construction which marks him as an artist." His best American movies have a well-made, almost schematic quality, allowing for no digressions. There are no accidents or extraneous details in his universe: Everything is ultimately relevant, especially apparent irrelevancies. Such isolated details might be likened to individual threads, which in conjunction with other threads, crisscross to imprison its victim in an inescapable web. As Jensen has noted, "These webs of circumstance, coincidence, bad luck, or evil continually ensnare Lang's 'heroes', who are really just specimens being objectively observed under controlled conditions."

Lang got many of his stories out of newspaper accounts. He kept clippings of articles he thought might serve as bases for movies. He worked on most of the scripts to his personal films, even though he didn't do much of the actual writing. He thought of himself as a script doctor rather than a writer. That is, he could detect flaws in the story construction and often suggested revisions or alternate scenes. When he was handed a completed script by his producers, Lang often reshaped it to reflect his thematic interests, unless it was a purely routine assignment. Like Hitchcock, he often thought in terms of striking scenes; then he integrated them into his stories. He preferred his scripts to resemble abstract equations, with the story divided into two sections, the second half neatly paralleling the first. Since his shooting schedules were generally short, he liked to have his scripts as complete as possible before production.

Lang seldom explored the psychology of his characters in much depth. Usually they are sketchy and stylized, and in some cases, unconvincingly motivated. The workings of the plot take precedence over the workings of the characters' minds, which indeed are often as machinelike as the plots. In the German movies, crowds are often architecturalized into geometrical shapes, and characters are commonly presented as general types. In the American movies they're more concretely developed, in large part because the stars playing these roles brought with them an automatic characterization based on their iconography. Generally Lang remains aloof from his characters and their feelings. Emotions are presented objectively, as scientific variables, as it were. Normal characters––which he claimed didn't exist anyway––seldom excited his curiosity. He was concerned with the emotionally crippled, the driven, the obsessed. Most of his American films focus on tortured individuals, alone or supported only by a woman, struggling against robot-like adversaries.

Actors generally divided directors into two categories: those who were concerned with the performances and those who were obsessed with their visual style. Lang was a stylist. Like most directors of this type, he was considered unsympathetic to the problems of his players. He was overtly hostile to the star system and thought it detracted from the theme of a film, which he claimed was paramount. Needless to say, actors resented his attitude. Edward G. Robinson said of him, "He was autocratic, dominating, and extra-precise. He knew exactly what he wanted and he was going to get it, no matter what." During the production of Woman in the Window, Robinson got exasperated when the director spent a whole hour rearranging the folds in Joan Bennett's costume so that she would cast a certain type of shadow he wanted. Robinson also believed that Lang was thoughtless of his crews, who weren't too thrilled with his indifference to their convenience.

Henry Fonda––whose professionalism was praised by such notorious sadists as Ford, Wyler, and Preminger––disliked Lang intensely. "I couldn't get along with him at all," Fonda recounted. "He is an artist certainly. A creative artist. But he has no regard for his actors. It just doesn't occur to him that actors are human beings with hearts and instincts and other things." Lang kept Fonda waiting for three hours in one scene while the director corrected and re-corrected the cobwebs on the set. Fonda was fuming in anger, for all the scene required was for him to enter the room, stand there a moment, and walk out. When he did turn his attention to his players, Lang sometimes rushed them, claiming that the shooting schedule didn't allow for frills. After rehearsing, he would shoot an entire scene from one direction; then he repeated the scene with the camera at a 180 degree reverse angle. "He was a master puppeteer," Fonda complained. "He literally tried to manipulate an actor. If he could, and the camera didn't pick it up, he would literally move your hand into a shot with his hand on you. He couldn't talk since it was in sound, but he would be waving his hands frantically at you, and it was very disconcerting."

Lang's insensitivity to actors is amply documented in the films themselves. True, there are some excellent performances in his movies, but for the most part by director-proof actors who are almost invariably good, most notably Fonda, Robinson, Spencer Tracy, Lee Marvin, and Dan Duryea. Most of the protagonists are played by serviceable leading men who generally did better work under other directors. Lang claimed he valued the contributions of his players. "I don't want to have 25 little Fritz Langs running around. I have too much respect for an actor." But the director was often evasive and contradictory in his interviews, which were mostly given in his old age, after he had mellowed somewhat. His highest praise was usually reserved for those players who gave him the least grief rather than their best work. For example, one of his favorite performances was by Marjorie Reynolds in the otherwise excellent Ministry of Fear. At best Reynolds is a conventional ingenue, at worst a mannequin on strings. Very likely Lang didn't want forceful, attractive stars, for his theme of depersonalization might then be weakened, if not contradicted.

What counted most for Lang was his mise-en-scène. Like a painter, he was acutely sensitive to every nuance of texture and lighting, to the architecture of his sets, to the symbolic implications of shapes, space, and placement within the frame. "Every scene has only one exact way it should be shot," he insisted. One reason why actors often complained of his methods was because he made his statements visually, by the way the players are positioned within the mise-en-scène. On the other hand, close shots, which he avoided, are favored by performers because these ranges are best suited to capturing acting nuances.

Lang was an important practitioner of a style which the French called film noir, or black cinema as it's sometimes referred to by Anglo-American critics. As early as 1937, with You Only Live Once, the director introduced certain noir elements, though the style is generally associated with the American cinema of the 1940s and early 1950s. Noir cuts across generic classifications and can be seen in gangster films, detective thrillers, urban melodramas, and even women's pictures. Its stylistic and psychological antecedents go back to German expressionism, though noir usually preserves at least a surface realism. Native influences have been traced to the gangster movies of the early 1930s, especially those produced by Warner Brothers, which were generally more moody and violent than those of other studios. The "hard-boiled" fiction of such novelists as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler also exerted an influence on the development of this style. In fact, several of their novels were adapted by important directors of this era, most notably Huston, Hawks, and Wilder.

The tone of noir is nasty, cynical, and paranoid. It's suffused with pessimism, emphasizing the darker aspects of the human condition. Its themes characteristically revolve around violence, betrayal, greed, lust, depravity, and corruption––a far cry from the optimism of the prewar American cinema. This grimness of tone strikes some present-day viewers as lurid, but social conditions during this period hardly encouraged a benevolent view of humanity. It's not coincidental, perhaps, that many of the best American noir directors were Jews and political refugees who had fled from Europe as Hitler's troops goosestepped across the continent. Among these expatriots, in addition to Lang, were Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Jean Renoir, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Anatol Litvak, and Max Ophüls. Many of their works of the 1940s are especially gripping in their portrayals of persecutions, manhunts, and frustrated attempts at flight and escape. A deeply felt sense of helplessness and terror characterizes these movies.

Many films noirs deal with themes of sexual neurosis. Such perversions as sadism, masochism, and incest are at least hinted at. Repressed homosexual undertones characterize some male relationships. There is also a streak of misogyny that runs through noir movies. In fact, the early 1940s saw the creation of a new genre cycle, the "deadly female" films, which centered on corrupt and exploitive seductresses. Some are out-and-out bitches, like the Joan Bennett roles in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. Women in film noir are frequently portrayed as tawdry, cheap, and selfish. Few of them can be trusted, especially when money is at stake.

The milieu of noir is almost exclusively urban. Titles commonly suggest nightmarish cityscapes by including such words as street, night, dark, fear, city, and sleep. The films are profuse in images of the city: dark streets glistening after a rain or crouching in the fog; cigarette smoke swirling lazily in dimly lit cocktail lounges; symbols of fragility, such as widow-panes, sheer clothing, glasses, and mirrors. The city is cobwebbed by side streets, alleys, and gutters. There are also many images of entrapment, such as tunnels, subways, elevators, and train cars. Often the settings are locations of transience, like grubby rented rooms, streets, piers, railroad yards, and bus terminals.

Despite the low budgets of many of these films, they are often exquisitely photographed. Noir ushered in a decade of brilliant black-and-white cinematography, for the style attracted some of the most gifted lighting cameramen in the industry: Lee Garmes, Milton Krasner, Lucien Ballard, John Seitz, and Sol Polito, to mention only a few. Noir is a world of night and shadow. Some of Lang's most powerful scenes are photographed with the characters seen in silhouette or wrapped in fog. His images are rich in sensuous textures, like neon-lit streets, windshields streaked with mud, and shafts of light streaming through the windows of lonely rooms. Characters are imprisoned behind ornate lattices and grillwork. Foreground elements, like gauzy curtains, potted palms, and drifting cigarette smoke, prevent us from seeing the characters clearly. Visual designs emphasize jagged shapes and violated surfaces. Most of Lang's movies in this style were photographed in the studio, where he could control his lighting effects with exactitude. But even when he used actual locations in the 1950s, they look forboding and surrealistic, like landscapes recalled from a nightmare.

Few directors could equal Lang's use of the frame as a symbolic device. Sinister shadows often invade the frame before the entrance of the character. Terrifying violence occurs off-screen, while we are presented only with a character's horrified reaction. Off-screen darkness frequently symbolizes a world of guilty secrets and unseen malevolence. In The Big Heat, for example, a scheming blackmailer is shot down by an off-screen killer who is "behind" the camera. The camera remains on her inert corpse for a moment; then the gun is thrown into the frame, falling on the floor with a thud of finality. Lang used his frame as a kind of visual prison. The edges are sealed off, suggesting no avenue of escape. He was capable of creating unnerving effects by opening a sequence with the camera in an empty room, "waiting" for someone to enter. These anticipatory setups suggest an eerie vacuum, for we never know what's going to happen. Because we feel more secure in knowing the nature of a threat, no matter how awesome, lack of action can be more fearful than action itself.

Lang was also a master of camera placement. He preferred long shots because they are more objective and permit the viewer to observe events without becoming emotionally involved. (Edited sequences of closer shots tend to draw the viewer into the action.) He insisted that camera movement must express ideas and emotions, and though he preferred stationary setups, he occasionally moved his camera to create a sense of anxiety or a floating, dreamlike effect. He also favored high angles, the angle of destiny as it's been called, because it provides us with a kind of Olympian omniscience in which the characters below seem powerless and vulnerable. Especially in the longer ranges, high-angle shots reduce characters to abstract patterns. Dominated from above, they resemble trapped animals in a maze.

The director's artistic shortcomings usually involved his inability to portray normal life. "Lang functions best with the dark and demonic," Jensen has noted, "and outside this realm he is ill at ease." The director's domestic and love scenes are usually wooden, his rare attempts at humor disastrous. He was too solemn to capture the spontaneity of people and incapable of depicting happiness convincingly. His anti-Nazi movies are flawed by their didacticism, usually in the form of sententious speeches which add little or nothing to the visual presentation of his themes. Lang sometimes had a tin ear for dialogue, especially in his earlier American movies, which were made when his command of English was shaky. In Hangmen Also Die, for example, Czech and German characters occasionally speak in an incongruous gangster argot, like "Keep quiet, or you get a slug in the gut." Lang was more eloquent when he used only silence––especially in his sound films, in which the lack of music and dialogue often creates suspenseful, empty spaces in the action.

"Lubitsch employs a Central European harshness and irony of attack in achieving his effects––it is the repartee of the cafes and clubs, as in that exclusive Budapest club with its sign, 'Members may not bring their mistresses as guests unless they are the wives of other members.'" ––Andrew Sarris