Fritz Lang

30 Dec, 2021 790 Recreational and performing arts

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-born film director Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who was one of the most celebrated film-makers of the 20th century. He worked first in Weimar Germany, creating a range of films including the startling and subversive Mabuse the Gambler and the iconic but ruinously expensive Metropolis before arguably his masterpiece, M, with both the police and the underworld hunting for a child killer in Berlin, his first film with sound. The rise of the Nazis prompted Lang’s move to Hollywood where he developed some of his Weimar themes in memorable and disturbing films such as Fury and The Big Heat.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Stella Bruzzi 2 episodes
    Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London
  • Joe McElhaney No other episodes
    Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Iris Luppa No other episodes
    Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Division of Film and Media at London South Bank University

Reading list

  • Imperfect Justice: Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) and Cinema's Use of the Trial Form
    Stella Bruzzi (Law and Humanities, 2010)
  • The Movie Book of Film Noir
    Ian Cameron (ed.) (Cassell Illustrated, 1994) Google Books →
  • The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror
    Paul Coates (Cambridge University Press, 1991) Google Books →
  • Fritz Lang
    Lotte Eisner (University of California Press, 1977) Google Books →
  • Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary
    Thomas Elsaesser (Routledge, 2000) Google Books →
  • BFI Classics: Metropolis
    Thomas Elsaesser (BFI Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Google Books →
  • Close Up 03
    John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (eds.) (Wallflower Press, 2008)
  • The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision And Modernity
    Tom Gunning (BFI Publishing, 2000) Google Books →
  • BFI Film Classics: M
    Anton Kaes (BFI Publishing, 2000)
  • M: Leading the Blind
    Iris Luppa and Douglas Pye (Movie, 2011)
  • A Companion to Fritz Lang
    Joe McElhaney (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) Google Books →
  • The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli
    Joe McElhaney (Suny Press, 2006) Google Books →
  • Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
    Patrick McGilligan (Faber and Faber, 1997) Google Books →
  • Seeing By Glimpses: Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia
    Douglas Pye (CineAction!, 1988)
  • While the City sleeps
    Michael Walker (CineAction!, 1992)

Related episodes

Programme ID: m0012s94

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0012s94

Auto-category: 791.430233092 (Biographies of film directors)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Fritz Lang, 1890 to 1976, was one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the last century.