Fritz Lang

It was only a little over one hundred years ago, in 1891, when Thomas Alva Edison patented his kinetograph camera and kinetoscope viewer ("Significant Developments. . . ," 2001). Since then film has gone from being a ten-minute black and white novelty that depicts people leaving a building after work, as the Lumiere Brothers filmed in Paris in 1895 (Yahnke, 1996), to 120-minute Hollywood color productions that not only tell stories, but do so with amazing special effects, not all of those produced by the camera.

Although it may seem as if the film industry has always been rooted in the United States, many creative breakthroughs in storyline, camera angle, lighting, etc., were actually made in Europe during the early years of cinema and then brought to America later. For example, such genres as the spooky horror film, the "scoff flick", and the film noir spy movie, in fact, have their roots based on a post-World War I philosophy of film known as German Expressionism (Giannetti, 1990; Morris, 2000). German Expressionists "sought to give shape to psychological states through stylized visuals - particularly (in the movies) using sharply exaggerated shadows and high contrasting lighting, disorientingly skewed set design and off-kilter camera angles" (Emerson, 1998, par. 2). Subsequently, many of the films made during this time were visually outstanding and set visual and story standards that are still in place today in the movie industry. There were several directors

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that year they divorced and she joined the Ministry of Propaganda ("Biography of Fritz Lang," 2001). Although this was the end of Lang's career in Germany, it was only the beginning of his career in the United States. While in Paris he made only one French film, "Liliom" (1934). He then signed a one-movie contract with MGM's David O. Selznick and moved to the United States to make the movie "Fury" (1936), starring Spencer Tracy and based on the book Mob Rule. Lang continued to make films noir and spy thrillers in the '30s and '40s, however with the decline of the studios in the '50s, and due to his reputation of being a difficult director to work with, his career sputtered out ("Biography of Fritz Lang," 2001). The films that Lang made up through his movie "You and Me" (1938), influenced, and continue to influence, American Cinema with his perception of the world in regards to storyline, special effects, lighting, and camera angles. Lang's film style may be best characterized by the grandeur of his sets, striking visual composition, suspense, and his ability to enlist the audience's imagination to evoke horror (Scheuer, 2001). The themes of his movies were usually man's struggle against fate and the mindless machine of g

Category: Film - F