The first six shots of The Big Heat (1953; screens April 22 at 7 p.m.) prove the greatness of Fritz Lang. The first is a big close-up of a pistol on a desk. A hand enters the frame to pick up the gun, and at the same time the camera pulls away. At the sound of a gunshot, the camera movement stops: a dead man slumps forward onto the desk. We never see his face.
Lang cuts to a wider view of a large and well-furnished room, the camera tracking behind the desk. In the background, a woman descends the stairs. She stops (now in close shot) beside a grandfather clock, its hands marking three o’clock. Then, in a shot that complements the earlier wide shot, the camera tracks toward the desk, tilting down as the woman approaches the dead man. We next see her close and from a low angle: she looks down without emotion.
The sixth shot begins on another extreme close-up of the desk, showing a policeman’s badge, an envelope (addressed to the DA), and the suicide’s hand still clutching the gun. A female hand reaches into the frame to pick up the envelope. The camera moves up and reframes on the woman as she opens and reads the letter. Her face hardens, signifying understanding but not compassion. She walks behind the desk, closes the blinds, and makes the phone call that sets in motion the plot of this film of corruption and revenge.
In its complex symmetries, and in the way it closes in on itself (recording the completion of an act, of a life) while reaching toward the past and future of the narrative, this sequence is a summation of classical filmmaking. Each detail answers to an exact logic, rather than simply appearing, and without pretending to more significance than it can claim in the economy of the whole. The morbid beauty of the images suffocates, but the camera frees you with its remorseless grace and its foreknowledge of all that will transpire.
Fritz Lang’s films are among the most rigorous, honest, and intelligent ever made. Even his minor works display a precise craft that shows that he had thought through, or intuited, each implication of the possibilities of camera position, camera movement, and the movements of actors. The Harvard Film Archive retrospective, which includes most of his greatest films, celebrates the fascination of cinema.
Lang forces you to question this fascination. Each film makes the act of looking not merely its subtext but also its subject. The viewer must learn how to read a Lang film: ordinary certitudes won’t work.
The Lang universe is dark and bleak but never merely hopeless. He makes his characters — and us — confront death and desolation because he sees value only in the struggle against these forces. Many of his narratives move toward window displays and vacant rooms — spaces where a controlled society realizes its project of a dehumanized world of things, a trap and graveyard for human desire. A famous example is the shop window in M (1931; February 10 at 7 p.m. and February 27 at 9:15 p.m.) that solicits and mocks the obsessed child murderer (Peter Lorre). In Metropolis (1926; February 25 at 7 p.m.), people are subjugated to line, form, pose, and architecture. Lang’s romanticism lies in the possibilities he extends to his characters to avoid fitting into designed spaces, to move unpredictably, to protest the excess of order.
The world of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1923; Part I screens February 8 at 7 p.m. and February 11 at 7 p.m.; Part II screens February 9 at 6 p.m. and February 13 at 9 p.m.) is an artificial splendor of vast communicating hells. As in many Lang films, the decor is stunning: the gambling paradise with its round elevators; the stock exchange dominated by a huge clock. Mabuse, with whom Lang was forever associated, is no ordinary master criminal; he’s the evil genius of a society in love with sensations. "Nothing is interesting in the long run," he tells a jaded countess, "except one thing. Playing with human beings and human fates." The will to dominate and destroy links Mabuse with Lang himself, who dominates through cinema and whose films repeatedly identify the gaze with murder. But Lang is never merely complicit in this structure of control, which he denounces through those who fight it.
The complexity of action and intrigue that marks Mabuse reaches an extreme in Spies (1928; March 6 at 9:15 p.m.), the most thrilling and brilliant of Lang’s silent films, and in his first sound film, M, which is the key to all his work. The motivating idea behind M, an enormous idea, is that a hidden unity lies behind the chaotic surface of the city. The film pursues this unity through a thousand ramifications of decor, sealed traps, and improvised passageways — chasing it down to a confession scene that contains the most harrowing six minutes in Lang’s cinema.
Lang opened the American phase of his career with Fury (1936; March 11 at 7 p.m.), a plea against capital punishment. The long sequence in which a rumor-ridden town turns into a raging mob is shockingly great filmmaking. The hope and the promise of America go dead and empty before our eyes: the script’s ironic references to Native Americans (the heroine, whose fiancé is about to be lynched by a bunch of yahoos, is assured by a soda jerk that "the redskins haven’t attacked in over 60 years") establish the story as a national tragedy. The sequence of Spencer Tracy’s solitary wandering at night is a more intense vision of spiritual death than anything in Hitchcock, the Coens, or David Lynch (to name some of the best-known directors who are indebted to Lang).
Even more than Fury, You Only Live Once (1937; March 18 at 9 p.m.) is a social-problem film that goes beyond the predictable ways of talking about a problem (in this case, the traps set by society that make it all but certain that a convicted criminal will become a repeat offender) to become a philosophical inquiry into evidence, belief, and the human condition. Lang’s films, in which mise-en-scène is supreme, are mostly lacking in first-rate performances, but here he gets one from Henry Fonda — with his young, deliberate, receptive face — as the most desperate of three-time losers.
The Woman in the Window (1944; April 8 at 7 p.m.) is a pornographic poem built around the figure of Joan Bennett, climaxing when she bends over an armchair to kiss a blackmailer. Whenever she goes through a door, the camera is ahead of her, so that we continually see her entering spaces, rarely leaving them. Everything is photographed as if it were behind glass; a study of a professor lured into a web of murder, the film is as much a book of models’ poses as a tense melodrama of fear and desire. In both this movie and its great follow-up, the perfect, astringent Scarlet Street (1945; April 10 at 9 p.m.), Lang attacks a view of sexuality that sees women as creatures incapable of love, from whom it is necessary merely to buy or coerce compliance, and men as goats or eunuchs, defined only by their sexual and economic potency.
The lacquered elegance of The Big Heat beautifully suits its urban twilight world and its sense that the characters are figures in a dream from which the dreamer is about to wake up. Lang makes you feel the dread of moments of waiting, suspension, and arrest, and the chill of empty spaces like the interior of the widowed hero’s abandoned house. A gangster comes home to his apartment one night, turns on the light in the foyer, removes his coat, and walks into the space where coffee is to be flung into his face — the camera all the while watching him without a cut, without blinking, waiting for him to come and get scalded.
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960; April 29 at 7 p.m.), Lang’s last film, is set in a hotel equipped with a complex surveillance apparatus — a heritage of the Nazis. There is no clearer statement about the dangers and the fascination of seeing in all Lang’s work than the sequences, bordering on pornography, in which people use a two-way mirror to watch the heroine. Or the disquieting moment when the camera, withdrawing from two people who are falling in love, reveals that we’ve been seeing them on a TV screen. In the cruelest of his metaphors of cinema, Lang recovers a strategic distance from his subject and from his own situation: that of an escapee from Hollywood now in internal exile within a Germany that disgusted and distressed him.
In smashing the mirror, in moving from absence to presence, Lang slays Mabuse once and for all and revives a romanticism that had fueled his most heartfelt films. The closed circuit of the lovers’ looks at the end of the film gives the answer to the culture of surveillance Lang denounces so passionately. With this affirmation, the overture to a private adventure, the cinema as practiced and criticized by Lang — microscope, violation, and control — can end. It’s appropriate that this shot is the last in Lang’s œuvre.
