A Companion to Fritz Lang

“Fritz Lang’s movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema, across genres, styles, and national contexts. With smartness and sharpness, the essays in this essential volume come from many angles to capture the richness of Lang’s cinema and bring great insight to its study.”
Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, NYU

Fritz Lang’s influence on cinema cannot be overstated, with a career that stretched from the silent era in Germany to the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s, from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, from Depression America to the McCarthy era. One of the best known émigrés from Germany’s school of Expressionism, Lang is also credited with influencing the emergence of film noir.

A Companion to Fritz Lang offers the first full-scale collection of scholarship available in English on one of the most important filmmakers of all time. Addressing much of Lang’s voluminous body of work, from Metropolis and M, to lesser-known titles such as Western Union and Clash by Night, this volume offers a superb overview of Lang’s cinema with revealing insights into his enduring influence on directors such as Godard, Scorsese, Chabrol, and Tarantino. The two dozen essays presented here are an unrivaled and up-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life and vision of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

Keywords: German Expressionism, cinema history, German cinema, Thea von Harbou, film noir, Woman in the Moon, Metropolis, American genre cinema, The Big Heat, film director, scholarship, reference, ?Auteur theory, auteurship, Film and Media Studies, classical cinema, Western Union, Clash by Night, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, Tom Gunning, Tom Conley, Raymond Bellour, Adrian Martin, Chris Fujiwara, Kent Jones, Nicole Brenez, Carlos Losilla, Paolo Bertetto, Weimar cinema and culture, Hollywood studio system, genre and authorship, American culture, German culture