Fritz Lang

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)

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Programme ID: m0012s94

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

Auto-category: 791.430233092 (Biographies of film directors)