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.
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)