Introduction

ing Outside the Films: Emblems

Hilf mir our maine Rolle zurOcklesen, bis zu mir selbst [ . . .]
Sieh, do such ich mich zu ereilen, aber ich loaf immer or mir
her and main Name hinterdrein . . .
Help me read my role backwards, till I reach myself [. . .]
See, there I am trying to catch myself, but I am always running
ahead of me and my name behind . . .
The Night Watches of Bonaventural

And so, my life is a running away,and I lose everything and

everything is left to oblivion or to the other man.
Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and Myself'

The Inscribed/Imprinting

Hand

The screen offers us an image, somehow standing outside or on the cusp of the film
which is beginning to unroll. A graphic drawing of a hand reaches towards us showing its palm, on which the simple tide of Fritz Lang's most famous film is inscribed,

INTRODUCTION

the single letter M. It is as though the hand offers the him to us in this credit
sequence, as over this graphic image other letters appear, forming the names of the
film's various collaborators. We are in the liminal space that introduces nearly every
film, the credits which serve, to use Gerard Genette's term, as a paratext, the boundary between the text and the world surrounding it and which acknowledge that
the fictional world we are about to see was made, produced by a number of people,
whose names now appear before us. This hand stands out in its non-photographic
quality as a visual emblem underlying all these names of the makers of this film, a
hint of what is to come.
But in its rather contorted depiction, the hand does not really seem to make a
generous gesture of offering to the audience. Rather, it displays itself, a hand raised,
almost in a gesture of supplication or surrender. It recalls the convulsed and
deformed hands of German Expressionist paintings and graphics; its gesture
speaks of suffering as if the letter inscribed on it were a wound, an insignia
branded on the palm like an archaic punishment. As emblem of the film's story, it
anticipates a moment in which the criminals pursuing Hans Beckett (Peter Lorre),
just identified by the blind balloon seller as the child murderer the whole city is
pursuing, mark Beckett in order not to lose sight of him in the city night. To do so,
one of them inscribes the palm of his own hand with a large white M in chalk (M
for murderer, M6rder). This chalk mark is then transferred onto Beckett's shoulder
as the man pretends to stumble against him. The M proclaims Beckett's identity as
the murderer, the man sought throughout the Him, lifting him from the crowd of
anonymous backs that one might pass in a city street, the crowd into which he had
previously disappeared The mark, then, is the sign of singularity, of guilt, of being
picked out from the crowd. But the hand that is inscribed with the M is, therefore,
not the murderer's hand, but rather that of the man who marks him. As an
emblem for the film, the image of the hand serves as a transfer between the marker
and the marked, a common bond between murderer and pursuer, as much as a differentiation. Lang's film works both to establish and to blur categories: between the
police and the criminal, the normal and the insane, the guilty and the innocent
Lang pointed out in interviews that the M inscribed in the palm simply traces
over an M already imprinted on the human hand from birth. The three major lines
of the palm - those which necromancy claims stand for life, love and success - intersect to form a figure like an M. Lang, therefore, identifies the M with the traditional
sign of fate, the lines imprinted on the palm which occult science allows us to interpret. But whereas everyone's fate is different - and the differing lengths and shapes
of these lines were believed to encode and reveal an individual's destiny - the figure
of the M is nearly universal. The mark that has such a fatal consequence for Hans
Beckett in this film is a mark we all share.
There is another reference contained in this marked and marking hand. Lang has
indicated that he made frequent appearances in his own films, a practice we more
often associate with a director highly influenced by Lang and whose success Lang,
during his later career in HoHywood, would envy and try to emulate, Alfred Hitchcock. But whereas Hitchcock's appearances emphasized his highly recognisable
Bgure, Lang's appearances remain anonymous. He appears not as a face, or a caricature silhouette, but in close-ups of hands, standing in for actors playing characters
in his films. Although we cannot identify with certainty which of the close-ups of
hands in Lang's films (and there are many of them) actually show his own hand
(presuming his anecdote is true), it is not unlikely that it is actually Lang's hand
which is marked with chalk in M.4

INTRODUCTION

This opening image and its associations suggest a large number of the themes
that will be central to this book: inscription and identity, the ambiguity of gestures,
the body as a sign, the transfer of guilt, the interplay of individuality and universalit, of single character and mass - all these are themes that intertwine in Lang's films
throughout his career. But, primarily, this book seeks to plot the ambiguous figure
of Lang himself and his presence in his films. But what do I mean by the figure of
Lang? I do not simply mean the biological, biographical person Fritz Lang who
directed these films and with whom I once spent an evening in 1969. This book will
not be in any sense a biography. Patrick McGdligan's recent biography of Lang, 77/e
Nature of the Beast, has opened up new perspectives on Lang's life and I feel sure
more Lang biographies will be produced, perhaps questioning and modifying
McGilligan's findings The figure of Lang I seek to trace is constituted by an
exchange between this actual historical person and the films he made. Eventually
Lang merges with these films and therefore becomes both more and less than the
biological, biographic person. Rather than detailing Lang's life and times, I want to
capture the way Lang enters his own films, fashioning for himself his identity as a
him-maker, forging an image of himself which stands behind, or looms over, his
films and the discourses surrounding them. This figure of Lang seems to be, like a
credit sequence, part of his films, yet also outside them, connecting them to an
enunciating labour, to a source from which they derive. But it is a source whose
existence is indicated by the films themselves; a source we find only by reading
backwards from them, as though the films, or our careful viewing of them, create
the figure of Lang as much as vice versa. In what way did Lang imprint himself in
his films, or - to pick up on the reversal suggested by this image of the imprinting
hand which first must be marked itself - in what ways do Lang's films imprint him
on the audience, on film history?
Thxs is, therefore, a book that tries to tackle the issue of director's style and :
authorship in a somewhat novel manner. The critique of authorship which was '
launched in the 60s and 70s in literature and film studies, signalled by key texts
from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Peter WoHen, undermined the auteur 1
theory, which treated mm directors as authors, pronouncing it both methodologically naive and ideologically suspect. Naive because it lacked a true understanding
of the Hollywood mode of production and the constraints placed on a director's
self-expression; suspect because it staked a meaningful interpretation on a theological' account of the author-as-creator. Such a view of the author precluded a more
progressive assumption - that meaning is made by readers and viewers in an ongoing interaction with texts whose energy should not be frozen by being referred back
to an authoritative source.
If we approach authorship in terms of the director maintaining control over the f
production of a film, Lang stands out in film history. Lang's assertion of control
c)V,'r his European films is legendary, epitomized in the many stories describing him
as a tyrant, driving actors and technicians to extraordinary achievements. His
,,ttcnlpt to exert a similar degree of control over his Hollywood films is equally wellknown, as evident in its compromises and defeats as in its successes. But even a
passing study of Lang also reveals the vital role his collaborators played in his films,
ixuhxding directors of photography, set designers and, perhaps most importantly,
)

Ills scx`ct`nwritcr and wife, Thea

Von Harbou.

The credits

of some prints

of M, in

Lu.t, avoid mentioning

Lang as director (although the first writing on the screen
,I,.,larcs w,` arc watching chin Fritz I,ang liim`). Instead the credits open with the

I N 'I. It<>l>l I L:'I`I<>N

rubric dieser film outstand in gemeinsamer arbeit' - this him comes from a collective project - and then lists Lang's name first in a long column of collaborators.
Lang's image of himself as a director in these credits wavers between a claim of
ownership (`a Fritz Lang film') and apparent modesty (one of a collective). But just
as this book is not a biography, it is also not going to provide a Production history
of Lang's films, recounting the evolution of each Lang film and the various forces
which shaped its final form - as much as that book needs to be written, and as I
would love to write it. The focus of my work will remain for the most Part on the
screen. I will explore the complexity of Lang's imprint on his films through viewing
his films, rather than exploring their production.
Lang once characterised himself as a Handwerker, a craftsman, rather than an
artist. But, once again, with apparent modesty, Lang claims an important stake in
his work In Germany a Handwerker takes on the traditional value of direct Personal involvement with production, in contrast with the alienated and mechanical
labour of an industrial worker. Lang once again asserts the Priority of his own
imprint on his films through keeping his hand in the process. The hand leaves the
imprint of the maker. But the work process of a director of films - which are certainly complex industrial and technological products, created through a detailed
division of labour - makes a literal understanding of this imprint impossible. Lang
will never leave a simple fingerprint, but an imprint which resembles the mark left
on Beckert's back, a sign heavily mediated as it attempts to emerge from
anonymity.
The Screening Room: strange

but True'

But what clasp is given us by this phantom hand, which is not physically Present there
in the text to greet the reader or viewer, but only leaves its mark, its imprint? The
author does not necessarily efface the reader's part; indeed, the author exists as an
invitation to reading The author, in film as well as literature, is, I would maintain, a
creature of the reader's or viewer's desire. Instead of providing the ultimate signification and meaning through presence, the author works by remaining absent. As Foucault's essay what is anAuthor?' makes clear (as well as the writings of literary critics,
such as Wayne Booth, who have analysed the multiple registers of narration), the
author never simply speaks in their own voices Between the actual writer and the
reader a series of speakers intervene, such as fictional narrators, or what Wayne
Booth calls the implied author: all of which are contained in the writing and separate the reader from direct contact with the actual writer. As Foucault Puts it:
It is well known that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first Person
pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localisation
refer directly to the writer, either to the time that he wrote, or to the specific act of
writing. Rather they stand for a second self whose similarity to the author is never
fixed and undergoes considerable alteration in the course of a single book. It would
be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional
narrator; the author-function'
arises out of their scission in the division and
distance of the two

Rather than achieving direct communication with a reader, by writing an author

splits off their own words so that they take on a life of their own. As forge Borges
states in his sketch Borges and Me', the author is always `the other mall` scParatc

I NTROD UCTION

from the living breathing person; the author is the one who writes, or rather who is
embodied in the writing Foucault calls writing a voluntary obliteration of the self':
`Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill,
to become the murderer of its author's Barthes, in fact, sees the death of the author
as not only the birth of the reader, but as the birth of writing, and of the writer as
scriptor, one who does not express himself, but rather, like MaHarme, abdicates, gets
out of the way, erases his I: in order to let language itself take Over.9In modern
literature, Barthes claims, from Mallarme through Kafka, Proust and the Surrealists, there is no longer a person behind the text, but rather a play of signification, a
fabric of quotations% the force of language and writing itself which, as Foucault
puts it, creates an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears lo
Film studies, frankly, never lingered over these major theorizations of authorship.II It was often assumed any treatment of the author must follow the naive trajcctory Barthes denounces: the author as god, as first cause and ultimate meaning of
the text to be discovered through the biographical author's person, his history, his
taste, his passions'. Barthes' proclamation of the death of the author, in the selective
manner it has been used in him studies, seemed to reduce the process by which a
reader or viewer encounters an author in a text to a hushed and submissive passivity. The possibility of a modern author dedicated not to self-expression but to the
play of discourse, particularly relevant in a medium like film where the auteur'
rarely speaks directly in his own voice but rather indirectly through sounds and
images assembled, performed and in some ways produced by collaborators,
retllains
largely unexplored.
I see the author as precisely poised on the threshold of the work, evident in the
him itself, but also standing outside it, absent except in the imprint left behind I
will approach Lang as an author from this perspective, not simply (following Peter
W<dlcn'srefining of the auteur theory) considering the author as a name for the syst<`nlatic nature of a group of texts.12 Not all films invite us to construct their author.
In fact, the film medium readily lends itself to authorless discourse. I would claim a
<hrodor has to struggle to assert authorship, both in the making of the film and in
tile discourses surrounding it. An authored film shows the signs of this struggle, a
,t t ,Iggie by which the author may discover (and reveal to the viewer) something
<,tI,,'rthan her personality or individual history, tastes and passions The agon of
,,,,starship in film invites an encounter with the language of cinema, just as the
,Ilodcrn
author in literature encounters the drives underlying language itself. My
,.exploration of Lang will seek to uncover this encounter with film language, which is
,,I,,,, in a profound sense, the fashioning of its tradition and history. Lang stands as
<,tic of tile him authors who fundamentally influenced the way film language - edit,,lg, <on\position, lighting, set design, acting - told stories and addressed audiences.
|"till\ language's encounter with and reaction to large-scale forms - such as allegory,
the ,,adventure story, or the crime narrative and tale of detection - are essential parts
<,t I .,t fig's creation

as an author.
Wc <',flt follow Foucault in claiming that the biographical person in effect dies to

l',<,<l,,<
e tile author, as Barthes imagines Proust giving up his life in order to prod,t,<. the novel of his life. I will not be tracing these films back to Fritz Lang's life, but
will rather track. the way Lang as an author, as an assembler of images and sounds,
nl,tkcs his hand scnscd within the very filaments of the texts. His hand beckons to
,,,t<, <'tlt<`r his texts and find him, but entices us into a maze rather than setting up
,, <|,tr<t en< oLlI,t,`r. Sitl<'e thcrc will be no author's hand in this maze to grasp ours
,Ind sll<,w us the way, we encounter

the lanKuaKe of <.it14.Ina itself and our own work

INTRODUCTION

as film viewers. The search for the author takes place in a labyrinth in which at
times even the film director himself may have lost his way.
Perhaps there is no better exploration of the paradoxes of film authorship than the
screening room sequence in Godard's Contempt in which Fritz Lang plays Fritz Lang:
a German director, now making a film of Horner's Odyssey in Cinecitta for producer
Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). In this scene, Lang watches rushes from this film
which he never actually directed but his fictional character of the same name within
the film did. The sequence contains many references to Lang's career, to incidents that
Lang himself had reported in interviews. The key instance involves a struggle for control over the film (and the nature of film discourse) with Prokosch. After knocking
cans of film across the room, Prokosch bears down on Lang, yelling, you cheated me,
Fritz', claiming the scene he shot was not in the script. Lang claims it is but refuses to
surrender his own copy of the script to the producer. When a copy of the script is
brought to Prokosch he flips through it and gruffly admits the scene is there, But it's
not what you have on that screen.' Lang responds, naturally, because in the script it is
written and on the screen it's pictures, motion pictures it's called.' Prokosch reads by
flinging more mm cans, this time in a parody of the classical Greek statue, Myron's
Discus Thrower (Lang comments: finally you get the feel of Greek culture').
The sequence re-stages an encounter Lang claims he had with Eddie Mannix, the
producer of his first Hollywood film, Fury. 13 Therefore Lang is playing (or replaying)
Fritz Lang based on his own script. But the dialogue also makes an essential claim
about film authorship: it is not the script, the written words, that Lang has authored,
but their translation into images. Here we encounter Lang's own claim to being an
auteur, his attempt to control indetail the image as it appears on the screen. The surviving scripts of Lang's Hollywood films make clear how literal this authorship was,
with Lang's careful diagrams showing the camera angles and camera movement
within the set, the paths of the actors, with sketches conveying the framing and even
the gestures of the actors. The words were a libretto for which Lang supplied a full
orchestration into images. And as his anecdote makes clear, this control over miseen-scme did not simply add something to the words, but transformed them. Lang's
contribution is alchemical, a chain reaction of reinterpretation and visualisation,
opening up the film (and the viewer) to non-verbal meanings.
But this sequence of Godard's film also demonstrates the way a modern author
(or a cinematic author: Godard as well as Lang) creates a text out of Barthes' fabric
of quotations'. The film-maker functions less as a scriptor than a fashioner of
palimpsests, texts written over other texts creating new meanings from the superimposition of old ones. Besides quoting Lang's life (or accounts of his life), the
sequence accumulates a thicket of references and quotations, including Palance's
parody of Myron's sculpture. Inscribed on the wall is a quote attributed (possibly
spuriously) to Louis Lumiere: the cinema is an invention without a future'. Scenes
from a cinematic adaptation of Horner's Odyssey are screened, accompanied by Lang
quoting in German verses on Odysseus - not from Horner, but from Dante - in
which the Italian poet placed his forebear's hero in the Inferno and had him recount
the voyage he undertook atter his return from Troy. The film screened, although supposedly directed by Lang, recalls, with its arcing camera movements around ancient
statues, Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (a film we see announced on the marquee of a
theatre later in the film and the plot of which, as many critics have pointed out, resonates with Contempt's story of the collapse of a marriage). Therefore, we receive
Horner's Odyssey as passed down through several hands: Dantc's scqucl and
Godard/Lang's cinematic adaptation with a how to Rosscllini. Whcn Prokoscll tries

INTRODUCTION

to circumvent Lang's direction by hiring Paul Javal, a new scriptwriter (Michel piccoli), he seals the deal by writing a cheque on the back of his female assistant
(Godard would later use the cheques written for the stars and technicians of Tout va
bien as credits for that film,) declaring, when I hear the word culture, I bring out my
cheque book: a quote transformed from Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering who
threatened, when I hear the word culture, I take out my pistol.'
But perhaps the most complex quotation in the scene, and the one with the
most resonance as an emblem for the film director, comes when Lang quotes in
German (he speaks German, French and English in this sequence - the three languages in which he made films - making us aware of the varied texture of language
and the need for translation) the last stanza of Friedrich H.olderlin's poem The
l'oct's Vocation':
Furchdos bleibt abet, so or es muss, der Mann
Einsam or Gott, es schuzet die Einfalt ibn
Und keiner Warren brauchts and keiner
Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilt.
/ t ran slated by Christopher Middleton as:
Fearless yet, if he must, man stands, and lonely
Before God, simplicity protects him, no
Weapon he needs, nor subterfuge
'GillGod's being not there helps him.]

f "\fig then discusses the variants on the last line, that H `olderlin first wrote so lunge
def c ;ott nicht do list which Francesca, Prokosch's assistant, translates for Paul as
"I`,mt que Dieu no fait pas default (as long as God does not fail him). Then, Lang
t"tcs, H`olderlin changed the verse to so lange def Gott uns nahe list (as long as
c;t>d is near to us). But the final version reverses these and describes man's aid
' <>I',ingfrom God's being missed, his failure (Gottes Fehl) or as Lang says in French,
`, <`n`cst plus la presence du Dieu, c'est absence de Dieu qui r assurel'homme' (it is
I"' I"I,gcr the presence of God, it is the absence of God that reassures Man). Lang
, ,,In.ludcs, it is very strange, but true14
I borderline'sverse claims the creator's absence as an essential relation to his crestt ' t >rt' 'I`he sequence in the screening room centered around the representation of
nods and heroes. Prokosch intones, I like gods. I know exactly how they feel.'
ill t'kosch's identification with the gods revolves around his sense of their power lik<'his chcquebookwhich can reverse the plot of the Odyssey by hiring a new writer.
t ',Hg, however, immediately cautions Prokosch, jerry, don't forget, the gods have
I"'t , rcatcd men, man has created the gods.' This is more than a simple statement of
l't' ' Icrklch-like humanism or atheism. As the author is in some sense the creation of
flu` cadre, imagined by the reader as they interact with the text, so likewise, the gods
" ' ,` , re all'LIby man from the traces, images and signs of their power. The gods shown
," t In'Sc rushes from the Odyssey directed by Lang' appear only as statues; immol',I,., iI','I't' 'I`hc living presence of the gods has departed from this world, leaving only
t It cir images behind. Man misses god, and that missed opportunity remains like an
'l""nswcl.cd
phone call (in German a Fehlanruf is the term for a wrong number).
c "t ult I`,, I' y to the approach to the author that Barthes condemns, which claims to
"t ti over the full prcscncc
of the author in the text, in this more complex theology
t h""'I' y of reading ) of1`crcd by I loldcrliu and I,dug ( or ( ;odard) al>scncc becomes
tilt r `s liIblI st IllI>igtlt >us, hut powcrf ill, Ki[ t to file arcade.

(or
the

INTRODUCTION

The Interview and the Clock

1 claim that I can find Lang within his films, that he has imprinted them with his
mark But things are more complex than that. I am not just reading Lang's films
backward in order to reach the real man outside the films. 1 am claiming that Fritz
Lang as author in some sense merged with his films. The author stands on the
threshold of his films rather than entirely outside them. The Fritz Lang that existed
entirely outside his films (if such a total exclusion were possible) was not Fritz Lang
the author about whom 1 am writing this book. But I am not just saying that the
author is immanent in his texts, either. Fritz Lang is a construction, a creation as
much as any of his films are, but of a different sort than any single mm. Not only is
he the point of convergence of all his films, he is also a figure that existed outside
them but always in relation to them, directing them from that Position. Lang clearly
appears as this figure in Godard's film: Fritz Lang', a famous German director,
author, as Godard's characters indicate, of both M and Rancho Notorious, yet in
some way a fictitious character as well, part of a plot. This is a character with a history becoming a character in a story. But Lang did not have to wait for Godard to
create this role for him. He had already played it and, as we saw, Provided Godard
with the scenario and dialogue for many of its key scenes.
A key anecdote of Lang's role in history appears in Contempt, when Paul
expresses his doubt to Prokosch that Lang will accept his rewriting of the Odyssey:
in '33 Goebbels asked Lang to take over the German cinema industry, and that
same evening Lang crossed the border.' The story of Lang's escape from the Third
Reich after a tension-filled meeting with Goebbels, which included the Minister of
Propaganda's offer to Lang to assume the leading role in the development of Nazi
cinema, forms the eye of the hurricane in recent revisionist accounts of Lang's life.
Patrick McGilligan points out that Lang only began to tell the tale of his meeting
with Goebbels during World War 11.15 The first version was published in 1943 as
publicity material for the release of his Hollywood anti-Nazi film, Hangmen also
Die and the simultaneous release of an English-language version of his last German
film before exile, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the banning of which by the Nazis
supposedly precipitated the meeting with Goebbels. In other words, Lang first told
this story as a way of stressing his own involvement with the world portrayed in his
films and as a sort of advertisement for them.
Lang later gave increasingly detailed and dramatic recitations of the story many
times, in interviews in English, French and German, in versions that have significant variations but all of which seem based on the same central scenario. Nearly
anyone who reads them notices a quality to the accounts that is not only dramatic,
but cinematic, and not only cinematic, but specifically Langian. In his account of
the meeting Lang emphasises a sense of repetition, hard-edged geometry and an
experience of alienation that recalls the sets and mise-en-scene of Metropolis, M, or
his Hollywood anti-Nazi films. The imagery suggests a labyrinth, like the maze of
authorship in which, I suggest, Lang himself may have lost his way:
You go down long wide corridors with stone flags and so on, and your steps echo,
and as you come around the corridor there are two guys there carrying guns. It was
not very agreeable you come to another desk, a third desk and Hrally to a little room
and they say, you wait here.' So now you are perspiring a little. The door opens on a
long, long office, and at the end of the office there is Dr. Goebbcls.' 6

INTRODUCTION

A version Lang told to William Friedkin for an unrealized documentary, quoted by

McGilligan, adds these characteristic Langian details to the description of his walk
down the corridor:
{It} had great squares of cement, the walls were black - no pictures, no inscriptions.
The windows were very high [so] that you couldn't look out of [them]. I walked and
walked on these cement squares. Every step echoed constantly

Ghe interview with Goebbels varies little in the different versions, except in one
detail. In all versions Goebbels explains to him the need to ban The Testament ofDr
Mabuse because of the film's ending, but reassures Lang that the F.uhrer knows and
loves Lang's films and has proclaimed, This is the man who will give us the great
Nazi films.' Only in a few versions does Lang raise the issue of his Jewish heritage,
with Goebbels responding, we will decide who is a Jew.' Lang indicates he outwardly expressed delight to Goebbels while inwardly thinking in panic, How do I
get out of here?' 18
This concealed desire is brilliantly expressed in Lang's narrative by another char,'ctcristic (and cinematic) detail: a clock: outside the window there was a big clock,
,Ind the hands went slowly round'19 Lang's concern about the time comes from his
decision that he must leave Germany that very evening (saying to himself, This
<'vcning is the last moment you can be sure of getting out of Germany'), the essential motif of classical cinematic storytelling (developed to perfection in Lang's own
films) - the deadline. I looked at the clock again. At two-thirty the banks close and
how can I get out of here? I didn't get out.'20
Ghe rest of the narrative recounts Lang's furtive and secretive crossing of the
I'ordcr that evening, the last he could safely spend in Germany. Unable to get
money from the bank he gathers a few expensive objects (a golden cigarette case, a
Y,oIdcnchain and, according to a French version, jewellery from a girl friend) and
lite cash he had around the house and takes a train to Paris, ostensibly for a few
days, in fact, never to return to Germany while Hitler was in power. Some versions
)tint
him concealing these valuables on the train (taping them under the bath' <'<"11 sink, or hiding them in a slit he cuts in the carpet) as he crosses the border.
Al`Icr Lang's death the cracks began to appear in this story, or at least in its
'<.I"ti)n to actual events. The sale of Lang's passport to the Stiftung Deutsche Kine"'.'thck in Berlin allowed scholars to determine when Lang actually left Germany
f<'I France, and the date was months after the alleged meeting with Goebbels. As
M, c Gilliganpoints out, there is no record of the meeting although Goebbels metic"l<'us|y recorded his meetings in his diaries.21 It seems likely, then, that the story is
I 'lIlg"S fabrication, his scenario, or, as Jorge Dana describes it in the narration of his
' "< <'Illdocumentary on Lang's German films, his imaginary film'.
'lIw biographical enigmas this fabrication presents are many. Does it conceal a
"'<"'<`
anll'iguous attitude towards the Nazis and Goebbels than the tale expresses?
WI'.II about the detail, sometimes included, of the discussion of Lang's Jewish heritage , ,' Part of his identity he rarely mentioned and seemed unwilling to explore?
l't<Ilong, after endless repetitions of the story, grow to believe it himself? 1 am not
Hot'lg
to pursue these biographical issues here. What draws me to this story is its
'<"(

'<d<` its an archetypal

Lang scenario of suspense, subterfuge and of threat to one's

'<I<"tt'ty, herc rcndcrcd as an autobiographical
talc. Lang in some way made sense
<mt <91his owl\ life, and prcscntcd it to other people, through this sort of story. Here
w<' 'cc the I .religion scenario cdipsillg the actual cvcllts of his wall life,

IO

INTRODUCTION

If Lang is caught in the labyrinth of his own storytelling, the revealing image for
me comes in the slowly revolving hands of the clock outside the window. This clock
supplies the suspense of the story, the sense of the need for an immediate escape
(which the evidence of Lang's passport, with its numerous trips and returns to Germany in the months following the apparent date of his encounter with Goebbels,
belies). The turning hands of the clock (McGilligan notes that in the version told to
Friedkin, Lang said the clock moved and moved and moved'), its relentless motion
stressing Lang's own immobility, stuck in Goebbels' office But the clock also
relates Lang to the world outside this office, a network of clock-determined deadlines - the banks which will close, the train schedules which could take him out of
Germany. The clock hands tick towards the last moment you can be sure of getting
out of Germany'.23 In the only visual version of this story I have seen, a television
interview where Lang tells the tale in German, acting out the various roles, he acts
out the motion of the clock, turning his hand and arm one way to indicate the passing of time and his other arm in the opposite direction to indicate Goebbels' ongoing speech.24These gestures add a further dimension to Lang's drama: he is caught
between two implacable machines, one counting the minutes, the other voicing
Nazi ideology and offering the temptation of becoming the Film F uhrer'.
In the next chapter I will discuss the role clocks play in setting up a central device
of Lang's films which I call the Destiny-machine. To define briefly a concept I will
discuss in detail, the Destiny-machine determines the environment in which Lang's
characters struggle, serving in most cases as an obstacle this corresponds in many
ways to the theme of fate or destiny (in Contempt Lang introduces his film of The
Odyssey as the fight against the gods') which has become such a cliche of Lang criticism that recent commentators have tended to treat it with scorn. But I think we
risk losing the mainspring of Lang's dramaturgy if we simply dismiss the idea of
destiny in his films as banal. The point is that for Lang destiny is not a metaphysical
concept (and actually not a fight against the gods) but a material one, less a meaning than a structure. Destiny appears in Lang's films, not as a philosophy, but as a
machine, whose mechanical nature in most of the films remains very literal. This is
not to say that Lang's films are about a Luddite struggle against machines (although
Metropolis does dramatize such a revolt). The machine in Lang does stand for
something beyond itself. But, rather than a metaphor for a view of human nature or
metaphysics, the machine is a metonymy, a fragment which stands in for the whole
systematic nature of the modern world which Lang sees as a complex determining
destiny. In the following chapters I will show how this systematic nature of the
modern world is explored in Lang's films, but here in this self-fashioning anecdote
we find Lang himself pitted against the Destiny-machine, on the one hand the
unstoppable clock marking the boundaries of human social time (when banks
close, trains leave and human fates are given their last moment' when something is
possible) and the equally unstoppable machine of ideological discourse issuing
from one of the key inventors of modern propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
In his story Lang stands fixed between these two forces, immobilized But as we
have learned, Lang himself created this particular scenario, possibly as the only way
to make cogent the power the Nazi party heldat this moment over his identity and
future as a film-maker, or perhaps to camouflage his own more ambivalent reactions to Nazi power. In narrating, or rather acting it out, his gestures not only indicate his own actions and reactions, but the motions of the Destiny-machine, as he
revolves his arms to capture its mechanical progression. Lang's gesture summons
up an image he often recalled, of a lunatic he saw in an asylum when he was prepar

INTRODUCTION

11

ing The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, who thought he was a grandfather clock. In his
interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Lang indicates he incorporated this figure into
the original version' of that film:
He stood there and made a movement

with his arms like a pendulum

- and I

dissolved to a grandfather clock; one day this man has a feeling that some of his
springs have fallen out - so he crawls on the floor and tries to find them.25

Whether or not this figure ever actually appeared in a version of The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse, he does appear in the most interesting of Lang's unproduced scripts,
The Man behind You. This original story by Lang represents his attempt to make an
American version of his Mabuse films and its earliest version was one of Lang's first
American projects, one he continued to work on throughout the 30s. Here the
man-clock is presented exactly as Lang describes in the Bogdanovich interview, a
man who swings his arms like a pendulum and who is presented from the point of
view of Dr. Moran (the hi m'sMabuse-like master criminal) in a dissolve to an
image of clockworks which suddenly snap, as the madman crumbles onto the floor
in a fit. This patient will only respond to one question: what time is it?' and always
with the same answer (like the clock outside Goebbels' office): Too late.'
I end this introduction of emblems of Lang's authorship with this image of Lang,
like his fictional lunatic, acting out the mechanical motions of the clock. In Lang's
world (which includes his finished films, his scripts, and his accounts of his life, particularly as they tend toward the fictional) not only are characters threatened by the
I)cstiny-machine, but the very act of authorship as well within the agon or struggle
which authorship initiates, the author becomes subject to systems beyond his or her
control, not only the tyrannical system of Nazi power, but also systems like the very
order of language which the modern author, described by Barthes and Foucault,
surrenders to as he vanishes. But this is not simply a contest of hero and opponent
with the stronger force overcoming the weaker. Rather authorship often slips into
III
identification with the impersonal system. The man becomes the clock and
,aunts off the moments of his own fate. The author becomes captured by his own
story. Part of the drama that Lang's films enact is precisely the struggle between the
, claimsto power of an author-like figure and the real power of the impersonal
system of the Destiny-machine. In almost all cases the apparent master is revealed
it, have been a tool all along.