Fritz Lang’s Diagonal Symphony

Frantisek Kupka, 1913

Moholy-Nagy, 1924

1. The Visual Signature of the Auteur

       The visual motif of strong diagonal lines crossing the frame that appears from time to time in Fritz Lang's films is clearly no accident. For instance, to get the pattern of shadows on the floor shown in the frame from You Only Live Once the shot had to be specially relit, since in the other shots that surround it in the film it can be seen that the shadows lie in quite different positions. In the other examples illustrated the compostion has been created by putting the camera in a somewhat unusual position, or a shot has been taken that is not at all necessary or helpful to the action of the film, as in the shot of the suitcases from The Secret Beyond the Door, and also in the shot of the rails from Human  Desire. And in the case of The Woman in the Window the production designer's photograph of the real tollgate on which he based his studio set is taken from a much more banal angle than the composition that Lang finally got from the set when he shot the film. Most of these characteristic shots from Fritz Lang's films are associated with a typical camera position  at eye-level or above, tilted slightly down, and with the lens direction at about 45 degrees to the walls of the buildings in the horizontal plane. At the beginning of Lang's career there are only a few clear-cut examples of this characteristic angle to the decor, but by the time he made Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in 1956 this approach to composition had become quite relentless.

       It must be emphasized that what I am describing is a matter of flat pattern, for this was what interested Lang, rather than the concern with architectural space so often postulated in interpretations of his work. In fact his brush with architectural training was very brief and reluctant, whereas he followed the calling of artist by choice for several years before World War I. According to his own testimony and the available evidence, his favoured masters in art were Klimt and Schiele, but it is obvious that their styles could be of no help when it came to film composition. The only possible source that I can see for Fritz Lang's most characteristic compositions is the style of abstract painting using regular geometrical shapes that was just beginning to consolidate after World War I.

       The first abstract painting involving regular arrangements of parallelograms (and hence of diagonal lines) by Frantisek Kupka date back to the Paris of 1913, but by the end of the War a number of artists such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Theo van Doesburg had taken up the motif of regular shapes arranged on the diagonal, and even Mondrian had a brief flirtation with the regular diagonal line in 1919. The parallelogram motif also began to appear in applied art, and Moholy-Nagy transferred this kind of composition to his photographic work as well in 1924. But whatever the exact source of this patterning in Fritz Lang's films, there is no question but that firstly it had nothing to do with Expressionism, and secondly that Lang quickly made it his own as far as films were concerned. Besides using this sort of composition in its purest form in a few shots in each film, sometimes before or after the actors have been permitted to enter or leave the frame, he also  used it to form the diagonal grid across which he disposed the figures of the actors in a far larger number of shots.

       Lang's pride in his mastery of this approach is surely responsible for this and other portraits of himself that he had taken looking through a Mitchell camera viewfinder, and it is also the reason that he detested CinemaScope, for such compositions are impossible within the proportions of the 'Scope frame.

Moholy-Nagy, 1921

Spione, 1928

M, 1931

You Only Live Once, 1937

M, 1931

Die Spinnen II, 1920

Der müde Tod, 1921

You and Me, 1938

The Secret Beyond the Door, 1948

Der Tiger von Eschnapur, 1959

2. The Things Take Over

         As you can see, many of the shots reproduced here are inserts; that is, they are shots of objects or parts of the human body other than the face. Now particular cases of Fritz Lang's use of inserts have often been commented upon, but an interesting point that has not been brought out is the amount of inserts he used. When he started directing after World War I, the best American directors, following on from D.W. Griffith's example, were already making use of a fair number of insert shots in their films to make dramatic and expressive points. In fact at the beginning of the nineteen-twenties it was quite common for 5 percent of the shots in an American film to be inserts, and in some films even up to 10 percent. Some of the bright young European directors immediately caught on to the possibilities of the use of the insert and followed the American lead. Fritz Lang was among them, and there was nothing special from a dramatic point of view in his use of insert shots, or in the amount he used, at any rate until the last two years of the decade.

       However, by the latter part of the 'twenties a new trend towards even greater use of inserts had developed, this time led by the so-called European avant-garde. (Actually, in present day terms, the kind of films in question, typified by Kirsanov's Ménilmontant (1926),  would be referred to as "art films", as opposed to the truly avant-garde efforts of say Man Ray.) In these films the much increased number of insert shots mostly appeared in continuous strings, either with dissolves between them, or more rarely cut straight together, so making up the newly fashionable "montage sequences".

       But when Fritz Lang too began to use more inserts, from Spione (1928) onwards, he did not put most of them in montage sequences, but introduced them, as  had been the earlier custom, as single shots into the middle of scenes, at a more or less relevant point. In Spione 17 percent of the shots are inserts, and from any ordinary conception of film narration many of them are gratuitous; isolating objects whose function is already obvious of of no great interest.

       With the coming of sound the use of inserts decreased sharply in nearly all films, since they had largely been used as a roundabout way of conveying information that it is possible to convey more quickly and subtly by the combination of dialogue and behaviour. But Fritz Lang's first sound film, M, is quite exceptional in having even more inserts (19 percent) than he had used in his last silent film. And in this particular case they are all well applied. Not content with this, in his next film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse,  he went even further, and more than a quarter of the shots in this film are of things rather than people. This was some kind of record for mainstream cinema, and again Lang had reached a situation where a  substantial proportion of the insert shots were nonfunctional, this time irretrievably. On the evidence available it seems to me that the proportion of inserts used in an ordinary narrative film cannot rise above 20 percent without some them holding up the movement of the film, while at the same time not contributing anything extra to it. While I do not know if Lang consciously drew this conclusion as well, it is quite certain that he retreated from this extreme, and all of his subsequent films have less than 15 percent inserts.

       However, to have inserts making up even 15 percent of the shots is quite exceptional for a sound film, the usual upper limit being about 10 percent, and to get so many into a film in a meaningful way requires some special construction of the script at the writing stage. This was one of the main features of Lang's involvement in the scripting of his films, as is proved by the fact that in The  Ministry of Fear, the only one of his Hollywood films for which he was forced to accept the script as already written without his participation, the proportion of inserts quite exceptionally falls as low as 5 percent. So we can say that, with respect to this dimension of film form, and taking their context into account, Lang's sound films are more unusual than his silent films. Nevertheless, the actual way Lang used inserts in his sound films was till completely in the silent film tradition, leaving aside the purely decorative use of some inserts which I have already illustrated. Even the more complex examples in Lang's films, which have often been discussed, such as the arrow brooch belonging to the murdered prostitute which the hero in Manhunt turns  into a weapon to kill her murderer, have their models in silent cinema. One such example of the dual function object featured in insert shots in silent films, just the latest of many I have seen, occurs in Tod Browning's Outside the Law (1921). In this film the criminal protagonist makes a kite for a little child, and later the crossed sticks of the frame of the now broken kite cast the shadow of a crucifix on the floor to recall him from his wrongful ways. Such devices were already the aim of the smartest American filmmakers as early as 1917, but Fritz Lang's diagonal decorations of the frame were all his own.