A Companion to Fritz Lang by Joe McElhaney

Author:Joe McElhaney [McElhaney, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781118587232
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Writing, Image, and the Thing

The seeming impasse created by the juxtaposition of word and object, an impasse which Rilke’s object-oriented poetry seeks to overcome, is an issue that surfaces repeatedly in Lang films. We recall, for instance, the way in which dialectical editing and sound bridges actually emphasize the distance between word and image in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. A recurrent preoccupation, writing is often staged in Lang’s films. One of the more abstract, symmetrically arranged shots in Spies is of two hands holding pens and signing documents, arranged in a pattern and shot from above, and several people will die for its sake. In this shot we do not witness the signing per se; it is not the act of writing that we see. Here the usual pictorialism of Langian documents has migrated to the abstract composition of the scene. But repeatedly in Lang’s German films, letters and maps covered with pictograms (Metropolis), with a combination of pictorial signs and writing (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), or simply with writing (Spies) ultimately stand revealed as Things, blots in collusion with death. Covered with mysterious markings, the map in Metropolis leads workers to catacombs littered with skulls.

In Lang films single words may also approach the status of things or take up things into their inscription. In The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the word Mord, murder, is several times the object of the camera’s scrutiny. Here the word attains to the status of an object; its materialism is emphasized. Singling it out for our view in close-up, more than once the camera tracks out of the word and into the surrounding space as if to suggest that the word itself has powers of pollution. Again and again we see it on posters, black, seemingly in bold – it is printed in an old German font that turns the word in the direction of the image. In M, the letter Beckert the murderer sends to the newspapers was written on a window ledge; its script is distorted by the ledge’s rough surface, which imprints itself in the writing process. In Spies a document that condemns two men to death is printed in Cyrillic, an alphabet that, to the Western eye, is likewise on the side of the image. In this film, too, Haghi communicates with his nurse in Sign (a language that uses visual signs) and a blotter, inscribed with the imprint of word fragments, has the look of abstract art. In all of these instances, writing has an imagistic aspect that defamiliarizes it and takes the objects on which it is inscribed into the realm of things.

Most notably, of course, it is the mad Mabuse whose writing begins as pure design, as a series of indecipherable hieroglyphs. Later, as Baum the psychiatrist reports to his students, words become visible in Mabuse’s scribblings and gradually sentences emerge, although the sentences Mabuse forms always retain a pictorial aspect. Covering the pages of his testament with curlicues, Mabuse’s imagistic script resembles Expressionist lettering on film titles and frames.

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