PUBLIC LECTURE: The Very Modern World of Fritz Lang

Although the very idea of such a thing would undoubtedly mortify Adorno and Horkheimer, a number of their fellow émigrés to the US in the 1930s – including Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Edgar Ulmer, Billy Wilder and, of course, Fritz Lang – might well be considered the pulp wing of the Frankfurt School.

In his major German films ("Dr Mabuse, der spieler" (1922), "Metropolis" (1927), "Spione" (1928), "M." (1931), "Das Testament des Dr Mabuse" (1932)), Lang constructed a mise-en-scène of relentless modernity, from spy cameras and skyscrapers to communications networks and countdowns, which combine an Expressionist critique of industrial rationalisation with Critical Theory’s analysis of instrumental reason. Contradictorily, this was enabled by the hyperbole of his constructed worlds – the very stuff of the commercial thrillers and spectacular cinema produced by the Culture Industry. Following a discussion of "Metropolis", the lecture will concentrate on Lang’s American career, first as he struggled to reconcile his imaginative vision with the vagaries of the Hollywood studio system and significantly reduced budgets. His early American films, such as "Fury" (1936), "You Only Live Once" (1937) and the neglected, if bizarre, "You and Me" (1938), constitute a series of experiments in transforming a social vision into the idiom of American individualist narrative cinema. His major films noirs, including "Scarlet Street" (1945), "The Big Heat" (1953) and "While the City Sleeps" (1955), succeed, Dr Bould will argue, in reconstituting an emphasis on the individual subject as a critique of capitalist modernity

Mark Bould is a Reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England. He is the founding co-editor of "Science Fiction Film and Television", and an advisory editor for "Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory", "The Journal of Horror Studies" and "Science Fiction Studies". He is the author of "Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City" (2005) and "The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star" (2008) and co-editor of "Parietal Games: Critical Writing By and On M. John Harrison" (2005). He is currently writing "The Routledge Film Guidebook: Science Fiction", co-writing "The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction", and co-editing "Neo-noir, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction", "The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction" and "Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction".

The lecture will be followed by a screening of Fritz Lang’s film "Metropolis".

This lecture is the first in the inaugural Humanities Lecture Series: dreams, visions, freedom.