[The following is a translation of Luc Moullet’s Fritz Lang (1963/70, Seghers). The book consists of two parts: Moullet’s monograph and a collection of writings by and on Lang. I have chosen not to translate the second part because (a) Lang’s articles and interviews were originally published in English and are thus available in English elsewhere, (b) many of the texts on Lang (by Bazin, Godard, Rivette etc.) are already translated in their entirety into English, and (c) I think the second part, with its patchwork of excerpts, registers more as filler material that adds little value to Moullet’s monograph.]
I. Search (1916-1949)
- Man Dominated by the World (1916-1926)
- Man Seeks to Conquer the World (1922-1938)
- Should Man Revolt or Adapt? (1940-1949)
II. Maturity (1951-1960)
III. Conclusion
The Seventh Art 
October 11, 2020 at 12:31 am
In regards to your understandable decision to leave out the second part: would you consider posting the complete contents of that section (preferably translated) so those of us without access to the book can track down the various pieces? Thanks
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October 11, 2020 at 1:45 pm
Hi Austin,
Sure, You can find the table of contents for the second part here.
The first section (“Cinema According to Fritz Lang”) of the book’s second part consists of three texts by Lang:
a. Criminal Psychology and Crime Films (published as “Crime and Cinema” in Penguin Film Review No. 5, 1946)
b. Sugar and Poison (published as “Happily Ever After” in Penguin Film Review No. 5, 1946)
c. The Octopus (an extract from Cinéma 62, November 1962)
The second section (“Art and Profession”) is a mixture of passages from various interviews, whose source you can find here.
The third section (“Points of View, Reviews, Testimonies”) is made of short extracts from various articles/reviews on Lang and his films. I’m hyperlinking existing translations wherever I could find them.
★Claude Chabrol: A few lines both in Cahiers du cinéma 54, Christmas 1955 & Cahiers du cinéma 138, Christmas 1962.
★Lotte Eisener: “Notes on Fritz Lang’s Style”, La Revue de cinéma II, February 1947. (The English translation of Eisner’s book on Lang is available on Monoskop.)
★Georges Franju: Cinématographe, March 1937.
★Jean-Luc Godard: “The Return of Frank James”, program notes later published in Godard par Godard. (These notes are surprisingly absent from Tom Milne’s English translation – I’ll try to translate the whole piece and put it up on December 4, the day between Godard’s and Lang’s birthdays!)
★Jacques Rivette: “The Hand” (on BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT), Cahiers du cinéma 76, February 1957.
★Georges Sadoul: “The Historian’s Point of View”, Histoire du cinéma, 1962, and Histoire du cinéma mondial, Flammarion.
★François Truffaut: “Loving Fritz Lang”, Cahiers du cinéma 31, 1954. (A translation by Sallie Iannottie is available in Braudy and Dickstein’s Great Film Directors: A Critical Anthology)
★André Bazin: “An Implausible Film” (on BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT), Radio-Cinéma-Télévision 405, October 1957. (This must surely be translated somewhere!)
★Michel Mourlet: “Fritz Lang’s Trajectory”, Cahiers du cinéma 99, September 1959. (Translated in Stephen Jenkins’ Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look.)
★Bernard Zimmer: “June Bug”, unpublished, 1962.
★Samuel Fuller: “Lang and Me”, unpublished, 1962.
★Volker Schlondorff: “The Outsider”, unpublished, 1963.
Please also let me know if you’d like any particular article from the list above translated.
Cheers.
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October 26, 2020 at 7:08 am
Well, I’m interested in the Chabrol bits and the Samuel Fuller piece as well but I wouldn’t want to add to your already substantial labor…
Above all I’d like to read those three pieces by Lang in their original. I was able to find one of them online: https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/film-makers-on-film-making/section/8ced830a-16ca-455b-92b1-124a2e54a718
Perhaps someone out there has scans of the other two?
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October 26, 2020 at 9:51 am
Hi Austin,
This is amazing. I was looking for this piece when I was translating. I even got in touch with Prof. Joe McElhaney, the editor of the Fritz Lang companion. Thank you for that.
There are cheap used copies of Penguin Film Review No. 5 available online in the US, which contains ‘Crime and Cinema’. I wouldn’t be able to have it shipped to my place right now, unfortunately, due to the pandemic. As for ‘Octopus’, I am not sure if there exists an original version at all, given that Cinéma 62 sounds like a French publication. It is likely that it was translated without the original being published.
I’m translating the Chabrol bits below. I will try to put up the Sam Fuller piece soon.
Cheers.
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October 26, 2020 at 9:52 am
Claude Chabrol on Fritz Lang (from the second part of Moullet’s book)
DEFINITION
—
Those who don’t understand what he does consider him to be in full decadence. The truth is that, even in the rare studio jobs he accepted (like GUERRILLAS), he remained faithful to himself. His theme—the fatality of degeneration, vengeance, the occult power of secret societies and spy networks—is no more important to him than his aesthetic that illustrates and prolongs it: the imprisonment of characters within a frame whose slaves they are and which they can escape only through everyday actions and gestures. The sets, the very limits of the screen are, in his words, as important as the actors, and the movements of the latter as important as the framing. Fritz Lang’s work is based on a metaphysics of architecture. From METROPOLIS to FURY, from FURY to RANCHO NOTORIOUS, it isn’t a case of decadence, but a simple and natural evolution.
(Cahiers du cinéma, issue 54, Christmas 1955.)
—
CORRECTED DEFINITION (the passages in square brackets aren’t in the book, but in the original CdC text)
—
[When you’ve made films, there are things in cinema that don’t impress you anymore. Welles, for instance, is someone you find extraordinary when you haven’t made a film. When you’ve started making films, you find him less extraordinary, because you tell yourself: after all, there’s only one thing to do…. But, as we go along, we see that it’s extraordinary all the same, because, of course, there’s only one thing to do…, but, precisely, what’s beautiful about him is not at all what, earlier, seemed extraordinary, it’s that you never find those empty moments I was talking about earlier. There is always something going on in Welles’ films.]
Having said that, I think Lang is even better, insofar as you can never even say to yourself at: you just have to do this or that, you just have to put the camera in a certain place or use a certain lens. Lang is a perpetual mystery.
[So is Hawks, in a sense, but it’s not the same thing. There’s a secret about him, but it’s not a trade secret. It’s a personal secret. Hawks has a sense of gesture and space—which are physical elements—that cannot be acquired if one doesn’t have it. In his work, nothing happens in the head. When Huston tries to do Hawks, it only makes you laugh. Huston has to think, while in Hawks, everything flows naturally. You don’t have to have an inferiority complex towards him: you just have to do something else.]
In Lang, everything happens in the head. So, in a way, you should hope to find out what’s going on there. In fact, you keep telling yourself that you could do the same thing, but you know you won’t be able to. Lang has both: the personal secret and the trade secret; you must know, once and for all, that you will not find them and that it is useless to look for them; that would be ridiculous.
(Cahiers du cinéma Issue 138, Christmas 1962.)
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October 30, 2020 at 6:34 pm
Here’s Sam Fuller on Fritz Lang.
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October 30, 2020 at 10:48 pm
This is so great! Thank you. The Chabrol bit turned out to be especially interesting, and I appreciate the additions from the original Cahiers text. Very important.
I’ve been digging around the the net looking for this “Octopus” thing. I can’t find record of a French journal called Cinema (incredibly), but there was an English film journal called Movie that ran an interview with Lang in November 1962!
“Fritz Lang Talks about Dr. Mabuse,” interview with Mark Shivas, in Movie (London), November 1962.
This interview is reprinted in Sarris’ Interviews With Film Directors which I haven’t looked at yet. “Octopus” is a fitting word for Mabuse, but it is odd that this would not be in the “interviews” section of the Moullet book, so I could be way off.
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October 31, 2020 at 10:46 am
Hi Austin,
I just checked the interview in Movie #5 (Nov ’62). It’s a short interview where Lang mostly talks about his interaction with Goebbels post-Testament. So I’m afraid it isn’t it.
I also discovered the French magazine the ‘Octupus’ piece is extracted from (again, it’s only an extract). It’s a hefty, 160 page magazine:
https://fr.shopping.rakuten.com/offer/buy/76194328/Cinema-62-N-70-Adieu-Marilyn-Les-Crocordiles-Et-Le-Cadavre-Exquis-Par-M-Flacon-Livre.html
It isn’t a literal octopus that he’s referring to in the article as much as the “machinery of evil that threatens to swallow the entire world” in THE BIG HEAT.
If you’d really like, I can translate this piece sometime later as well, though I’d prefer having access to the whole piece in CINÉMA 62 than this truncated extract.
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October 31, 2020 at 9:23 pm
Don’t worry about it! It would be great to read the whole piece some day but there’s a whole book of Lang interviews I’ve yet to read on top of the Moullet book. You’re doing great work, thanks again.
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October 31, 2020 at 10:14 pm
I’ve sent out a word asking if anyone has access to that particular issue of CINÉMA 62. Fingers crossed!
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December 5, 2020 at 7:23 pm
Here’s Jean-Luc Godard on Fritz Lang.
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May 3, 2021 at 11:49 am
Hi JAFB– Been meaning to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your translation of Moullet’s Lang book. I read it this winter in the midst of watching about 30 of Lang’s films and it was fascinating.
I see you’ve translated some other interesting articles from French, and I thought I’d see if you know of this one – Jean-Claude Biette’s essay on Jacques Tourneur’s film ‘Wichita’ (“Revoir Wichita”, Cahiers du Cinéma no.281, Oct. 1977). Over and over again I’ve come across references to this piece as seminal, brilliant, fundamental, etc. yet it has never apparently been translated into English. If we could find the French text I wonder if you’d consider working your magic? Just a thought.
Immense gratitude for your work!
-A
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May 3, 2021 at 11:54 am
Hi Austin,
Thank you so much for returning to the translation and for your kind words. No better way to read the book than watching the films in parallel!
I wasn’t aware of Biette’s article. But I see that I have a copy of it, and that it’s a three-page piece. I will certainly plan for a translation this month!
Thank you once again, cheers!
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May 25, 2021 at 6:23 pm
Hi Austin,
Here is translation of the the article by Jean-Claude Biette you mentioned!
Personally, I’m not sure if it’s brilliant or seminal (I feel Tourneur’s film deserves both more and less than what this text offers). I’ve put up the translation nonetheless.
Cheers!
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