Abstract
This chapter considers one of Fritz Lang’s less-heralded American films, showing how it employs idiosyncratic editing and staging strategies to imprint a seemingly conventional espionage/mystery thriller with Lang’s particular brand of self-reflexive paranoia. After reviewing much of the extant academic criticism of the film and providing a brief summary of the film’s production history, this chapter presents analyses of staging, framing and editing strategies in individual scenes, identifying stylistic and formal motifs that work to convey an ongoing sense that the action is constantly being observed by some unknown and unseen off-screen presence. It then relates Lang’s filmmaking choices in these instances to theories of cinematic “suturing” and proposes that the film’s dominant strategy may be seen as deliberately disrupting the system of the suture.
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Notes
- 1.
Humphries (1989) identifies the “insistent” off-screen gaze as “central to the Langian textual system” (41), and in addition Ministry of Fear identifies key examples of its functioning in Hangmen Also Die (1943) and The Blue Gardenia (1953). Humphries ultimately relates Lang’s use of this device to the larger theoretical issue of the cinematic “suture,” which will be discussed at some length later in this chapter.
- 2.
In this, this film might be seen as a key thematic predecessor to the cycle of Cold War espionage thrillers which was kicked off 15 years later by North by Northwest and which reached its apotheosis during the Nixon administration with films like Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975).
- 3.
Brecht , it might be noted, was a personal friend of Lang’s and the two collaborated on the story for Hangmen Also Die! (1943), which would remain the playwright’s only Hollywood credit.
- 4.
See Rothman’s “Against the ‘System of the Suture.’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Autumn): 45–50.
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Rothman, William. 1975. Against the ‘System of the Suture’. Film Quarterly 29 (1, Autumn): 45–50.
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Deyo, N. (2020). Ministry of Fear: Fritz Lang’s De-suturing Operation. In: Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_4
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