Lang, Fritz

Lang, Fritz (1890-1976), Austrian-American film director. Born in Vienna, the son of a prominent architect, Lang rebelled against the family profession to study painting and drawing in Munich and Paris. After a tour of the Far East, supporting himself with his art, followed by another period in Paris, he enlisted in the Austrian Army at the outbreak of World War I. Invalided out after sustaining many wounds, he entered the film industry as a writer for Deutsche Éclair (Decla) in Berlin.

Lang moved to directing films in 1919. His first real success was the two-part film Die Spinnen (1919-1920; The Spiders), which, like a number of his later films, was a thriller about a hero fighting against a master criminal and the gangs he controlled. Lang applied to this and subsequent films his own strong visual style. This depended on arranging the shots to produce a simple geometrical patterning in the background to the action, with shapes like those in the abstract paintings of the time by the American artist Moholy-Nagy and others. His international fame began with Der Müde Tod (1921; Destiny) and Siegfried (1923), which emphasized German culture in their content. Metropolis (1926) was a visually powerful but muddled futuristic fantasy, but with the coming of sound, Lang made brilliant use of its possibilities in M (1931), a thriller about a perverted killer of children being hunted by the police and criminal gangs in a big city.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Lang left Germany for France, and then the United States. There he made films for various companies, such as You Only Live Once (1937) and Human Desire (1954), which continued to emphasize themes such as persecution and the power of lust. After returning to Germany and making Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (1960; The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse), Lang retired.