Beyond Destiny and Design

Abstract

This chapter explains how Fritz Lang uses a mobile camera in the early part of his career. It discusses the changes in style and technique that emerge over a decade of filmmaking. More broadly, the chapter analyzes how Lang's stylistic and thematic concerns emerge and develop, especially the way that they – like the films he will later make in America – employ complex articulations of narrational perspective and point of view. The chapter argues that Lang uses camera movements to negotiate complex subject positions within the films and to create surprisingly open, fluid spaces, all of which creates a productive tension with his broader themes of destiny and design. Finally, the dynamics of camera movement in these films get at some issues that are fundamental to thinking about camera movement more generally, bringing out ambiguities and tensions that camera movements can elicit but which appear in few other films.

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