6533b861fe1ef96bd12c54c3

RESEARCH PRODUCT

A tragic view

subject

description

Fritz Lang's American films start off as if they had no beginning, as if something had been decided on and launched inexorably, in our absence, and we were astonished witnesses to its final explosion. In medias res, the expression used in narrative theory to describe the entrance of the reader or spectator in fictions that are underway is, to all intents and purposes, insufficient and imprecise since the point here is not that actions are activated, but rather that the end is imminent. Thus, the furious pace, the climax, the intensity that the first Langian scenes often have. As if we were at the same time expelled from comprehending and plunged into the maelstrom of events. The content of these actions is, in addition, terminal: violent murders, accidental deaths, hopeless traumas and, as a result, their staccato pace has little to do with the gradual, calm introits in the American films of the classical period. Some random examples illustrate such comments.