In the following essay, Bellour provides an analysis of Lang's common cinematic techniques used throughout his career.

In the following essay, Kaplan asserts that while Lang correctly assessed the decline in male authority in the public and private spheres, he puts forth only one solution: a return to the old-style patriarchal authority, instead of a move toward something new and positive.

[One can see] that Lang's career in the classic German cinema, embracing as it did most of its tendencies, serves in itself as a kind of allegory. In a variety of stylistic disguises the same obsessions appear and recur—in the Nibelungen saga, which added to expressionism an architectural solidity and massive fresco-like sweep, fatality of legend; in the contemporary melodramas, The Spiders, the two Mabuse films, The Spy, fatality of power and violence; in M, fatality of the sadistic inner sel...

The earliest examples we have of Lang's work, The Golden Sea and The Diamond Ship—completed parts one and two of a projected four-part "series" called The Spiders (1919)—are in some ways representative of much of that work. Serial-like, they feature the most rudimentary of "thrills"—actors menaced by rooms filling up with water or the walls of a room coming together—and have, to put it mildly, no character, story, or thematic interest. Pre-art, ...

Lang's films reflect the struggle within his people as they respond to the pushes and shoves from the dual sides of their character. In medieval morality plays the struggle would have been represented by good and bad angels whispering into the ear of the character trying to resolve his dilemma, and frequently Lang is able to find a similar material representation of the struggle. Many of Lang's chief characters are people driven by some inner conflict of the sort symbolized by Jekyll and Hyde....

The first thing to strike the casual observer about Fritz Lang's recent films is his apparent interest in returning to his own sources and going over his own past. His latest film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, takes up a line previously represented in his work by The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in 1933 and Doctor Mabuse the Gambler, one of his earliest works … dating right back to 1922. (p. 43) Certain themes run inescapably through his career from the beginning right up to date, and of them a...

The figure of the femme fatale, appearing as early as Die Spinnen, turns up again and again as a constant motif in [Lang's] work; thus the career girl [as portrayed in his unfilmed scenario Death of a Career Girl] is less an outgrowth of [a] chance encounter at Cannes than of previous portraits of women. Kriemhild, one of the earlier versions, also pursued a goal to its logical, destructive end, shedding all human emotions save that of revenge (a form, after all, of ambition), leaving more than one d...

In Lang's films, interiors are atmospheric geometry before they are a home for anyone. [Late] in Ministry of Fear, [Stephen Neale] and the girl come to an apartment which they realise is an unoccupied trap—but it is only as unowned as every other interior in the movie. The precious home in The Big Heat—though shaken by the bomb outside—is as neutral as an advertisement living room. Joan Bennett's rooms in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street are dens from schoolboy dream...

The producer [of The Niebelungs], Fritz Lang, already famous in this country as the begetter of Destiny and Sumurun, was once a painter, which probably explains why, in utilizing, not the opera-glass but the field-glass method, he has seemed to insist, quite rightly, that the visual beauty of a film is just as important as its dramatic economy and effectiveness. Actually he has completely subdued the dramatic element to the visual one. The human beings in this epic of Siegfried remain legendary characters: ...

Tigress of Bengal is an incoherent amalgam of portions of [The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb], weighed down by childish American dialogue and out-of-synch dubbing. Yet enough remains to prove their unmistakable authorship. To find their origins we have to go back over forty years, to a scenario written by Lang and Thea von Harbou for the silent version directed by Joe May, for whom Lang was then working. And one has only to look at Lang's own Die Spinnen of 1919 (and, to a lesser extent, Des...

Anyone who is indifferent or hostile to the Cinema should make a point of seeing Destiny…. [It is a very remarkable German production that is] bound, sooner or later, to effect radical changes in the standards of film-making…. [It] is necessary to give as much publicity as possible to the new forms of psychological fantasy of which Destiny, for all its faults, is such an admirable example. (p. 284)