SOURCE: "On Fritz Lang," in Substance, No. 9, 1974, pp. 25-34.

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

An amazing fate, Fritz Lang's, and fraught with paradox.

Like Stroheim, he was one of the foremost directors, yet not an actor embellished by the surprising prestige accorded every wretched performance; he was like Sternberg, yet without a woman like Marlene at his side; like Murnau, dying (forty years ago) a death wrapped in mystery; in a sense, Fritz Lang was the first in his day, solely for his work as a filmmaker, to have become cinematic legend. There is Welles, of course, again an actor, whose reputation (being at least mythic) rests upon having provoked America. And there is Hitchcock. But the myth here is concealed beneath a sociological facility, an imagery which hides the essential man. In a sense Lang...