Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Standing Outside the Films - Emblems
The Inscribed/Imprinting Hand
The Screening Room: 'Strange but True'
The Interview and the Clock
I. Reading the Text of Death - Lang's Silent Allegories: Der müde Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927)
1. The Märchen: Der müde Tod - Death and the Maiden
Who Tells the Timely Story of Death?
The Allegory of the Maiden: Reading and Desire
Final Figure: The Look at the Camera
2. The Decay of Myth: Siegfried's Death, Kriemhild 's Revenge
3. Metropolis: The Dance of Death
The Allegory of the Machine
The Universal Language of Silent Film
Demons of Energy: Who Rules the City of Metropolis?
Gothic Modernism: Technology as Modern Magic
Oedipal Nightmares, Allegorical Riddles
Apocalypse without End, Endings without Conviction
Burn Witch Burn
II: The Mastery of Crime - Lang's Urban Thrillers: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ( 1922), Spies ( 1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932)
4. Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination
The Sensation-film and the Spaces of Modernity
The Terrain of Modernity: Space, Time and the Mastery of Communication
The Mechanical Production of Counterfeit Identity
The Grand Enunciator and the Power of the Gaze
Playing with Time
5. Haghi
The Evil Genius/Mauvais génie
The Staging of Desire
Building Identity from Fragments
Finale: Bringing Down the House
6. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
A Message, Condemned to Death, Has Escaped
'Pay No Attention to that Man behind the Curtain'
The Same Old Song, but with a Different Meaning
(Since You've Been Gone)
III: Hinge - M (1931)
7. M: The City Haunted by Demonic Desire
'Oh Mother I Am Lost!' The Murder of Elsie Beckmann
Formed in Fright: The Topography of Terror
Der Schwarze Mann
The People vs Hans Beckert
IV: Fritz Lang's America - The Social Trilogy: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), You and Me (1938)
8. You Ought to Be in Pictures: Liliom and Fury
The Flight of the Refugee
Meet John Doe: Lang Arrives in America
A Whole Town of John Does: The Lynching of Joe Wilson
'You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town': Joe Wilson's Private Theatre
9. You Only Live Once
The Paradoxes of Vision
Identities Assembled and Expunged in a Carceral Society
The Re-educating of Joan Graham Taylor
10. You and Me
A 'Cinematic Hash': Experimental Cross-breeding among the Hollywood Genres
You Can Not Get Something for Nothing
V: Framing Desire: The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), House by the River (1950)
11. The Woman in the Window: Cycles of Desire
Prelude to Nightmare: Shop Window Sweetheart
The Paranoid World Made of Glass
Eternal Return
12. Scarlet Street: Life Is a Nightmare
Mirror Images
The Fourteen-Carat, Seventeen-Jewel Cashier
The Artist's Signature and the Mourning Play of the Melancholy Baby
No Perspective: The Cancelling Out of Chris Cross
13. Secret Beyond the Door: Broken Frames and Piercing Gazes
Pastiche and Palimpsest
Speaking and Seeing: A Woman's View and Voice
Unlocking Bluebeard's Seventh Room
Architecture of Doom
14. Coda: House by the River
Effacing the Traces and Writing the Abject
The Flow of the Writer's Hand
VI: The 50s Exposés and Lang's Last Testament: The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Big Heat (1953), While the City Sleeps (1955), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt ( 1956), The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)
15. The Blue Gardenia
Contradictions of a Decade
Off the Hook
Booking Cinderella
16. The Big Heat
Circuits of Corruption
The Construction of Authority
Rogue Cop
The Big Heat Falls Alike on the Just and the Unjust
17. While the City Sleeps/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The News is Made at Night
Television, Person to Person
Inside Out
18. The Circle Closes on the Last Mabuse
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Recycled Vision, Feigned Blindness, Total Exposure
The Slte of Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modernity
The Death of Cinema, Cinema and Death
Notes
Bibliography
Index
