Movie retrospective curated by:
Palazzo Esposizioni Roma and La Farfalla sul Mirino

Promoted by:
Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

In conjunction with:
Goethe-Institut Roma, Forum Austriaco di Cultura Roma

Our gratitude goes to:
Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (Wiesbaden), Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin), Park Circus (London), Tamasa Distribution (Paris), Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Lab80 (Bergamo), Tucker Film (Udine)

Media partner
Quinlan.it

“Only one word to qualify him: inexorable. Every frame, every movement of the camera, every shot, every movement of his actors and every gesture has something decisive, something inimitable”. Truffaut’s words still ring true as a description of Fritz Lang’s cinema and its pioneering contribution to the very concept of movie directing, to the possibility of impressing a single vision on a film’s countless expressive facets, reflecting the concept of Kunstwollen, the “artistic volition” of German and Austrian culture. A crucial figure in the season of expressionism in Germany, before going on to become the man behind some of the best noir movies ever filmed in Hollywood, Lang is the focus of this retrospective held to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. The retrospective revisits the salient moments of his directing career, revealing an infinite legacy of visual and narrative inventions. Watching these films again today means realising how entire movie genres were codified and the extent to which every thriller, every sci-fi film, every espionage movie and every fantasy film still owes a debt to Lang’s unparalleled genius today. But it also means discovering a moviemaker who was not afraid to take his measure of such tough themes as guilt, fate, violence and the moral ambiguity innate in each one of us, an approach reflected in visual terms by his obsession with geometrical constructions and complex architectural forms. The result is cinema that never ceases to be topical. One has but to think of Metropolis, filmed in 1926 but set exactly 100 years later, which tells of a world torn apart by increasingly glaring economic inequality and in which technology is first and foremost a weapon for manipulating and exploiting the masses: a prophecy as “inexorable” as its maker.