
The Big Heat’s Resting Gun
Scenes of a resting gun open and close Fritz Lang’s vigilante film noir The Big Heat, but there are no silenced weapons of any sort in between.

Scenes of a resting gun open and close Fritz Lang’s vigilante film noir The Big Heat, but there are no silenced weapons of any sort in between.


"Crazy" movies for crazy times. These 32 films make the case for the recently-escaped-or-released-mental-patient narrative as its own subgenre, replete with a language of recurring themes, plot devices, and character archetypes.

Fritz Lang’s Indian epics are hothouse flowers of cinema with gyrating dancers, man-eating tigers, pagan magic, groaning lepers, and mythic moments. Has Lang ever come up with more desperate, mad, or heroic symbols of futile struggle?

Remember the pre-CGI visual beauty of Fantasia? Fischinger, who also worked with Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, among others, invented the "lumigraph" (a machine for "playing" colors on screen). This guy should be put on a stamp.

From playing with Death to finding a lost Incan civilisation, these two Fritz Lang silents burst with adventure and intrigue.


These five silent films reveal details about life in America, Germany and France between one colossal war and another.