Destiny

Fritz Lang 1921

Bargaining with Death for the return to life of her dead husband, a young woman is sent back into three periods of history where she must enact a woman in similar circumstances. If she can save her lover she has won her bargain. Lang’s first exploration of the nature of Fate, which emerged as a major theme in his work, here takes the guise of Death. For Lang, Fate is a mixture of the repressive conditions of modern society and the nature of the Human Condition itself. Fate is expressed visually as much as by plot: the characters are frequently dwarfed and overshadowed by the huge expressively lit sets, imprisoned by and reduced to geometrical elements of the décor. Thus Lang’s mise-en-scene renders perfectly the feeling of domination which this Fate governed Universe evokes in Man

Fritz Lang (1921)

Buster Keaton (1926)

Alfred Hitchcock (1926)

F W Murnau (1922)

Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)

Jean Cocteau (1932)

Frank Borzage (1927)

Buster Keaton (1926)

Buster Keaton (1927)

Arthur Robison (1923)

René Clair (1925)

Buster Keaton (1920)

René Clair (1924)

Vsevolod Pudovkin (1925)