Lang's Fury Continues to Resonate in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

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Date

2020

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Odradek Edizioni

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Abstract

America’s history is rife with racial tension. Continued discussions about rights, opportunities, and civil liberties across racial lines have been captured in cultural objects since imagery of slave ships, auctions, and plantation life were produced and circulated in the early-seventeenth century. In addition to drawings that were primarily used for newspaper advertisements and announcements, documentation of the earliest photographs of slaves, daguerreotypes from 1850, resurfaced in the attic of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in 1976. Images like these contribute to the racial tapestry that has been woven over the course of generations. As visual mediums evolved, the cinema also captured representations of social struggle on the topic of race since the early-twentieth century. One such film was released in 1936 by a film director who had recently emigrated from Germany. That director was Fritz Lang and the film was titled Fury. In this article, I discuss the impact of framing shots and the editing of footage in the creation of a narrative by filmmakers, as we see in Fury, in addition to more contemporary concerns pertaining to the potential fabrication of footage through editing and modifying the content of filmed media. One of the many accomplishments of Fury is the way it frames the medium of the moving image as the closest we can get to reliably capturing events. This, however, comes with the caveat of the medium’s easy manipulability. Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement, we continue to see how filmic evidence is often received by their consumers with distrust.

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Keywords

Black Lives Matter, Activism, Cinema, Classical Hollywood, Fritz Lang, Human Rights, Lynching, Race, Revolution, Resistance

Citation

Porter, Cynthia D. “Lang’s Fury Continues to Resonate in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict. Volume 6 (2020). Open Source. https://zapruderworld.org/volume-6/langs-fury-continues-to-resonate-in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement/