Who is Who in Film Studies

Austrian-German director of Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). Lang's visual grammar encodes a single recurring question: who built this system, for whose benefit, and what happens when those below discover the mechanism? The vertical structure of Metropolis is not set design — it is a theory of class. Technology, in Lang's cinema, is never neutral: it is always the instrument of whoever built it.

Can help you study: Expressionist cinema and visual grammar, the cultural history of machines, representations of technology and urban life, the politics of architecture, Weimar Germany, film noir.

Screenwriter and science fiction writer who worked in both Hollywood and the pulps with equal authority. Brackett wrote the screenplay for Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946) and the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980, completed after her death). Her Eric John Stark planetary romance series defined a tradition of hardboiled science fiction. She was the rare writer who moved fluently between literary science fiction and commercial cinema.

Can help you study: Film noir, science fiction and the pulp tradition, screenwriting, planetary romance, Howard Hawks's method, the relationship between genre fiction and cinema.