Sound Strategies: Lang’s Rearticulation of Renoir

Fritz Lang directed Scarlet Street in a triangulated response to his previous film, The Woman in the Window, and to Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, which it explicitly remakes. The ambivalent relation among the films is most clear in Lang’s treat-ment of sound, which reverses Renoir’s practice. When one innovative and well-respected director sets out to remake the work of another, and those two talents disagree on practically every aesthetic and method-ological issue that filmmaking presents, the result is likely to be a pair of films as disparate as Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).1 What Thomas Leitch calls “the characteristic promise of the remake—that it’s just like the earlier film, only better, ” is even more complicated when the film in ques-tion is an American re-presentation of a foreign film, since American audiences may not recognize and respond to the “improvement.”2 Leitch proposes that re-makes typically rely on “a triangular notion of intertextuality ” in which the three sides of the triangle are formed by a literary original, a film translation of that original, and another film that stands in relation to the first two.