While sippng a rum collins through a straw in Tiny's Bar, following J.J.'s stag party in springtime New York, Chris Cross tells Kitty March of his impressions of the current art scene. Turning her head away from Chris-as if she were about to spit a lemon seed, and commanding the frame in the righthand foreground, she quips, You're never appreciated in your own country. To which Chris responds, hesitatingly, stuttering his affirmation to underline and erode the substance of her remark, That's, that's one way of looking at it.[l] But that's already two ways of looking at it, for in 1944 Fritz Lang is appreciated in neither Europe nor America. At this instant the film shifts onto the register of its own painterly condition. The characters tell us of its production; the couple indicates how to read the film as a long rebus and how, on the thematic layer of the plastic arts in the film, they perform their roles as fragments of letters that trace the history of the confrontation of European and American shapes. When European painters of the 1920's fixed letters and words on their collages, oil-based canvas and paper, they resurrected hieroglyphs. Not only was perspective flattened by a depthless surface of representation, but the field of drama that had been aligned with academic painting was now written out of the frame. Whether of German or French inspiration, Cubists and Expressionists found a way of dismantling and recasting the fields of varied and often self-cancelling meaning in works of art. Painting rebusses from scenes of contemporary life, they shifted an optical plenitude from illusion to matte areas of force. It is this type of abstraction that