M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

or: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

An X-ray of a Weimar metropolis, disguised as a police procedural: the child murders that set the plot in motion are almost treated as incidental. Curiously, this film and Lang's next, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, share many similar qualities. (Either is arguably his masterpiece.) Each begins with a sequence of visual and mechanical virtuosity, only to step immediately thereafter outside the closed circuit, to environments and characters not (yet) directly connected to what has just been illustrated. Quite confidently, and correctly, Lang posits that nearly the only information we need to understand the magnitude of Hans Beckert's crime is a shot of a smile that appears on Frau Beckman's weary face as she realizes her daughter is just getting out of school. The elision of the Beckman narrative (both mother and daughter are subtracted, permanently and at the same time, from picture and then from sound), the absence of any bereaved parents, until the final shot, is very nearly an act of mercy on Lang's part. Or, perhaps it is simply that Lang wasn't one to rely overmuch on pathos, instead presuming the audience's emotional intelligence by filtering grief through other layers of story and observation.

In both films, Lang hints at a socio-economic infrastructure in which the criminal class, and the law, can coexist on balanced, even peaceful terms. (A meeting of criminal "department heads" in M is like a prototype for the "New Day Co-op" on HBO's The Wire.) In both films Lang looks forward to periods in which terrorism challenges, even destroys, traditional ways of life - ways of seeing - just as it portrays a society still reeling from a war that gave the world means of killing in terms of mass production. The problem presented both to the police and the traditional criminal class is the man who, although he is nothing more than flesh and blood, introduces a virus of the irrational into age-old, smooth-running social mechanisms. And, in his manipulation of the media, Beckert affirms his status as an agent of political as well as social agitation: no system can process him. He is Mabuse from the bottom up rather than the top down, a single human entity that can wreak havoc on all extant systems. He is an insoluble grain.

M was Fritz Lang's first sound film, and it arrived after the box office failure of Woman in the Moon. Although Germany had produced indigenous talking pictures starting in 1929, M is the epicenter of all sync sound innovation, in artistic terms. Just as Citizen Kane is often pointed out not really to be the "first film" to have this or that mechanical novelty, M is the aesthetic forebear even of the talking pictures that came before it, and certainly of all but a few that have been made since. While the "correct" mode of thinking, according to commercial moviemaking wisdom, is to form around the picture a field of unceasing, balanced, and realistic sound that is subservient to the visual, Lang treats the bulk of M's audio like a blank slate, only adding sound when it is absolutely necessary. This practice lends itself to scenes of total silence that can be disconcerting to contemporary viewers, who are accustomed to scenes which otherwise have no dialogue or sound effects to have, at the very least, a layer of ambient quiet that reassures the viewer that they still inhabit the space they see, and that nothing is wrong with the projector. With M, Lang's use of sound is not restricted to a playing backup, but frequently serves as counterpoint, even as the dominant source of information, while incidental business plays out onscreen.

With the painstaking attention to detail that he was known for, Lang constructs the city almost entirely inside Nero-Film. It is not a city that is represented on a literal, macro scale, with vistas and skylines and easily identifiable tourist attractions (which is how we would do it today). The 99.9% of the city that we never actually see is present in the film through surrogate imagery - one speakeasy, one quaint cafe, one toy store, etc., is sufficient to serve as the DNA we require for the spirit of the unseen remainder of the metropolis to inhabit our mind. Lang's vision of the fictional city funnels up from the subatomic level, giving us only the spatial information we absolutely require, and then filling those spaces with exhaustive detail: knick-knacks, furniture, character-based props, character-based wardrobe, signage, food and drink, etc. All of which suggests the dizzying infinity of a Mandelbrot Set. We're given a little, a tightly-packed little, and we fill out the rest.

(The spaces in Lang's cinema would gradually empty out, or appear to, as he progressed through the 1940s and '50s, toiling more and more thanklessly, until at last The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse would be constructed of annihilating voids.)

Spaces in M are distinct from one another as they need to stand as an archetype (as the pickpocket chief speaks for the pickpocket association), and also finds (or builds) common traits between functionally different parts of the city, such as the police headquarters that is crosscut with a meeting of the criminal underworld, each in a smoke-filled boardroom. The compositions in Lang are often described as "geometric," and indeed they are filled with or filled out by circles, straight lines, right angles, and so on, but taken as a whole, the mise-en-scene is arranged as to draw the viewer's eyes into a mass of harsh, twisted angles, personified by the transformation, through knotted geometry, of milling-about townspeople into violent, hysteric mobs bent on revenge, based on false information, or no information whatsoever.

At the conclusion of M, Lang shows us that the crime is beyond even his ability to process, at the height of his meticulous, intuitive style. During the long sequence of Beckert's underworld trial, there are two separate shots in which a hand, symbolizing justice, reaches out to seize the killer by the shoulder. The last verbal expression of these two, criss-crossed layers of justice is, "In the name of the law...", but this is followed by the incoherent pronouncements of a judiciary, and finally the full truth, the most explicit articulation of the void that has existed in and around the film the entire time, is spoken by the mothers.