One thing I hope to do with this blog is address the alarming lack of content that has been a pervasive problem since I started graduate school last semester. To make up for it, over the next week, I'm going to be giving excerpts from papers I wrote while in graduate school last semester. Please note that these are going to be sometimes dense, often boring, and most likely not very good, but I'm sure someone out there is going to enjoy them. The first here is a paper I wrote on Fritz Lang's M as a work of proto-noir. Please note that I refer through the paper to a chapter Chris Fujiwara wrote on Out of the Past, which can be found in his book on Jacques Tourneur.
M is in very much
about the city—the structures allow for the anonymity of Beckert to walks the streets without suspicion, which also
addresses Fujiwara’s third point related to cities. As Gunning explains,
“Berlin is a city hungry for and inundated by information. But the way this
flow of information interrelates essentially alienated is attested to by
Beckert’s letter, his desire to communicate…yet remain anonymous.”[1]
M demonstrates both textually and
visually how urban landscapes and technology are essentially responsible for
letting Beckert get away with his murders. Berlin is a city of strangers, so
during an early sequence, a number of strangers are accused of being the
murderer for no particularly reason in striking point-of-view shots, which also
implicate the spectator and further suggest the anonymity of the murderer as it
extends beyond the screen space. Later, the iconic thumbprint towers over the
investigator, as technology emphasizes and empowers the myth of the monster.
Most essential however is the approach of the police to capture Beckert in
comparison to the gangs and how they
fail. The police use their archival documents and topographical view of the
city (as noted by the many maps Lang highlights in scenes with them) to search
for Beckert, leaving them with a name and an address but no man. Instead, it is
the criminals who find the man in bodily form (his name remains anonymous).
Thus, like the classic noirs, M
suggests a world in which the institutions that create and signify progress are
also the ones where exploitation is most likely to occur, and here it is the
rise of the interconnected institution of the city.
