The Portrayal of a Murderer in Fritz Lang's M: Toward an Effect of Three-Dimensionality in the Classical Cinema

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Notes

1. For historical details of these events and for reading of the film in the context of Weimar society see Maria Tartar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 41–64, 153–172; also Anton Kaes, M, BFI Film Classics (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 26–38.

2. This essay refers to the film version M 2000 (3024m) restored by Nederlands Filmmuseum in collaboration with the Bundesarchiv—Filmarchiv and the Cinémathèque Suisse.

3. Roger B. Wyatt's term in ‘Thinking About Thoughtware’ (on-line publication, accessed 4/25/2004) http://tech-head.com/thought.htm

4. Edouard Pommier, Théories du portrait: de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 105 ff.

5. Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck,1983), vol. I, 39ff.

6. My summary relies on Jacques Aumont's discussion of Balázs in Du Visage Au Cinéma (Paris : Editions de l’Etoile/ Cahiers du cinéma, 1992), 79ff.

7. See the discussion of this image in Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 226–228.

8. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, History of American Cinema 1, (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster / Macmillian, 1990), 43f.

9. See Lev Manovich's brief and handy summary of the technical features of the early animation in “What is Digital Cinema?” http://www.manovich.net/text/digital-cinema.html, 2-3.

10. Musser, 25.

11. Kaes, 19-20. See also Jeanpaul Goergen, Walter Ruttmans Tonmontagen als Ars Acustica (Siegen: MuK, 1994).

12. See Wolfgang Iser on the schematic character of literary texts in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. David Henry Wilson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 168–179. For example, Iser writes about literary inderterminacy and filling-in of blanks (using Jane Austen as example) as follows: “What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes, the gaps arising out of the dialogue—this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. He is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said. … But as the unsaid comes to life in the reader's imagination, so the said ‘expands’ to take on greater significance than might have been supposed: even trivial scenes can seem surprisingly profound… it is a product arising out of the interaction between text and reader.” (168)

13. Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch,’ Schriften zum Film:, Der Geist des Films’: Artikel und Aufsätze, vol. 1, (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984), 51–52.

14. Bruce F. Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3–22.

15. Musser, 25.

16. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson LTD, 1952), 54–55.

17. Balázs, Schriften zum Film, vol. 2, 57ff.

18. There's a good discussion of brain mechanisms specializing in facial identification in Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 174–182.

19. Freud, “The Uncanny,” in A. Dickson (ed.), Art and Literature, vol. XIV (Harmondsworth, 1985), 347ff.

20. John Berger, “The Suit and the Photograph,” in About Looking (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1980), 27–36.

21. Lang wrote two articles upon the release of the film in which he reflects on the invisibility of the murderer in terms of his lack of face. See the note xi.

22. Deleuze, 88.

23. Musser, 25.

24. Quoted in Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 145.

25. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17–29.

26. For an acoustic analysis of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse see Chion, ibid., 31–47.

27. Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Der ewige Jude: Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilm (Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, 1995), 268–271.

28. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 181.

29. For a thorough study of such pre- and pro-digital narrative constructions see Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

30. De Chirico's reflections on destabilization of the spatial relations in painting imply the same notion of freedom from the physical constrains of the real spaces. See Stoichita, 145 ff.

31. Manovich shows the digital cinema's debt to early animation techniques, discusses its character as a sub-genre of painting which is based upon manipulation and intervention within an image, which in the traditional cinema was possible only by approximation and suggestive techniques. Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?,” 1–13.

32. D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After The New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 211.

33. Characteristically, the initial title of Lang's film was Murderer Among Us, which was changed into M during the course of shooting. Kaes, 15. For the discussion of similitude substituting resemblance see Rodowick, 211.

34. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ in What is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), 9ff.