"M is the Murderer" completed by Frieze Lang in 1931 tells the story of a mentally ill person who murdered children. Its technical achievements alone are worthy of attention: practical and imaginative use of sound, clever cross-editing, detailed and attractive composition like a picture. Because of these achievements, "M is the Murderer" will always attract audiences from different countries and different generations. But I think that Lang’s films are fascinating because they reflect the turbulent German society in the 1930s. Whether intentionally or not, "M is the Murderer" is like a mirror image of the rise of fascism in Germany. However, in this process, the most important thing is that the film attempts to present this fact to those German audiences who are deeply trapped in fascism and its growth. It is well known that the German cultural crisis in the 1920s to the early 1930s was pervasive. From 1919 to 1933, the Weimar Republic gradually declined, and the entire society fell into a kind of chaos and disorder. Whether in economic, social or psychological, poverty, unemployment, and depression became common phenomena. The fiasco of the First World War destroyed Germany's traditional personal identity and the sense of stability in an orderly society. This general disorder and instability was also reflected in many major cultural customs of the time. The nightmare-like works of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch represent the painting style of the German expressionist school. They focus on the dark and violent world hidden in daily life. During that period, Freud's work became more and more important, because his work discussed the dark subconsciousness under the consciousness of women and men, and at the same time, it also portrayed a civilization full of secret dissatisfaction. The German expressionist films of the 1920s also paid attention to this crisis and its portrayal. As Siegfried Krakauer and Lot Eisner said, some of the most important films of that period showed "enchanted screens," which reflected the unstable reality of society. From "Dr. Caligari's Cabin" to "Nosferatu" and "Interview with the Vampire", many of these movies are about madness and destruction, and even realist street films. And the plot also shows a world that collapses and is heading for extinction. In the film, the dictators and madmen control the chaos, and many viewers can see this hinting that Hitler is a character like Caligali, who will use the panic in the crisis as a tool of destruction. These themes are the center of "M is the Murderer", which is derived from the tradition of expressionism. Lang was also quite involved in this trend in the 1920s. The protagonist Beckett was seized by a force he could not control, and this force drove him to kill the child. Under his calm appearance and daily life, this crazy murderer began to push the world into chaos. In terms of style, the film absorbed the expressionism and "street realism" traditions in German films. On the one hand, a large number of expressionist shots present a frantic and uneasy atmosphere. For example, the spiral staircase symbolizes a deep dilemma and a dizzy vision. On the contrary, there is also street realism that describes social poverty and the living conditions of the lower classes, so sometimes the film looks like a documentary. It should be noted that, unlike other expressionist films, in "M is the Murderer", it is difficult to distinguish between the psychological chaos in the fantasy world and the social chaos on the streets. Or just from the story itself, in this post-expressionist film, Lang makes it difficult to answer the question: Is Beckett an evil lunatic, or a victim of some power that is all over the society?
Sometimes, the film clearly shows this confusion and crisis. The balloon symbolizes a victim of Beckett in the film, and its pudgy image happens to resemble Beckett's body shape, perhaps to imply the connection between the killer and the victim. The police on behalf of law and order launched an operation to hunt Beckett, through Lang's parallel and cross-editing, it is very similar to the fact that the mob in the underworld is also looking for Beckett, and it is almost indistinguishable. Finally, there are several well-arranged mob scenes (at the time of the final judgment), and those scenes appear to be as hysterical and cruel as the tragic murderer. These examples can't help but remind people of the Nazis' slaughter in the name of law and order, as well as those soldiers who had perfect discipline and became war machines.
Then, "M is the Murderer" produced many double images or reflections, which seemed to confuse many questions about a crisis society: where does the crisis originate? Where is the order and where is the chaos? What is a nightmare? What is reality? His The double image and the resulting problems are most evident in the character of Beckett, more precisely, when both him in the movie and the audience watching the movie carefully examine his image. In the film, Beckett examines himself in the mirror over and over again, trying to find the "madman" who seems to have been lurking somewhere in his body. Once again, Beckett looked in the shop window, and the window glass showed that his shadow was placed in a frame, and the frame was formed by the shadows of a group of knives arranged in a square in the shop. Here, this ordinary person has turned into a vicious image. Later, in the same mirror, Beckett found that he was seen through, because when he looked in the mirror another time, he saw the letter "M" on his back.
The reflections that appear in different scenes and shots are not the same thing, but they are all revealing the dark side, chaos, and self (and social) murder impulses. Moreover, in most mirror images, the camera puts the viewer at an angle. It seems that they are also involved in this kind of reflection-from Beckett's over-the-shoulder lens or directly reflecting itself. Just as the film seems to have a strange sympathy for the lunatic Beckett, these mirror images seem to force the audience to discover the dark side of their hearts from the reflected images of the mentally disordered murderer. Like other German films in the late 1920s and early 1930s, "M is the Murderer" indirectly reflects the German culture in crisis, not just a simple reflection. Combining the two traditions of expressionism and street realism, it turned the nightmare into reality, and reality turned into a nightmare in a disturbing way, which was far from contemporary German films. Perhaps the German officials also recognized this, and they forced Lang to change the original title "A Murderer Among Us" (A Murderer Among Us) because they thought the title was too politically sensitive. After escaping from Nazi Germany for a few years, Lang may realize that even though "M is the Murderer" is so powerful, there is still no movie that can stop the authoritarian darkness spreading on the streets of Germany. M. Trillo
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