In fact, the overall situation is first expressed in a specific and individualized time and space: a house in a city, a terrace and a kitchen in an apartment building, the journey from the apartment to the school, the posters on the wall, the excitement of people.. ....
But soon in this environment there will be two dots, and then two action lines, which are constantly intersecting and alternating, maintaining each other's rhythm: the police line and the gangster line.
It has been found that the distinctive structural features of the negative or positive characters as organic expressions have already had a fixed position: so there is a gradual exposure of the killer.
When the gangster controls the killer, we will experience the real action and know the real killer, this is the duel between M and the beggar and the gangster.
This double-line structure has its own setbacks and rhythms, leading us from situation to duel, from synthetic symbols to binary structures.
Of course, the duel is not the action - the only moment of the image, or only in it, the duel unfolds around the line of action, always marking the necessary synchronicity.
The process from situation to action is therefore accompanied by a leap between duels. This dual structure is also a multiple structure. Even in a purely Western film, it is difficult to delineate this structure at the final stage.
When the real duel happens between M and the police or society? Or was it between him and the gangster who didn't want him? Does the real duel exist elsewhere? In short, it may exist outside the film, although he exists in the film.
In the gangster court scene, the robber or the beggar represents the crime—the power of habit or behavior. Representing crimes of rational structure, they blame M's impulse to act. M responds to his innocence to this: he has no choice but to follow impulse or emotion, and at this time, and only at this moment, can the actor perform in an expressionist way. In short, isn't the real duel in M is the Murderer between Lang and Expressionism? It was his farewell to expressionism and his conversion to realism, as evidenced by The Testament of Dr. Mabus, in which the indifferent structure of Mabus Cup realism kills.
In the end, the organic performance still retains the final ambiguity, because when the police are going to catch the gang and take M out of their hands and put the murderer on trial, people don't know if the situation will change because of this, if the crime is convicted or not. Either get slapped by it, or everything changes, and crimes are bound to change (now, they must be watched carefully, even for small crimes).
View more about M reviews
