A Film Canon

 

 

The prototypical serial killer film, M firmly construes its central figure - a child murderer (Peter Lorre) stalking the streets of Berlin - as a synecdoche for the city itself, transforming him from protagonist to presence, a blind spot only indirectly accessible to the camera. To this end, Lang ensures that we don't see M's face until late in the narrative, as well as constructing a mise-en-scene that perpetually suggests something happening just beyond the edges of the frame, whether by way of the emphatically stark, empty streetscapes, or the pervasive disjunction between sound and image - epitomised by M's signature whistle, which always precedes his (momentary) appearance. Simultaneously, the city authorities are increasingly reified, producing the first fully articulated vision of the police as an institution, rather than a collection of discrete individuals, that I have seen to date, as well as connecting it to those dark, conspiratorial networks anticipated by Dr Mabuse's crowded, claustrophobic card-rooms. In fact, the killer's most striking gesture is to explicate, and thereby undermine, instutionalised crime, bringing about an identification of criminal and policeman that culminates with his (show) trial. Held by prominent members of the Berlin underworld, who sit as both judge and jury, this penetrating deconstruction of the rhetoric of terror explains Nazi censors' dissatisfaction with the original title: Murderers Among Us.