“reconstruct the discourses which circulate through the film”: historical base and referentiality. (7)

Summary list of discourses in M:

Artistic discourses:
Modernism
Expressionism
documentary
Epic Theatre

Filmic discourses [codes] in M:
omniscient camera
experimentation with sound: sound bridge, sound collage
“serial” structure”: interlocked & embedded scenes
smoke as metaphor, as ‘alienation effect’
playacting metaphor

Historical discourses:
Weimar Republic
aftermath of World War I
economic depression
rise of Nazism

Social discourses:
“wound culture”
- fascination with crime
- serial murder
- pulp fiction
- mass media and media spectacle

artistic trends:
- Zeittheater
- Epic theater

surveillance (panopticon)
- police
- militarism
- bureaucracy
- ‘politics of the street’
- organized crime

criminality and mental illness
capital punishment
anti-Semitism

Notes:

1. Berlin 1931 (5-26)

M as modernist film
M as documentary
“clockwork” analogy
original title and title change

experimentation with sound in M
- free of diagetic constraints
- “signifying code”
- "silent film with sound”
- Expressionist use of sound
- sound collages (whistling)

theatrical conventions:
- Zeittheater: topicality
- Brecht and Epic theater: move away from psychology and empathy to sociology and critical distance.
- episodic structure (as in serial), indirect presentation
- Peter Lorre, Epic acting

analysis: opening sequence(11-14)

historical factors:
Weimar Republic
depression
rise of Nazism

Topicality:
Serial murders
Recollection of wartime slaughter

2. Serial murder, serial culture (26-38)

analysis: Elsie meets the murderer (27-28)

“wound culture” and fascination with crime

Peter Kurten and Fritz Haarmann
“psychoses” of attack, missing person, letter
media spectacle

“law of seriality” and structure of M
- illustration & seriality more important than cause & effect
- "serial narratives” in the culture
- “multiple interlocked and doubly embedded scenes”

3. Total mobilization (38-53)

analysis: billboard / barroom sequence (39-40)
“sound bridges”

technologies of supervision, registration, and surveillance
- the panopticon
- imagery of smoke in M

“politics of the street”
- organized crime
- making heroes of criminals
- lack of identification with police

4. Before the law (53-77)

analysis: “mirror scene” (54-57)
- embedded in two other narratives: handwriting & bureaucratic
- telephone conversation: bureaucracy
- playacting motif
- physiognomy: pseudo-‘science’

Depiction of Beckert
- effeminate
- childlike
- oral fixation
- fascination with store windows
- “substitute father” for children

“omniscient stance” of camera toward Beckert and others

connection of criminality with mental illness

analysis: street scene – shop windows (58-64)

Beckert’s “trial”
- “forces a re-examination”

[skip “war scene” (68-69)]

Beckert as outsider
- pathologizing of otherness
- anti-Jewish connection )

death penalty controversy

analysis: concluding scene (75)

[skip 77-82]