Fritz Lang M: Analysis

Fritz Lang's M (1931), contains both dialogue sequences and silent sequences with music or sound effects. Lang edited the sound as if he were editing the visuals.

We are introduced to the murder in shadow when he speaks to a young girl, Elsie. We hear the conversation he makes with her, but we see only his shadow, which is ironically shown on a reward poster for his capture.

Lang then set up a parallel action sequence by intercutting shots of the murderer with the young girl's mother. The culmination of the scene relies wholly on sound for its continuity. The mother calls out for her child. Each time she calls for Elsie, we see a different visual: out of the window of home, down the stairs, out into the yard where the laundry dries, to the empty dinner table where Elsie would sit, and finally far away to the child's ball rolling out of a treed area and to a balloon stuck in a telephone line.

With each shot, cries became more distant. For the last two shots, the mother's cries are no more than faint echo.

In this sequence, the primary continuity comes from the soundtrack. The mother's cries unify all the various shots, and the sense of distance implied by tone of the call suggests that Elsie is now lost to her mother.

visibly and audibly--the major predecessor of that movie's low and high angles, its baroque and shadowy compositions, its supple and wide-ranging camera movements, its tricky sound and dialogue transitions, and above all its special rhythmic capacity to tell a "detective story" by turning most of its characters into members of a chorus, delineating a social milieu and penetrating a dark mystery at the same time.

t was also the first talkie to have a person heard off screen while an image unrelated to the dialog is displayed on screen (as seen early in the movie when Mrs. Beckman is heard calling for her child Elsie while an empty attic, an empty chair, and an empty stairway are shown). While Lang used sound heavily to enhance the mood and feel of his film, he also went without it (complete dead silence) on occasion to increase tension and create a paranoid mood.

Other cool tricks used by the Fritz Lang include heavy use of shadows (largely in the style of the yet to come Film-Noir genre), and the use of setting to create darker moods (evidence that Lang was at the head of the German Expressionist movement).

Lang used it sparingly and its silent sections are among the most dramatic. The purposeful sparseness of sound in the film lulls the viewer into a tranquility that is at various points abruptly disturbed by whistles, bells, and screams.

After seeing a mother nervously awaiting the return of her child, the film cuts to a little girl walking down the street, bouncing her ball. She bounces it against a wanted poster for the child murderer. The murderer's first appearance is his shadow suddenly looming onto the poster, the shadow appearing to speak as he asks the child her name, stressing his anonymity. Lang intercuts between Elsie's mother getting more and more agitated and the murderer buying Elsie