M

Cold Dew passed three days ago (the term turned on 8 October at 14:29), and the nights have turned with it. Tonight calls for a cold film — a city reshaped by fear of a man no one can see.

There is an in-house reason too: this archive already holds Lang's Metropolis (1927), that vast vertical silent city, and it has always lacked its counterweight. M is that counterweight. Four years after Metropolis, Lang delivered his first sound film, moving the camera from the tower tops down to the street — and he did it not with spectacle but with a whistle. It also fills the archive's thinnest decade: the 1930s held only Modern Times (1936) until now.

What it does with tonight's second film only becomes clear once both are seen: one invents cinema's rules, the other smashes every one of them.

1931 年的柏林。一名连环杀童犯在活动，全城恐慌，报纸天天头条。

警察搜遍出租屋、地铁站与妓院，指纹、笔录、线人撒了一整张网，一无所获。受害孩子的母亲们站在街口，只能互相搀扶。

同样的压力也压在另一群人身上——持续的搜捕搅黄了黑道的生意。于是贼王、老鸨、销赃者与扒手头目开了一场会，做出一个决定：警察抓不到的人，我们来抓。全城的乞丐、小贩与擦鞋童都被动员成一张监视网，目标只有一个：那个还没有名字的人。

影片几乎不拍犯罪本身。它拍的是一座城市如何在恐惧里改变形状。

（这里不再往下说。）

1931: a film with almost no dialogue that reinvented film sound

M premiered at Berlin's UFA Palast am Zoo on 11 May 1931. 117 minutes (original German version), German, produced by Nero-Film. Directed by Fritz Lang, written by Lang with his then-wife Thea von Harbou.

Lang had resisted sound. M — his first talking picture — answered not by letting cinema speak but by letting sound arrive before the image:

• Off-screen sound as narrative: the whistle (Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Peer Gynt suite) is heard before the killer is seen, and the audience recognises him before the police do — the film's most suspenseful passages run on sound, not image;
• subjective sound: in the sequence where mothers wait for news, a police telephone bell is cut against the rhythm of a knife on a chopping board — sound becomes a state of mind;
• counterpoint, not sync: children's rhymes, the whistle and city noise chase one another; sound is used as structure, not accompaniment.

Two manhunts, one shoulder

The film splits its narrative in two. The police line plays like a procedure picture — conference rooms, filing cabinets, fingerprint close-ups, much of it on location with real documents. The underworld line moves to an entirely different, gangster-film rhythm. The two are cut in parallel, tightening until they meet on a single shoulder.

The violence it does not show

M almost never shows the crime itself. Its worst moments are off-frame: a balloon rising, an empty plate, a mother's hand. Lang leaves the fear for the audience to finish — which is why the film still works ninety-five years later.

Peter Lorre's first major role

Round-faced, flat-nosed, with eyes where innocence and cruelty coexist, his Hans Beckert delivers the monologue at the film's improvised tribunal exactly on the seam between silent-era gesture and sound-era voice: gestures first, then words, like a man only just learning to speak.

Before the turn

Shot two years before Hitler came to power, drawn loosely from the Düsseldorf child murderer Peter Kürten (the film deliberately never names the city), it has been reread ever since as a warning about a society so frightened that it hands judgement to another kind of violence. Critics trace the entire serial-killer genre — from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) through Seven (1995) to Zodiac (2007) — back to this point.