Focalization in Fritz Lang's M (1931)
M (1931), originally titled Mörder unter Uns (The Murderer is Among Us), is Fritz Lang’s first “talkie” film. The story takes place in a German city: a serial murderer of young kids has kept the citizens unsettled; in this restlessness sweeping the own city, not only do the police feel obliged to catch the killer, but the underworld criminals are also eagerly chasing him, for they are having a hard time because of him, since the tightened raids by the police have affected their own business. The underworld launches its own network of search for the murderer, running parallel to the formal investigation procedures conducted by the police. Both approaches manage to spot the murderer named Hans Beckert, but it is the underworld’s men that first mark and physically catch him. Beckert is put onto a kangaroo court for the underworld’s trial. On the court, Beckert claims that he is a psychopath that kills involuntarily. As with the police, by interrogating an ally to the men who catch Beckert, they accidentally find out where Beckert is taken and get there timely, just before the court of criminals are going to kill Beckert. The final scene ends with the victims’ mothers sitting outside the real court and sobbing, one of them uttering: “This will not bring our children back. One has to keep closer watch over the children! All of you!”
Although the director stated that “to warn mothers about neglecting their children” was the very message he wanted to convey (Jenson 95), we can tell it is beyond an alarming killer story. Multiple sets of characters are enmeshed together: citizens, policemen, criminals, and a psychopath killer. As Paul M. Jenson remarks, the crowd in this films is no longer anonymous as it is in his previous films, but is with its members being “sharply delineated;” yet despite such pity and concern for individual, “his observation is still highly objective. There are really no main characters, though Lorre’s (the actor for the murderer) is the central and most famous role, and no one with whom the viewer is allowed to identify. This gives the film a cool, documentary quality. (94, my emphasis)” In order to discover how the film leaves the viewer dangling to identify with any set of the characters, I would like to study the film in terms of its focalization and offer my interpretation of the film’s indecisiveness of the use of focalization.
In this essay, I would like to consult Gerard Genette’s definition of the various kinds of focalization to examine how the narrative is shifted among the multiple sets of characters and with what filmic technique the information is regulated, articulated and restricted to realize the shift. According Genette’s categorization, the sorts of focalization include zero focalization, as is in a pure, simple diegetic narrative; internal focalization – in which the character’s subjective perception of certain information is fully reflected- which is subdivided into “fixed focalization” strictly bound to one single character, “variable focalization”, which shifts from one character to another and is frequently used as an authorial method to regulate the information, and “multiple focalization”, which deals with multiple perspectives on one subject; and the third kind “external focalization”, in which the subjectivity of the character is kept unknown. Within one narrative, focalization may transit from one kind to another, for “the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily steady over the whole length of a narrative (191),” yet “any single formula of focalization does not … always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section. (191)” I end the outline of the terms here, for I will name any further alterations and possibilities of focalization when I encounter them in my analysis of M, for the scenarios that reflect the flexibility and ambivalence of some of the definitions are just inexhaustible.
With regard to M, we can roughly divide the film into five movements: the introduction to the issue, the social turmoil being stirred, the meetings respectively held by the police and the mob, the race between the two parties to catch the murderer, and the underground trial. For each chunk of the film, there are different forms and degradations of focalization of the characters. Generally speaking, the shift of focalization in M moves the narrative from the suspension of a crime story to the multiplicity of a socio-political case, then to the representation of situation of a social alien.
The first chunk of the story mainly focuses on the social scene, a panorama of the lives of the people under the plight of the serial kid murders. The focalization remains mostly external at the beginning. I will first take the first sequence for a detailed analysis. After the credits, the beginning image is preceded by the off-screen voice of kids singing a folk song, the lyric of which is ominously echoing the current situation. The camera overhead is kept at a long distance to shoot the kids in the yard from above, and then it pans to the left, then up, to show in another long shot a housewife who is collecting the laundries. She cries: “Stop singing that song!” The camera keeps still at the position, until the woman turns back into the building. The singing, having been paused for a second, resumes off-screen. Then it cuts to the interior of the building. As the woman enters the frame from the bottom, the camera moves to track her to the door of an apartment. Another woman, as we know later is Mrs. Beckmann, answers the door and gets the laundry. The camera keeps them both in the frame in full figures as they are talking, until the Mrs. Beckmann turns around; there then occurs a 180-degree axis reverse of the camera position, as in the next shot the camera is positioned inside Mrs. Beckmann’s apartment. By now, the focalization remains external, as we see the camera movement is highly fluid among potential focal characters and there is no shot/reverse shot that shows the subjective perception of any of the character. For the following shots inside the house, there is the continuity editing that links the housewife raising her head at the clock that strikes, the image of the clock, and the reaction shot of the housewife; this seems to hint at some subjectivity of the woman, yet it could be dubious to pass it as internal focalization for the limited information it gives out. The viewer is still at the position of interpreting her act of looking at the clock. What follows is an inter-cutting of Elsie walking on the road after school and the Mrs. Beckmann’s preparation for the lunch. Then after the shot is cut back to the girl, the camera tracks her to the lamp-post and turns to shot the reward notice of the killer, until the shadow of the murderer enters from the right and the off-screen voice asks “Your ball is beautiful. What’s your name?” The girl’s answer is also kept off-screen. The objective distance the camera keeps serves to defer the identification of the audience with the characters. What follows is another intercutting between Elsie and Mrs. Beckmann; on the part of the girl and Beckert buying the balloon from the blind vendor, it is captured in a single long shot that lasts for the whole purchase; her mother’s anxiety is on the other hand increasingly shown, and the level of focalization rises for there are more sets of shot/reverse shots used to show her conscious care of the time, her asking her girl’s friends about Elsie, and talking with the postman. Yet the objectivity of some shots still tests the degree of such focalization, for example, in the scene of her conversing with the postman, the camera is positioned still at the front door where the postman stands, when she moves out of the frame to get her purse, her voice sounding off-screen. The climax of this sequence that symbolizes Elsie’s death is not only of external focalization, but also with authorial intervention, as after Mrs. Beckmann yells Elsie’s name to the outside streets, there are an array of inserted images of pure objects without characters: the staircases of the building, the laundry-drying area, the lunch plates; as the yelling fades off, it is cut to the meadow, to which the ball of Elsie rolls out of the bush, and then the shots of a high power line, on which Elsie’s balloon is tangled. The opening sequence largely keeps the subjectivity of any of the character in check to maintain a basically external focalization, with some paralepsis, excess of information, to show the anxiety of the mother who loses her child.
The next chunk becomes more complicated in terms of focalization. The street scene of the mass sensation stirred by the extra news of the murder is still externally focalized, given the camera position (above and behind the characters) and the long shot distance, from which the mass remains an anonymous collective. However, more subjectivity begins to sneak into such scenes of multiple characters. For instance, the gather-together of acquaintances perches on the boundary between external and variable focalization, as it comprises shots of different distances to capture the interactions between the several individuals. Shot/ reverse shots are used in shooting some heated conversations to build up the air of gaining confrontation, making the faces a little bit caricatured. This echoes the fervently implanted notion by the police and the press that: “The murderer is among us.” How much this social horror affects and concerns the individual within the collective is also elaborated on in several scenes like the raid of the policemen at the crocodile club, the talk between the bar-tender and the officers and the street chaos of mistaking an innocent man for a suspect: shot/reverse shots are adopted in the conversations, and medium close shots help to frame the human reaction in a more detailed way. However, this degree and amount of individual depiction does not amount to internal focalization on any side. The point of these scenes are no more of eliciting allegiance to a single set of characters than showing how the interpersonal relationship becomes fragile and the civil space is offended in this time of plight, as Tratner comments on the function of these shot/reverse shots as signals of failure of interaction: “… (the friends who dine together yet end up in mutual accusation) show the breakdown of the classic interpersonal space of dinner conversation: there is no trust that one’s private space can be shared by others at all. The shot/reverse shot of Hollywood films, the paradigmatic center of interpersonal relations in eyes looking into eyes, is parodied…we again see direct point-of-view shots reversing, so that both men are looking directly into the camera and almost spitting in anger at each other. One-to-one interaction is not the way to get to ‘know’ someone at all: it produces error and mistaken identification. The basis of the liberal order is threatened by this failure of one-to-one interactions to reveal the truth. (Tratner 120)”
A bulk of time in this chunk is in fact devoted to the phone call between the inspector and the secretary, which is innovatively shot in a lecture-like style. The inspector’s account of the police effort is visualized by relevant images, from footages of the police action to the scientific, unnaturally large graphs of fingerprints that look odd against the realistic setting of the offices. Although the voice of the inspector is addressing the secretary, the visuals are for the audience rather than the secretary. In another represented scene within the inspector’s account, an analyst is enumerating the features of the suspect’s calligraphy that is reflective of his histrionic tendencies; on his mention that the suspect should be a psychopath, Beckert appears on screen to make grimace at his reflection in the mirror, as if acting to the analyst’s dictation of psychiatric characteristics. If in the first part of the “lecture” the image is calculated to fit the speaker’s perception (in an expressive way, though), the image of Beckert here is completely independent, for at this point, none of the other characters should have known the existence of Beckert. The exposition made by “juxtaposing voice and image from different places and different times (Jensen 101)” thus authorial authority to regulate and configure information in order to endow the film with the kind of documentary objectivity.
In the third chunk the underworld criminals come as the fourth side of the dynamic. In order to show their own prowess, each of mob head is given some room to flaunt their booties. Then follows the intercutting of the police meeting and the criminal meeting, in which both sides, although to the same end, are shown taking disparate approaches; their cognition of the situation and solution are essentially in stark contradiction, as emerges in the juxtaposed discussions: for the Inspector and his men, public cooperation is impossible and undesirable (“It makes me puke!”), while it is the very thing the criminals are going to mobilize, and more efficiently than the police. The quasi-debate is deliberately made as a sociological effort to meditate the differences and similarities between the two kinds of organizations. The complexities of the social strata are more and more revealed in terms of orientation, capability, methodology and simply visibility. In order to introducing the network of beggars, there is a long take which examines the beggars’ hide, framing as many details of their lives as possible, then pans to the next-door coffee shop and halts to give a close-up of the notice board, which reads that beggars are prohibited here. The settings of the two worlds are revealed to be in vicinity, but before that, the camera meanders around the place of the beggars without a hint at such a connection. The split of the city is symbolized in this shock effect created by mise-en-scene and camera movement.
In the fourth chunk, departing form the previous physical documentary quality, the narrative starts to get internally focalized on several (sets of) characters, making it to some extent fit Genette’s definition of variable focalization. First of all, for the first time in the film, the subjectivity of Beckert is foregrounded. Beckert stops at a shop window to look at the display of knives; in this sequence, the first shot is him standing at the window looking inside, the next shot of the arrays of culinary tools shows what he sees, then reverse shot shows his fascinated expression at the display till his expression changes into that of shock, in the shot next to that we see the reflection of a little girl in the mirror inside the store window; in the reaction shots of Beckert, we see him struggling, wavering, close his eyes trying to suppress something, and then open his eyes again; the shot/reverse shot repeats once; in the next reverse shot, the mirror shows the girl is leaving the scope of the mirror; next we see the camera is positioned behind Beckert, and him looking left, where the girl is heading, his facial expression is visible on the reflection of the window glass. This is by far in the film the first sequence that shows so completely the subjective perception of Beckert. The mise-en-scene, on the other hand, utilizes the “display of knives, … to circle Becker’s head” (Jensen 100) so as to show he is trapped in his own desire and the menace he does to satiate the desire. The ensuing scenes show how he is impelled to follow the girl; in the long take tracking the girl Beckert sees in the window reflection, although he does not appear within the frame for the first half, we know it is him for he is whistling the tone we are familiarized in the Elsie’s death; then when the shot tracks the girl and her mother walking back, the camera deviates from its original track and moves on to focus on Beckert, dejected and frustrated.
As with the other two sets of characters, both have their own plot to develop. The police officer goes to Beckert’s house for clues and recognizes him to be the murderer. For the underworld “agents,” however, they finally meet Beckert in person. In the scene of the blind vendor recognizing Beckert, the vendor is temporarily internally focalized. The sequence covers the blind man hearing the whistling, recognizing it, calling for help from a young mob, and being left alone; during the process, he remains in the frame of the camera. The whistling, like the object to the eye, helps to signal that this is his active perceiving; this equation is established in a previous scene showing that he is sensitive to sound and music. The focalization is transferred to the young mob in the sequence of him marking the letter M on Beckert. First, the creation of suspense is based on parallisis/lack of information of M, determined by the youngster’s perspective grounded in the partial knowledge. We, as well as he, see at a distance that Berkert takes out of a knife, yet not knowing the exact context, and presume Beckert is going to kill the girl he is with. But after the youngster manages to mark Beckert and moves out of the frame, the camera pans, in an authorial omniscience, to show the mark on his back. In this following sequence, focalizations on the chased and the chaser are alternated in the favor of an exciting story-telling, until finally the pale, ghastly Beckert is found in an office building. For the scene of Beckert being caught, it effectively utilizes off-screen sound to suggest the approaching of his chasers, so that the camera is fixed to show the panicked expressions of Beckert.
The police write their side of the story. In the interrogating the suspect of ransacking an office building, the inspector accidentally finds these mobsters have been actually searching for the murderer. Multiple characters like Franz the burglar and two inspectors are alternatively focalized to show how the inspectors play a tactful trick on Franz to force the truth out of him.
In the penultimate scene of the kangaroo court, finally, Beckert is the one internally focalized. There are medium shots to show the sight of Beckert: ferocious expressions of the “judge panel” and long shots that pan across the underworld courtroom to show this cramped room of revenge. He is repeatedly scared by the poking arms of the blind vendor and the attorney, as is faithfully portrayed in visual terms: Beckert stays at the center of the picture when an arm extends into the frame and scares him, then the camera pans along the arm to frame both figures in the picture. Longer time is given to him to make monologue confession about his compulsion to kill. But this conclusion is dubious, given such alterations as the close-ups of individual listeners who are secretly sympathetic with Beckert. More importantly, when the attorney stands up on his defense, Beckert is ousted from the frame as he is crouching at the foot of the fence, his head bent down, and no shots is given to suggest what he is thinking. The focal character becomes the attorney who tries fiercely to win over the irritated and agitated audience.
From the meticulous description of the focalizations of M, I would like to try to distinguish some of the features of its shift in focalization. And how the focalization affects the interpretation of the story.
The film is in general multi-focalized. But with the four sets of characters, they follow different trajectories of focalization. The social mass, first of all, is generally kept externally focalized, as we can see in the beginning sequence in which the camera pans from the kids in the yard to the woman collecting laundry and the chaotic street scene when newspapermen are selling news extra on the recent murder and reading the reward notice. There are cases of the individual within the collective being shaded with individuality, for the sake of emphasizing how the incident affects people on the personal level. For Beckert, his subjectivity is gradually revealed. The character transforms from the object of external focalization (in the typical scene of writing the anonymous letter as a evil figure) to the subject of internal focalization, in which his inner struggle is first behavioristically represented and then verbally explained. It is interesting how the presence of Beckert is gradually immersed into the story: first his image is deliberately imposed among scenes (such as the handwriting analysis scene), then as the plot of catching the murderer emerges as the main plot of the story, and with more clues of him disclosed, Beckert begins to be internally focalized, as his multiple characters are portrayed, and with the final scene, he becomes the central, victimized figure in the court, opening up all his suffering to the listeners. It is just the reversal of the mass scene, perhaps, in which the mass, first appearing as the vulnerable and the inferior, become more violent and intolerant when their source of fear is laid bare in front of them in the end. The police and the underworld are in a lot of cases juxtaposed to foreground the contrast between them. With multiple members on both sides, I find the two sets are at best multi-focalized at some point, for they are in most cases mouthpieces of certain standpoints and value systems, as we can see from the intercutting of the meetings of the both sides. As with some single, dramatic scenes, as the story-telling demands, the characters are in variable internal focalization to make a scene coherent. It is manifest in the sequence of the capture of Beckert, in which the chaser and the chased are focalized, the partial knowledge can patch up as a coherent whole. Finally, there are insertions of documentary/lecture-style shots and graphs, as well as detached camera positions and movements to position the viewer most of the time as an observer. The long takes of the beggars’ hiding place, and overhead long shots of the expressively-shaped street both attest the attempt to building objectivity. In some cases the camera stays still at an empty scene, waiting for the character to enter (which can be found in the opening scene of the kangaroo trial, in which the camera witnesses the whole process of fetching Beckert from the dark custodian place). Some montage also reflects the authorial design, like when Mrs. Beckmann cries Elsie’s name, there are deliberate montage of images of the plates, the banisters, and then, when Elsie’s death is hinted, the ball she plays with and the balloon tangled on the wire-line.
As with M, the favorite work of Lang himself, there are indeed numerous ways to interpret it. The several interpretations I am going to make here are inspired by the design of focalization in this film: the issue of duality, the existence of an alien within a society, and the anxiety stemmed for the destruction of the traditional interpersonal relationship.
One of the conspicuous features of M is the opposition between the underworld and the police. The narrative is laid out on the dual tracks. According to Jensen, “through the opposition of the criminals and the police (with an individual caught between), M really embodies the more general contrasts of disorganization (the police in one sense, the mob in another) and order (the criminals and beggars), justice and revenge, Democracy and Fascism, and perhaps even the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Third Reich. (95)” However, it is not the director’s point to judge which way is better, but to prove that although one could have reasonably built up expectation on either form of solution, both have failed in the end to eliminate the fear of the people. The police, being more civil and scientific, are less efficient than the aggressive, intrusive criminals; however, what the arbitrary power of the underworld exert is an illegal trial, in which no apology is allowed for the defendant. Although as the movie unfolds, the force of the mass, stressed and mobilized by the underworld mobster leaders, is likely to more identifiable with the viewer than the elitist statement made by the inspector (that public is not worth the trust to cooperate with), it may be channeled to a neutral perspective in the kangaroo court scene, where Beckert is to a large extent internally focalized, and his fear for compulsiveness of killing impulse as well as the despair for isolation is forcefully conveyed. It is reinforced by the director’s shift of focalization to capture the secretive identification with Beckert among the audience. This is what the multi-focalization brings to the viewer: an experience of double horror that is induced by the complex design of murderer-hunting. The process is elucidated by Tratner as:
In the beginning, the movie seems to be about the horror of killing a child, and we join with everyone in seeking to removes the horror. But when we see him, he seems rather innocuous as we follow him, gradually coming to a rather different horror: the horror of living in a society that can pursue and observe everyone and persecute them endlessly. If at first society is unfree because of the possible threat of Beckert everywhere (and of anyone at all being Beckert), it then comes to seem unfree because there are hidden people observing and judging everywhere. So the movie gives us in two different ways the experience of paranoia. (125)
The term “everyone” Tratner uses is interesting. The first “everyone” in Tratner’s statement is referred to “everyone else” apart from the murderer, the “everyone” that the intimidated individual can turn to, the “everyone” who is normal; while the second “everyone” to be pursued and observed is everyone in its broadest sense, the “everyone” who is multi-faced, and susceptible to the arbitrary judgment and punishment. The increasing gradation of internal focalization of Beckert is the “plead” the film makes to revise the stereotype of psychopath as “a criminal and a disease” but as “a sick man who cannot help himself” (Jensen 95). On the other hand, the presence of an “alien” to a society is always likely to kindle the craze for self-defense, which leads to “the second kind of murder,” differentiated from Beckert’s individual action of murder, which, in the name of justice, dwells on “the emotional impulsiveness”(Jensen 95, 96).
What is behind this hysteria, however, is the fear for ambivalence. His mental disorder makes him legally and ethically immune, for lawfully he should never be sentenced to death, and his act that is considered good in traditional ethics, (such as being kind to kids) is also in question. It is perhaps the most dangerous when “duality has become homicidal schizophrenia, with an innocent, unassuming façade hiding. (Jensen 94)” However, such ambivalence is symphonic of the time. The death scene of Elsie is replaced by several domestic images of the staircase, the plate …and her human-shaped balloon caught in between wires. Tratner notes that this is the dislocation of “an ‘intimate’ object in the wrong setting, held not by a child’s hand but by an utterly impersonal social structure.” Beckert as a stranger is particularly able to build familial-like relationships with the victimized kids, and his crime lies in “the alienation of the familial from its human and social setting” (Tratner 120). The alienation also lies true in other social relationships, where having a random chat can be considered guilty, friends get mad and accusatory at each other, and reporting clues of the murderer becomes an personal instrument to revenge. The alienation also occurs in familiar spaces in “inhospitable shapes” (119): the banisters forming a kind of confinement, the culinary tools configured into unfamiliar patterns from their ordinary look, real streets reduced to maps, and suppressive shade that ominously occupies half of the picture, of the staircase in crocodile club and the cellar of the underground court. What convey these images are mostly objective devices like long shots and, typical of M’s case, lecture like insertions; it seems to highlight that these structures “get in the way of humans, divide them, force them into positions they don’t want, and haunt them…(126) ” The multi-focalized narrative of M, in this sense, utilizes the narrative to explore the comprehensive and interlocked causes of horror in such a city where social space is reconfigured and unfamiliarized.
In this essay, I use Gennette’s theory of focalization to examine how the transition of focalization among four sets of characters constitutes the narrative of M (1931). The film possesses a documentary-like objective quality. Generally multi-focalized, the narrative adopts different alterations of focalization on different characters. It can be partially summarized that for the mass scene, the narrative is largely externally focalized, but when it gets down to individual level, there are scenes like conversations to adopt internal focalization to foreground the individual situation; for Beckert, his subjectivity is gradually revealed as the narrative unfolds, and through the change from external to internal focalization, this enigmatic character is humanized; for the policemen and the criminals, the two parallel sets of characters are put in multiple focalization, for the sake of portraying a comprehensive picture of values and conduct for both sides. These different modes of focalization work in synergy to depict a time in which everyone is under plight: although the two forms of organization are in opposition to each other, they cannot eradicate the real source of insecurity, for as the case of Beckert shows, the “otherness” that the ordinary loathe can be also inherent in “us.” Furthermore, as far as some visual presentations are concerned, the fear for Beckert is the fear for the unfamiliar, inhospitable and ambivalent parts in urban expansion. For M, the strategy of focalization serves the purpose of depicting a panorama of a city under development, which is inhabited by multiple strata of people and a common specter.
Works Cited
Gennette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. 161-185.
Jensen, Paul M. Cinema of Fritz Lang. Oak Tree Publications, 1968.
Tratner, Michael. Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
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Final Paper for Film Form and Film Sense
蓝光
