More than seventy years after its premiere in 1931,
Fritz Lang’s M remains one of the most important
films of German film history, a bewildering product of Weimar modernism
that continues to raise more questions than it can—and in
fact wants to—answer. This seminar is designed to examine
M’s extraordinary richness in meaning against the
backdrop of groundbreaking historical, film historical, cultural,
aesthetic, and ideological initiatives during and after the Weimar
Republic. Aside from using M as a case study to explore
the contested course of Weimar film history, this seminar also serves
as a theoretically informed introduction to the critical study of
film and visual materials in general. Weekly screenings of seminal
German and other films from the Weimar era and beyond will help
illuminate M’s formal strategies, narrative concerns,
and modernist energies in further detail, whether they concern Lang’s
innovative use of editing, sound, and mise-en-scene; the film’s
unique depiction of urban space; the question of cinematic authorship
as it pertains to Lang’s as much as to Peter Lorre’s
career; or the film’s depiction of issues such as power, surveillance,
urban mobilization, madness, desire, serial murder, vigilantism,
and justice. Discussions and most readings in English.
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