Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 5, February 2003
Joel Freeman
The Semiosis of Death in Lang's _M_:
Film and the Limits of Representation in the Weimar Republic
_M_ Directed by Fritz Lang Germany, 1931 The cultural production of the Weimar
Republic is marked by an obsession with death. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in the films of the inter-war years.
This obsession reaches a remarkable apotheosis in Fritz
Lang's _M_ (1931). _M_ brings into focus the absence of
presence that is inherent in any attempt to represent death.
This is the principal factor that gives _M_ a high degree of
visual and conceptual intensity. _M_ makes explicit the
degree to which film, as a medium, operates as a trope and
vessel for death in the cultural arena. When we excavate the
conceptual and cultural ground from which _M_ emerges we
find that the film is itself conditioned by a constant
re-discovery of the structurally determined relationship of
film to death. _M_ offers an unfolding of the formal
properties of film, which drive film compulsively back into
the terrain of death. At the same time the film makes
explicit the specific theoretical and historical factors
that shape and condition its recourse to representations of
death. In this sense _M_ can also be seen as an intervention
in the philosophical and aesthetic discourses surrounding
death in Germany between the wars. All of this is only possible because _M_
takes as its organizing principle a self-conscious inquiry
into the impossibility of representation that is intrinsic
to death. Any work of art that uses death in order to
advance a narrative or aesthetic purpose is instantly thrown
into an impossible position regarding its own effort to
offer representation. This impossibility is foregrounded
throughout the film. Consequently representation of death,
qua representation, becomes its subject matter. By
explicitly thematizing the absence of presence inherent to
representations of death, _M_ establishes a unique cinematic
semiotics of death. One of the theoretical by-products of
this is that it illustrates, in sharp detail, the fact that
core elements of the cultural life of the Weimar Republic
were predicated on a compulsive return to the problem of the
limits of representation. _M_ also illustrates the way in
which the return to death is itself marked by a desire to
overcome the impossible. [1] The virtue of _M_ is
that it foregrounds the position of death in a way that
challenges normal modes of representation of death. This
makes it an ideal site for an inquiry into the fundamental
structural features of film. In treating death it employs a
method that one might call non-objective representation.
When we excavate the theoretical sub-text that conditions
_M_ we discover that this method, that of non-objective or
non-representative representation, is in aesthetic terms its
operative principle. Non-objective representation is what
allows _M_ its semiotics of death. It is also what allows
_M_ to successfully navigate between an aesthetic of pure
non-objectivity which was advocated in certain quarters of
the avant-garde, [2] and the unconsciously mimetic
that dominates in art produced for mass consumption. The
very notion of non-objective representation is of course
inherently paradoxical. But it is only by reading the
manifestations of this method in _M_ that we uncover the
structural elements that force film, as film, into its
compulsive return to death. Thus the traces of non-objective
representation in _M_ and indeed in film as such, are the
aesthetic signifiers that allow us to unravel its peculiar
semiotics of death. An inquiry into the relation of the
structural features of _M_ reveals that film itself (and not
just _M_) is structurally bound to the absence of presence.
Further, we find that the presence of absence, or the
absence of presence is a constitutive feature of
representation in general, whether it be pictorial or
textually based. Film in particular, as the paradigmatic
vessel for the absence of presence is, as such, a trope for
death. Its formal properties determine that it must operate
in culture as a trope and vessel for death. Exactly why this
is so will be addressed later on. For the moment it is
important to note that inquiry into the formal properties of
film does not preclude contextual or historical
considerations. In fact just the opposite; in _M_ the
operation of film as trope and vessel for death reveals in
turn the status of death as a guiding trope for the
political life of the Weimar Republic. In this regard the
formal properties of the film (its narrative content and the
historical ground from which it emerges) are all
inextricably bound together in death. In _M_ the essential
inter-linkage of these putatively separate arenas becomes
clear. _M_ provides us with the material
necessary for an understanding of the role that film has as
trope for death in the cultural life of the Weimar Republic.
In order to understand how _M_ allows us this discovery we
need to have at hand a sketch of the conceptual ground from
which the film emerged. _M_'s position as a cinematic moment
that provides a view onto the formal properties of film as
trope for death is itself only possible because of the
particular historical and conceptual circumstances that gave
it birth. In this sense _M_ supports the notion that every
layer of the work of art is conditioned by its historical
context. In narrative terms _M_ is most effective when it
opens itself to socio-historical and philosophical questions
regarding the status of death in the Weimar Republic. _M_ is
thoroughly conditioned by these sorts of contextual
questions. On no count does _M_ perform its cinematic
enactment of death, of the presence of absence, separate
from these questions. As such _M_ throws light on both the
conceptual and ideological framework of the Weimar Republic
and on the formal properties of film as a medium. These two
registers, the formal and the contextual, treated together,
bring the death in _M_ out of the shadows and afford a view
onto how, 'the epitome of all tropes' [3] operates
in the cultural arena. When we view _M_ through these
registers the film brings us to the realization that death
is the framing element for many of the most basic structural
features of cultural production in Germany between the
wars. In order to gain a foothold into the
conceptual and historical context that allows _M_ to operate
successfully as trope and vessel for death, we can turn to a
perhaps unlikely source, Edmund Husserl. In his Fichte
lectures of 1917 Husserl indicates the degree to which, in
the aftermath of World War I, death established an
extraordinary lordship in the cultural life of the Weimar
Republic: 'Need and death are today's teachers. For
many years now death is not an exceptional event which
permits itself to hide and have its majesty debased through
splendid congregations, under piles of bouquets and wreaths.
Death has again won back its holy primal right. It is the
great reminder of eternity in time.' [4] The sentiments that Husserl echoes here
were not at all uncommon among the vast majority of Germans
and among its intelligentsia. The 'again' in Husserl's
phrase ('Death has again won back its holy primal right')
indicates the historically specific relationship to death
that manifested itself in Germany after WWI. It points to
the conviction that WWI brought about a return to (in
Sigmund Freud's words) old primeval forms of barbarity,
[5] which many Germans, especially those conditioned
by the relative comfort and prosperity of Wilhelmine
society, imagined had been educated out of civilized Europe.
The unadorned barbarism of WWI proved beyond a shadow of a
doubt that long cultivated Enlightenment values were a mere
delusion, a mask designed to hide and domesticate the
fundamental and inexplicable blood lust that lay at the root
of 'civilization'. Where once the term civilization could be
used with confidence, WWI made it necessary to conceive the
term in italics because everything the term was supposed to
signify (reason, the autonomous subject, liberal democracy)
were fundamentally destabilized. Max Horkheimer provides a
succinct treatment of this phenomenon in his essay 'The End
of Reason'. Though published in 1941, and obviously meant to
critique the rise of National Socialism, it echoes quite
well the troubled and troubling position of reason
throughout the inter-war period: 'The fundamental concepts of civilization
are in a process of rapid decay. The rising generation no
longer feels any confidence in them, and fascism has
strengthened their suspicions. The question of how far these
concepts are at all valid clamours more than ever for an
answer. The decisive concept among them was that of reason,
and philosophy knew of no higher principle. It was supposed
to order the relationships among men and to justify the
performances demanded of them.' [6] The conceptual and ethical system that
Horkheimer alludes to here found itself in an extremely
precarious position from the first moment of the Weimar
Republic. The validity of reason as the guiding paradigm for
'civilization' was ruined in part because WWI appeared to
bring about a return not just to barbarism, but to a
barbarism accompanied by the dramatically increased
destructive power of industrialized warfare. The marriage of
technology and an irrational, elemental blood lust created a
new plateau of mass destruction. Mechanized mass destruction
illustrated that the belief system traditionally attached to
the conceptual nexus of reason ('Vernunft') and education
('Bildung') was itself not only complicit in the slaughter,
but in fact the enabling agent for the slaughter. Thus the
war exposed the dangers that adhere in instrumental
rationality, but which had until the war been largely
repressed in the name of the enlightenment model of reason,
education, and progress. [7] The war laid bare the
malignant irrationality that always lurks within the
rational conceptual order. According to Adorno and
Horkheimer in the _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, reason is
itself predicated on a desire for violent lordship over the
objective realm. As such a primal drive to dominate nature
forms the true essence of the machinery of reason.
Consequently reason operates as an ideological mask for the
drive to domination and as such is itself ultimately
irrational in that is leads to self-destructive
ends: 'The absurdity of a state of affairs in
which the enforced power of the system over men grows with
every step that takes it out of the power of nature,
denounces the rationality of the rational society as
obsolete. Its necessity is illusive, no less than the
freedom of the entrepreneurs who ultimately reveal their
compulsive nature in their inevitable wars and contracts.'
[8] Though these ideas were formulated during
and after the second war not the first, it is safe to say
that the first war was in many respects the principle
catalyst for the critical framework that they emerged from.
Not until WWI do we see such widespread distrust of
rationality as the organizing paradigm for Western
societies. [9] The shock of WWI led to a great
levelling of the conceptual and ethical playing field,
leaving in its wake a heightened awareness of the presence
of death. Tropologically speaking, death visited itself upon
Europe, during and after WWI, wearing the mask of a
corrupted reason. The mask of reason was found to be a guise
for death, and it had at its beck and call a blood-thirsty
form of the irrational. Death was no longer an entity that
operated outside the secure, rationally established
boundaries of Enlightened society. With WWI death burrowed
its way into the very center of reason itself. The war
illustrated that the comfortable boundaries of European
societies, putatively predicated on rational discourse, were
a delusion. The rational industrialized lordship of death
that marked WWI highlighted the vicious irrationality that
lurks within reason. As such death was found to be simply
waiting patiently all along for the right moment to step
forward, take up the reigns of power, and wreak immeasurable
havoc. Consequently death erased the foundation of faith in
reason that was still a powerful cultural force in Europe
and in Germany before the advent of WWI. [10] Thus
the trope that inaugurated and guided the psychic life of
the Weimar Republic was death. The kind of death that dominated much of
the cultural discourse in the Weimar Republic was not a
traditional form of death. It was a new face of death, one
that had ascended to lordship by destabilizing the most
basic principles of reason. Death enlisted the very tools
that reason had provided men in the form of instrumental
rationality and technology, and used these tools in the
service of a primordial death drive. Sigmund Freud's
'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death' provides a concise
illustration of the damage that war and the primeval death
instinct can do to the 'civilized' order: 'To sum up: our unconscious is just as
inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as
murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided
(that is ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primeval
man. But how far we have moved from this primal state in our
conventional and attitudes toward death! 'It is easy to see how war impinges on
this dichotomy. It strips us of the later accretions of
civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us.'
(299) [11] The unique shock of the war was contained
not just in the presence of death, which always raises its
head in each and every war, but the shock was also a result
of the way that reason and rationality had been perverted
into the mere servants of death. Thus one of the most
disturbing truths hammered home by the war was that
instrumental rationality itself had efficiently turned the
enlightenment model of reason into a thing of ruins. It did
this through the efficient exercise of industrialized
warfare and the technology of mass destruction. It follows
then that in many important respects the post-WWI years in
Germany were marked by a shift from reason as the
predominant cultural paradigm to a period in which no
unifying or guiding paradigms were to be found. Death,
opportunistic as ever, inserted itself into the ensuing gap
and established itself as the guiding trope for the Weimar
Republic. At this juncture the fundamental inter-linkage of
the historical and conceptual context of the Weimar Republic
to _M_ ought to be clear. The notion that death was in many
respects both the inaugural and guiding trope for the Weimar
Republic is corroborated by even a cursory glance at
cultural production between 1917 and 1933. Disparate arenas
such as literature, art, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis,
and sociology are all marked by an attempt to negotiate the
visceral intrusion of death into the everyday.
[12] Correspondingly _M_ also takes death as
its inaugural moment. The first scene is not an actual scene
but rather the absence of a scene. The film opens with a
long moment of black space inhabited only by the sound of a
gong. This opening is already a non-figurative,
non-objective, figuration of death. By framing a dead zone
_M_ points to the central position that death will have in
its entirety. It also indicates a political parallel in as
far as death was the founding and inaugural trope for the
Weimar Republic as a whole. Here we already see at work the
aesthetic principle of non-objective representation that I
mentioned earlier. The black space of the opening moment is
a deliberate framing of the impossibility of representation
of death. Death operates in the out-of-field, [13]
in this sense death is the frame for the entire film and the
frame for the frames in the film. Death has to operate in
the out-of-field because is a signifier that cannot be
signified and as such it can only be invoked through the
manipulation and framing of various kinds of absence. The
black space is the quintessential expression of this
absence. Thus already in the first seconds of the film death
takes up a dominant out-of-field presence. This is a
cinematic device, but it is also an indication of the
dominant place that death established within the historical
and conceptual context from which _M_ emerged. _M_ is characterized by a fastidious
attention to the presence of death in the everyday machinery
of German society. One of the lessons of WWI was that the
banality, everydayness, and even commodification of death is
typical of large scale industrialized societies when they
embark on war or enter into severe economic crisis. The
film's central figure, Beckert, is not a literal figure for
death, but he does in part embody what was, at the time, a
new sort of everyday banality of death. As such Beckert is
the locus around which the unrepresentability of death, as
expressed in the absence of presence and the banality of
death, organizes itself. For example, throughout the film
Beckert's shadow is much more ominous than Beckert himself.
Beckert appears rather innocent and incapable of controlling
the overwhelming presence of death that dogs his every step.
Death is the substance of the out-of-field that accrues
around him. If we use Gilles Deleuze's definition of the
out-of-field we can see that _M_ is predicated on an
obsessive reference to the out-of-field presence of death,
and also, in more general terms, that death is perhaps the
quintessential out-of-field presence for film as
such: 'The out-of-field refers to what is
neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly
present . . . In one case, the out-of-field designates that
which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other
case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing
presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather
to 'insist' or 'subsist', a more radical Elsewhere, outside
homogenous space and time. Undoubtedly these two aspects to
the out-of-field intermingle constantly.'
[14] In _M_ Beckert is the conduit for the
out-of-field presence of death. In this sense Beckert is
foremost a figure for the everyman who was quite helpless to
control the lordship of death, one of the dominant features
of Weimar culture. Rather than revel in his identity as
serial killer he appears impotent and disoriented by the
murderous death that has infected his shadow. Beckert is not
in control of his own status as serial killer. In fact, we
never see Beckert commit a murder and we are not given
irrefutable proof that he is in fact the murderer. At times
it seems that Beckert has a shadow double or alter ego that
does the killings without his intention. What is important
is not whether or not he committed the murders but where
Beckert stands in relation to the suffocating absence of
presence that shapes the atmosphere of the film as a whole.
Beckert is clearly in many respects a victim of the
suffocating out-of-field presence, death, which accrues
around his being. Death is given its most literal
tropological representation in the film through Beckert's
shadow. Other non-representative signifiers, such as the
constant play of shadows across the visual field, or a
murdered child's balloon tangled in electric wires, also
indicate that death is the ever present out-of-field. In
every case Beckert himself is not present at the killing,
nor is death ever literally represented. Beckert is merely a
figure for the common person who is in essence a helpless
witness to the immutable and unrepresentable lordship of
death in his own life. In this regard actual murder would be
a too positivistic and empowering enactment of death. It
remains, like the out-of-field itself, a disembodied,
unrepresentable entity. When death encounters and is set in
conflict with the rational social order, the narrative of
_M_ is set in motion. In the most reductive terms possible,
this is a struggle for domination between the power of
death, the serial killer, and the powers of reason, the
police. The plot is dependent for its forward motion on a
rather familiar pattern of conflict between good and evil.
As the story advances the police mobilize the entire city in
a search for the murderer. The remnants of a rational social
order are embodied by the police and in particular in the
personage of Inspector Lohmann, the head of the homicide
bureau. The effort to capture the murderer is logical,
thorough going, and consummately rational. The focus on the
thoroughness of the search reflects the fact that the social
climate of the Weimar Republic had been so thoroughly
infected by death that no stone could be left unturned in
the effort to regain some degree of control over the
presence of death. The killer calls forth the presence of
death. This alone, once implanted in the minds of the
masses, is enough to destabilize the precarious social
order. Here _M_ acts as a mirror of a poisoned
public sphere. The often repeated phrase 'anyone's neighbor
can be the murderer' (or 'the murderer is among us') is
indicative of this climate of paranoia and extreme mistrust.
The paranoia is not directed at outsiders alone but also
reflects an even more unsettling mistrust of self. The mere
shadow of the killer becomes death embodied in the public
mind. The hysteria is not just a fear of death as other, as
wholly outside, but equally a reaction to the fear that
death and the irrational can and do spring from within. No
one is safe, not from one's closest family members or from
one's own 'primeval' self. In this sense death, much like
the out-of-field in film, is at once inside and outside of
the public body and each of its citizens. The police search,
in as far as it aims at unveiling the source of this
widespread paranoia, becomes a systematic and thorough, but
hopeless, attempt to explain the unexplainable. The presence
of the serial killer represents an embodiment of the dark
realm of irrational desires and the death drive which,
according to the lessons of WWI, lurked all along barely
beneath the surface of civilized society. Thus the search
itself is motivated by a desire to expose every inch of the
public body to the light of reason. The hope being that in
this way the sickness embodied in the out-of-field presence
of death could be expurgated. In _M_ death is the consummate
harbinger of the unknown, and reason is the only power
capable of cleansing it from the public body. The public itself, the masses, reacts
with hysteria to the out-of field presence of death because
they have a naive and primitive attitude of terror in the
face of death. The police, a more mature and 'enlightened'
class, offer a counter to this tendency in the masses. They
embody the skeptical rationalist credo that nothing can be
taken for granted and nothing can be assumed. Their belief
in the power or reason and rational investigation acts as a
kind of talisman against the primitive fear that the shadow
of death evokes in the masses. Base, primordial fear of
death can be and often has been manipulated for a variety of
ideological purposes. In _M_ this fear is used to justify
the most extreme and invasive sort of total mobilization and
public investigation. This aspect of the film reflects the
total mobilization for war that Germany underwent prior to
WWI, and it also foreshadows the rise of fascism. The police
act as administrators of life. They represent a hierarchical
social structure that relies for its power on its ability to
both preserve and deny life. In this regard the police
embody the remnants of a social order that offered a degree
of control over death through the exercise of reason. The
power of instrumental rationality to administrate life
depends on whether or not it manages to keep death within
the bounds of social control. Michel Foucault elucidates
this at length in _The History of Sexuality_: 'One might say
that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced
by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of
death.' [15] The impending destruction of this social
order is illustrated by the fact that in the end the killer
is captured not by the police but by organized criminals.
That a band of criminals and outcasts are the first to
locate death illustrates the degree to which the rational
social order embodied by the police was an entirely unstable
entity, incapable of attending to its most basic
prerogatives. This aspect of the narrative reflects not only
the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic as a state but
also the more broad-based failure of the enlightenment
project itself. In this way _M_ reveals the degree to which,
for its citizens, the Weimar Republic represented simply the
meagre remains of a misguided and ineffective conceptual and
social order. As such, in _M_, as in the actual Weimar
Republic, liberal democracy was predetermined to fail,
particularly when confronted with the elusive presence, or
absence of presence, of death. In _M_, in every instance, the
negotiation and representation of death proves to be a
failure. This holds true because any and all negotiations of
death qua representation are bound to fail. _M_ performs a
constant marking of this failure. As we have already seen
the murderer himself is not a figure for death. Part of
Beckert's function is that he stands as a marker for the
failure that adheres in any negotiation of death.
Negotiations of death always implode from within, precisely
because the ambitions of representation meet their limit at
death. Death, as a topic, regardless of the discipline,
whether in the sciences, philosophy, sociology, cinema,
literature, or the arts, is inherently limited to
tropological representations. Any negotiation that does not
first take this into account is bound to fail, not only in
its attempt at representation, but also on its own terms
because it operates without taking into account the limits
intrinsic to its own efforts. Nevertheless, failure at the
limit of representation, even if of the naive sentimental
sort, often proves to be the most revealing sort of
failure. Correspondingly, in _M_, the
self-conscious failure and impossibility inscribed in the
trope of death is perhaps its greatest success. It is this
failure that allows us to see the film as an aesthetic
intervention into the dominant theoretical and ideological
currents of its day. By making the impossibility of
representation of death explicit, and by placing this
impossibility in its social and ideological frame, _M_ acts
as a counter to the overwhelming tendency in the inter-war
period to make death into a subjective and ontologized
entity. At a time when death was not just metaphorically,
but literally everywhere, intellectual consideration of
death tended to restrict itself to the arenas of
psychoanalysis and phenomenology. As a result the specific
political and ideological ramifications of death in the
Weimar Republic were for the most part left uninterrogated.
To ontologize or subjectivize death means simply to place
the significance of death within a subjective frame and
treat it as a feature of individual existence, bereft of
ideological significance. Death, once subjectivized, is
reduced to something that the individual must struggle with,
either heroically or unheroically, on his own, in his
own-most-being. Certainly one cannot deny the necessity and
importance of ontologically and psychologically oriented
inquiries into the meaning of death for individual beings,
and in case of Heidegger the pre-subjective issue of Dasein
in relation to Being. Nevertheless the ontological and
subjectivist treatment of death tends to work to repress the
political and ideological significance of death as it is
manifest in culture. In the Weimar period psychoanalysis and
phenomenology were the two most important poles in the
intellectual terrain that fostered a subjectivized view of
death. In Freud's work death is subjectivized by making
death a feature of the unconscious, re-cognizable in terms
of the death drive or the primitive fear of death manifest
in the uncanny. In Heidegger's _Being and Time_, death, or
Sein zum Tode, is analyzed as a feature of fundamental
ontology. The overcoming of the inauthentic relationship
toward death in everyday inauthentic dasein becomes a way
for authentic dasein to achieve an authentic
unoutstrippable, non-relational, anxious resolve in
being-toward-death. [16] _M_ works to counter these tendencies by
calling into question the traditional ways that death is
represented. By highlighting the problem of representation
it offers a reminder of the fact that death, whether
represented at the register of philosophy, literature, or
art, is bound to a structural and conceptual absence and
impotence. Death, particularly the presence of death in the
cultural arena, is something that cannot be entirely
explained in terms of a subject-oriented psychology, nor can
it be entirely controlled and folded into the workings of
fundamental ontology. _M_ is a cinematic illustration of the
fact that the orders of language, creative discourse, and
discursive reason can never grasp death as anything but an
absence that marks the limit of human discourse. As such
death provides the frame for human discourse, but death, as
a marker for the infinite, cannot be translated into the
finite realm of human cognition. For good reason
representing and interrogating this limit is often the
central project of both philosophical inquiry and artistic
production. The instructive caution that _M_ offers in this
regard is simply that these efforts are ipso facto
conditioned to fail. _M_ illustrates that any representation
of death, from the word to film, is not the being of death
but rather a marker for the absence of both death and life.
Actual dead bodies fall into this category as well. The
corpse is the paradigmatic case for the problem of
representation of death. Perhaps even more so than any
artistic or conceptual representation of death, a corpse is
both neither alive nor entirely dead, in as far as it
represents the remnant of a former presence. Both the actual
corpse and artificial aesthetic and conceptual
representations of death operate in a liminal semiotic
terrain between life and death. The inherent impossibility of
representing death is exactly what makes the various
attempts to come to terms with it, make sense of it,
ontologize or sentimentalize it, both compelling and
repugnant. The resulting struggle, the always-hopeless
struggle to negotiate death through representation, gives
birth to discourses that are often unparalleled in their
intensity and cultural significance. This struggle is
precisely what gives _M_ its cinematic intensity. Death
becomes in _M_ the quintessential topic without a topos and
thereby elevates the film to a degree of conceptual
sophistication that defies the labels prurient and
sensationalistic, which were initially levelled at it by
critics. _M_ calls into sharp relief the impossibility of
representing death and thus fixing death within the order of
reason. Marking this limit is something that film, as a
medium, can accomplish more effectively than perhaps any
other discourse. Although saturated with an atmospherics of
death and with a constant, explicit thematization of death,
_M_ manages to abandon the usual cinematic methods for
representing death. At this register it lays bare the basic
paradox at work, either consciously or unconsciously, in any
representation of death. _M_ exposes the limits of
representation and simultaneously brings about an
intensification and sharpening of the artistic effort to
represent death. It does this not just by rejecting
representation, but also by laying bare the structural
impossibilities that adhere in its representation. The
film's method -- non-representative representation --
thereby casts critical light upon the practice of
representation in the broadest sense of the term. This calling into question of the
practice of representation is made possible through the
attention _M_ gives to its own cinematic materiality. The
principle method that the film uses to highlight its own
materiality is the still shot. Thus _M_ self-consciously
enacts the dialectical tension between photograph and film.
Throughout _M_ the still shot works to reiterate the
presence of death through the absence of presence. The
opening frame, a frame of black space, is a case in point.
Other obvious examples are the balloon mentioned above and
the still shot of the empty table setting where a murdered
child was supposed to return for dinner. _M_'s enactment of
the dialectical tension between photography and film is
indicative of a larger theoretical problematic that adheres
in the very materiality of any and every film. The essence
of this tension lies in the fundamental ambivalence that is
intrinsic to the supposed objectivity of the images that are
captured on film. To paraphrase Andre Bazin, the
photographic image captures its subject and embalms it. In
this way, while the subject is given a kind of after-life in
the film, it's essential, original being is displaced by a
mechanical reproduction of the original. [17] Thus
the framing of the subject is both a giving and a taking of
life. This basic ambivalence and tension adheres in all
filmic representation. This problematic was given expression
in Bazin's 1945 essay 'The Ontology of the Photographic
Image': 'Hence the charm of family albums. Those
grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost
undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits
but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set
moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not,
however, by the prestige of art but by the power of a
mechanical process: for photography does not create
eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply
from its proper corruption. 'Viewed in this perspective, the cinema
is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to
preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as
the bodies of insects are preserved intact out of the
distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from
its convulsive catalepsy. Now for the first time, the image
of things is likewise the image of their duration, change
mummified as it were.' [18] At this point, with Bazin's observations
in mind, it should be apparent that in order to understand
the role of death in _M_ we must tie the conceptual terrain
in which the film operates to its materiality. Analysis of
the content of the film has to be put aside, at least
momentarily, in order to read the film at this register.
Analyzing the use of actual representations of death is less
important than excavating the material out of which these
representations are moulded. The ambivalence that Bazin
points to in the passage above illustrates that film as a
medium is more inherently bound, at the structural level, to
the representation of death than any other media. This is a
simple result of the fact that all film, whether photography
or cinema, is a permanent and apparently objective framing
of the object at hand. Whether or not the frame is a single
motionless moment in time, as in photography, or the framing
of movement and time together, as in film, does not change
the fundamental fact that the object is thus framed and
preserved. Each event of framing and preservation acts as a
simultaneous taking and giving of life. Siegfried Kracauer
in his short essay of 1927, 'Photography', was one of the
very first critics to notice this fundamental ambivalence
intrinsic to photograph: 'In the illustrated magazines the
world has become a photographable present, and the
photographed present has been entirely eternalized.
Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has
succumbed to it.' [19] The tension between the life-giving and
the life-denying properties is the basic structural paradox
inherent in all film. This tension drives film, in its
innermost cells, again and again to the topic of death. I do
not think that the question as to whether or not the
materiality of film acts to deny or preserve life can be
answered negatively or positively in any absolute sense.
Certainly most critics who have entertained this question,
Kracauer among them, have tended to answer in the negative.
In fact the tendency among theorists of photography and film
is to view filmic representation as a sort of theft of the
aura or the authentic being of the original. This theft can
be seen as a kind of ontological erasure. But the framing of
the question in binary terms, as both Bazin and Kracauer do,
is less than faithful to _M_'s logic of non-objective
representation. In order to avoid viewing film as a bringing
forth of a multitude of small deaths, we need to allow the
ambivalence that is inscribed in the materiality of film --
the tension that it calls forth between the life-giving and
life-taking properties of representation -- to remain
detached from any fixed, absolute meaning. University of California,
Berkeley Notes 1. I don't think it would be going too
far to say that this impossibility is one of the central
problems in aesthetic discourse in general. At a very basic
level any attempt at the representation of something,
whether the representation be performed in film, language,
gesture, paint, stone, etc., is caught in the paradox that I
describe here. The attempt to give a thing life through
representation brings about its death. This is a consequence
of the fact that the effort to translate something from one
medium into another carries with it a double mark of absence
and mummification. This mark is constituted in the fact that
the thing represented is no longer present, representation
being fundamentally an indication of the absence of the
thing and an attempt to freeze that absence at a moment in
time. At this basic level all representation is inherently a
mummification of the thing represented in as far as
representation performs a freezing of things at a moment in
time. Thus the basis of representation is a delivering of
the thing represented to its death. In a dialectical fashion
this small death of the thing is also a delivering of the
thing to the threshold of a very different sort of
life. 2. See for example Kazimir Malevich's
suprematism and in particular his theoretical tract, _The
Non-objective World_. 3. My discussion of death as trope owes a
debt to the work of Elisabeth Bronfen. See in particular
Chapter 2 of _Over Her Dead Body_: 'Death the Epitome of
Trope'. Also of particular interest is the Introduction to
the anthology, _Death and Representation_, edited by
Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin. 4. Husserl, 'Fichte's Ideal of Humanity',
p. 112. 5. See 'Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death' (1915). 6. Horkheimer, 'The End of Reason', p.
26. 7. This discussion of the troubled status
of reason after WWI owes a debt to several sources. Chief
among those are several works by the Frankfurt School
theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Along with 'The
End of Reason' quoted above, the most obvious is _The
Dialectic of Enlightenment_, in particular the first
chapter, 'The Concept of Enlightenment', and Excursus II,
'Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality'. Another key essay
in understanding the Frankfurt School critique of reason and
instrumental rationality is Adorno's 'The Schema of Mass
Culture' (1936). 8. Adorno and Horkheimer, _Dialectic of
Enlightenment_, p. 38. 9. Another piece that is very helpful is
Bernd Hueppauf's Prologue to the collection _Essays on
Mortality_. Hueppauf provides a concise summary of the
relationship of death and reason, particularly in its
post-WWI manifestation. 10. Of course the Enlightenment was never
without its critics. The claim here is not that there was a
monolithic agreement of belief in reason and rationality.
Hamann and Nietzsche, among others, could be said to be
early critics of the Enlightenment project and reason as
such. The point remains valid nevertheless: reason, as a
cultural and philosophical social glue, lost the basis for
its moral justification in the face of WWI. 11. Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War
and Death', p. 299. 12. The examples cross all disciplinary
and cultural boundaries and they are too numerous to cite
here. Just to illustrate the degree to which death was
central to the times, a few obvious instances are as
follows. In philosophy and psychoanalysis there was Freud's
'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death' (1915) and 'Beyond
the Pleasure Principle' (1920), Martin Heidegger's _Being
and Time_ (1927), Franz Rosenzweig's _The Star of
Redemption_ (1918), Walter Benjamin's _The Origin of the
German Tragic Drama_ (1927), and Ernst Bloch's _Geist der
Utopie_ (1918). Examples in literature from the time period
where death is given a leading role can be seen in Doeblin,
Kafka, Junger, T. Mann, Hesse, Zweig, and many
others. 13. The out-of-field is a term is
borrowed from Gilles Deleuze's _Cinema_. I will make further
use of it and clarify its applicability to _M_ in just a
moment. 14. Deleuze, _Cinema 1_, pp.
16-17. 15. Foucault, _The History of Sexuality_,
p. 138. 16. These rather inadequate summaries of
Freud and Heidegger are not meant to say anything
substantive about the two thinkers. Such an effort would
require a great deal more space than is available here.
Rather, I want to provide merely an indication, in very
broad terms, of two of the conceptual positions that were
dominant in around the time of _M_. Such a broad
characterization allows us to fix more precisely the
contributions that the film makes with regard to
contemporary discourses surrounding death. 17. Perhaps the first place to go when
addressing this problem is Walter Benjamin's famous essay
'The Art Work in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. My
comments here owe a debt to his work. 18. Bazin, 'The Ontology of the
Photographic Image', pp. 14-15. 19. Kracauer, 'Photography', p.
59. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, 'The Schema of Mass
Culture', in J. M. Bernstein, ed., _The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture_ (London: Routledge,
1991). Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max,
_Dialectic of Enlightenment_ (1947), trans. John Cumming
(New York: Continuum, 1990). Bazin, Andre, 'The Ontology of the
Photographic Image', in _What is Cinema?_, Volume 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971). Benjamin, Walter, 'The Art Work in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction', trans. Harry Zohn, in
Hannah Arendt, ed., _Illuminations_ (New York: Harvest/HBJ,
1968). Bronfen, Elisabeth, _Over Her Dead Body:
Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic_ (New York: Routledge,
1992). Bronfen, Elisabeth, and Webster, Sarah,
eds, _Death and Representation_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993). Deleuze, Gilles, _Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). Foucault, Michel, _The History of
Sexuality_, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,
1980). Freud, Sigmund, _Thoughts for the Times
on War and Death_ (1915), trans. A. A. Brill and Alfred B.
Kuttner (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company,
1968). Heidegger, Martin, _Being and Time_
(1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper, 1962). Horkheimer, Max, 'The End of Reason', in
Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, _The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader_ (New York: Continuum,
1982). Hueppauf, Bernd, 'Death in the History of
Ideas in Western Civlization', in Mira Crouch and Bernd
Hueppauf, eds, _Essays on Mortality_ (Kensington: University
of New South Wales Press, 1985). Husserl, Edmund, 'Fichte's Ideal of
Humanity: Three Lectures', _Husserl Studies_ no. 12,
1995. Kaes, Anton, 'The Cold Gaze: Notes on
Mobilization and Modernity', _New German Critique_, no. 59,
1993. Kracauer, Siegfried, _The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays_, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995). Malevich, Kazimir, _The Non-objective
World_ (1924), trans. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Theobald
Press, 1959). Copyright © Film-Philosophy
2004. Joel Freeman, 'The Semiosis of Death in
Lang's _M_: Film and the Limits of Representation in the
Weimar Republic', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 5, February
2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n5freeman>.
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