Cinematography: Meaning through Images in M
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	Narrator:  Fritz Lang's M, a gruesome tale of a child's murder is rightly hailed for its subtle and complex cinematography. Blending the documentary look of German street films, and the dark psychological images of German expressionism, the film uses images to analyze and decipher a troubled society between the two World Wars. Early in the film, various shots capture the stark reality of life, with a combination of close-ups and medium long shots. In many of these shots, the almost documentary-like realism is infused
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	with an anxiety and tension created by low angles and tight framing, suggesting troubling meanings beneath the surface of these images.
Title Card: Framing & Offscreen Space
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	Narrator:  Shortly after the opening shots in M, we see Elsie Beckmann walking home, bouncing a ball in the street. Then in one of the more subtly frightening images in the film, there is a shot of a poster offering a reward for catching a child murderer. As Elsie bounces her ball off of it, a dark shadow of a man drifts over the poster. This ominous image is captured from a low angle, recreating Elsie's point of view. The framing and angles hint at a menacing figure
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	lurking just offscreen, on the edges of the image.
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	Narrator:  Through its framing and use of offscreen space, M rigorously avoids graphic violence, thus making that violence more mysterious and disturbing. You see the shadowy stranger buy Elsie a balloon from a blind man. Shortly after, all we see is Elsie's ball rolling away in the grass in a chilling medium long shot that shows the balloon tangled in telephone wires. Demonstrating how cinematography can create complex symbols and connotations, these shots dramatically depict Elsie's death without actually showing it. The tangled balloon also serves as a
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	metaphor, suggesting that Elsie's death more broadly represents a twisted modern world that traps and destroys innocents.
Title Card: Good vs. Evil
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	Narrator:  The way viewers understand the dark world of M and its images is indeed more than just good versus evil. And the film's cinematography works relentlessly to obscure those distinctions. Criminals and the police are regularly confused and visually blurred together. As Lang alternates between scenes of the police and the mob bosses, both groups gathering to discuss how to catch the murderer, the similarities are striking. Both groups are clustered around a table, plotting and planning in excessively smoky rooms. Even the murderer, Beckert, played by Peter
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	Lorre, struggles to understand his own violence and evil. At one point, he examines and tugs at his own face while looking in a mirror, trying to understand how such a monster can exist beneath this pudgy baby-face. And although we know him to be evil, Beckert's chubby body is strangely reminiscent of Elsie's balloon tangled in the telephone wires, a sign of destroyed innocence.
Title Card: The Spiral Image
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	Narrator:  Amidst the many shapes, frames and angles of the cinematography in M, one visual graphic stands out, the spiral. The spiral image is seen early in the film in an overhead point-of-view shot as Elsie's mother searches by the staircase for Elsie. This shape occurs again later when Beckert sees another young girl in the reflection of a shop window. Beckert and the girl are both framed by hypnotic spirals. Perhaps an imagistic emblem of the society of Beckert's dark unconscious, the spiraling shape seems to describe a
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	world that twists and turns in unstable and irrational ways. The spiral graphic returns yet again in the penultimate sequence, when Beckert is caught and tried by the criminals in a kangaroo court. This trial, the film's ironic conclusion is appropriately framed and shaped as a spiraling crowd. M is a film about the difficulty of deciphering images and signs. Here, criminals must become the vehicle for the law, and a blind man must identify the murderer.