The Use of Sound in Fritz Lang's M

In Fritz Lang's 1931 film M, cinematic sound is put to effective but sparing use through passages of silence and at times, sparse dialog. I listened to M through headphones and it gave me not only a closer listen to the film's sound, but actually focused my attention on the sound and encouraged me to discuss the aural merits of this landmark production. Despite considerable attention given in other essays to the film's visual accomplishments as well as Lang's social commentary on German society, this essay will focus on the film's soundtrack. (Incidentally, I viewed the first fifteen minutes or so of the film without headphones and found it not nearly as effective as listening with the headphones.)

There are long passages of silence in M which fooled me into turning up my stereo and checking the settings of my DVD player to make sure they were correct. I wondered why Lang would have chosen to give M a thin soundtrack but then I considered that this may have been a result of the technical limitations of that time. It was not until later that I read a bit of trivia at the Internet Movie Database that this was intentionally done by Lang. M was Fritz Lang's first movie with sound and I must admit, it shows.

The film has a feeling of being a half-silent, half-sound production and not sure of its cinematic identity. It is rooted in the past, in which Lang had experienced success, and is simultaneously looking into the future. This push and pull of concepts correlates to the inner turmoil experienced by the film's antagonist, Hans Beckert, a child-murderer astutely played by Peter Lorre. It's interesting to imagine M as being a silent film as it employs Lang's strong visual style and technique. Title cards and iris ins and out would find an aesthetic home in this film quite easily. This is not to say the sound is ineffective. Beckert's whistling as he is overcome with murderous desire is remarkably grotesque in that the whistling eventually becomes a calling card of dread. In the passages of silence in the front and middle of the film, there are more long takes with hardly any cuts. The pace is slow as the narrative and characters are exposed. That contrasted with the ending of the film with the "courtroom" sequence where there is a cacophony of noise and numerous cuts give M an effective dynamic. The film opens with a single, ominous bell-tone drawing the viewer in a sort of summons just before the playground scene where the children sing whimsically while at play, in a twist of irony, about the serial killer himself.