Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

perverted and neurotic sex murderer like the one in Ingster’s film: from Jack the Ripper in
Pandora’s Box to Lang’s M (1931). M also stars Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in the role of
a serial killer who preys on children in 1930s Berlin and is often cited as the film which
anticipated many essential features of the noir mood, mainly through its direction and
stylised photography. 31 As in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, the Expressionist subjectivity and
mise-en-scène are also symbolic of the reality of a country where the dark streets, the
abandoned market area where the tormented man hides (fig. 21), the frames within the
frame that seem to confine the character to corners, all reflect the child murderer’s swelling
disturbance and the fury of the mob which hunts him down.
In this chapter, I make the case that German Expressionism had a major influence
on film noir’s arresting visual style and its pessimistic mood, but simultaneously I would
like to argue that it was the influence of Weimar cinema as a whole, rather than just its
Expressionist forms, that had profound, complex, and multifaceted effects on American
cinema. Expressionism, no doubt, with its defining codes, especially at the level of lighting
(with the celebrated clair-obscur, the oblique lighting, the callous, elongated shadows,
severe and unusual camera-angling, the light playing on faces and creating their own
psychologically charged environments, and so on) is acknowledged and paid a debt of
gratitude to a large number of UFA cameramen and directors, like Carl Freund, Rudolph
Maté, Theodor Sparkuhl, and Fritz Lang, among many others. It is at this level that one can
perceive how influential German cinema was for film noir. A further citation of Paul
Schrader in his “Notes on Film Noir” bears this out:
[W]hen, in the late forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no
greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of Expressionist
lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, and it is not
surprising, in film noir, to find it bursting out into full bloom. (…) On the surface
the German Expressionist influence, with its reliance on artificial studio lighting,
seems incompatible with postwar realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors; but it
is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory
elements into a uniform style. (Schrader 1972:12)
31 Interesting enough, Joseph Losey created an exact remake of the Fritz Lang film in 1951, but of course
putting it in an American context and certifying that the location would be appropriate for the story. Thus the
film gains a new dimension and the tone of an American film noir. David Wayne plays the role of M, as the
murderer, and his illness and perversion are unsettlingly explicit in this version, as it seems apparent that he
gets a sexual thrill from the manipulation of the children’s shoelaces and the clay doll.
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