Indexing Identity: Fritz Lang’s M

Indexing Identity: Fritz Lang’s M

Kata Gellen

Modernism/modernity, Volume 22, Number 3, September 2015, pp.425-448 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mod.2015.0053

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Kata Gellen is an

Assistant Professor of

German at Duke Uni-

versity. She is currently

completing a manu-

script called “Kafka and

Noise: The Discovery of

Cinematic Sound in Lit-

erary Modernism.” She

has published essays

on topics in German

literary modernism,

classical Weimar film,

and German-Jewish

literature.

modernism / modernity

volume twenty two,

number three,

pp 425–448. © 2015

johns hopkins

university press

Indexing Identity: Fritz Lang’s M

Kata Gellen

The title and opening shot of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M refer not to a person or an event but an imprint: we all know the fa-mous scene in which Peter Lorre’s upper back gets stamped with the letter M, indelibly identifying him as the serial murderer of children the city has been desperately seeking (fig. 1).1 The title thus names a mark or imprint and, by implication, the act of im-primatur in which it originates. Of course, the letter M brings the words “Mord” (“murder”) and “Mörder” (“murderer”) to mind, and it also recalls a number of the movie’s central themes—Müt-ter (mothers), Massen (crowds), Macht (power), Mobilmachung (mobilization), and Manie (mania)—not to mention Lang’s filmic oeuvre: Metropolis (1925), Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon [1928]), Der müde Tod (Destiny [1921]), and multiple Mabuse movies.2 It is a suggestive letter that contains both a thematic and a cinematic index, and it is also, most basically and literally, an imprint—a material trace, an indexical sign.

Recognizing the title and opening image of Lang’s film as an imprint draws attention to the numerous scenes of imprimatur in M.3 The film continually represents the act of leaving and reading impressions: there are handprints and fingerprints, dactylographers and graphologists, newspaper print, facsimile prints, serialized novels, carbon copies, signatures, handwriting, and an abundance of writing materials and written documents. The film, in short, continually displays the realia of writing. The six stills in figure 2 are taken from the nearly countless scenes in the film that depict verbal impressions and, more often than not, the hands, fingers, and writing implements that produce them (fig. 2). What do we make of these scenes of imprimatur? How do

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

426

we read this deep fascination with hands and fingers, and the impressions—particularly imprinted words and letters—they leave behind?

I argue in this article that M posits a view of individual identity that is determined not by personality or interiority but by the physical traces a person leaves behind and are left behind on him. Identity, thus, becomes a function of identification—something outward and external. In this way, Lang exposes and critiques how identity is conceived and established in modern society—as something cold, objective, and impersonal. At the same time, Lang is operating within a medium and genre that are self-consciously indexical, since film and the detective story rely, respectively, on techniques and semiot-ics that contain “a trace of the real.” M thus operates according to the same principle of imprimatur that governs the determination of identity in modernity. This principle itself contributes to the film’s emphasis on nonvisual modes of knowledge and expression, specifically the tactile and the auditory. Indeed, the acoustic trace, of which the film’s pivotal moment of identification is an example, reveals a logic not only of ontological indexicality (the index as trace) but also of deictic indexicality (the index as pointer). In M, then, vision, hearing, and touch are all interconnected, and moreover all three modes of sensation participate in indexical modes of knowing and signifying. Through its use of the imprint, Lang’s film both performs a critique of modern society and moves toward an idea of embodied cinema.

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Fig. 1. The opening shot of M.

Gellen / indexing identity: fritz lang’s m

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Fig. 2. Scenes of inscription.

Identity and Indexicality

At two crucial moments in M, a character explicitly poses the question of identity. Early in the film a group of Berliners sits around a table at a local pub and reads from a newspaper article on the search for the child murderer who is terrorizing the city: “Who is the murderer? What does he look like? Where is he hiding?” These questions reflect the police’s exasperatingly difficult search, which we learn about in great detail in the following scene, where the chief of police describes their painstaking and as yet unsuccessful investigative efforts. Near the end of the film, when Beckert, the suspected murderer, stands trial before a kangaroo court run by the body of organized criminals


428 that has captured him, Beckert himself poses the question of identity in an effort to challenge the mobsters’ authority: “Who are you anyway? Who are all of you?,” he demands to know.4 Beckert gives his own answer—they are criminals—but his ques-tions run deeper than this obvious reply. The ease with which Beckert can assign their collective identity a label presents an explicit contrast to the difficult question of his own identity, which eludes not only the police and the mobsters for most of the film but also himself. In his famous monologue before this court, Beckert confesses that he is compelled by an irrepressible demon within—“this fire, this voice, this agony”—and feels divided between his real self and a shadow self that gets the better of him. This powerful speech, even if it raises as many questions about Beckert’s identity as it answers, represents a radical shift in the film—away from a cold, scientific notion of identity (identity as identification) and toward a personal, human understanding of identity. Yet although the film gestures to this view, it never embraces it. Beckert’s dramatic self-unveiling leaves the crowd of delinquents unmoved, though it is argu-ably responsible for the legal intervention that saves his life. After all, the suspected criminal is not lynched by the gangster mob but handed over to a court of law. This brief and inconclusive penultimate scene consists of a static shot, lasting only twenty-five seconds, in which several judges seat themselves and the chief justice utters the words, “In the name of the law . . .” Though it clearly indicates Beckert is being given a trial, it promises neither his salvation nor even an acknowledgment of his humanity.

In between M’s first inquiry into the problem of identity (the question “who is the murderer?” comes approximately ten minutes into the film) and its last (the question “who are you anyway?” comes about ten minutes before its end) lies the bulk of the film, which can be understood as a reflection on a notion of identity fundamentally tied to modern scientific techniques of identification. What makes us individuals, M tells us, are not inner qualities such as feelings, dispositions or psychological states but rather the physical marks associated with bodily movement and actions. In other words, we consist of the traces we leave behind and that are left on us; with proper care and effort, these traces can be read and produced in the service of establishing identity.5

The film makes this “argument” about the nature of identity in urban, technological modernity through its treatment of indexical signification—signs based on a principle of contiguity, metonymy, or touch—and in particular the written imprint. Roughly, M suggests that identity is no longer determined or guaranteed by physical appearance or the personal name, much less by mental and emotional states. It consists instead of physical traces of bodily actions, marks that we make and marks we are forced to bear. Inscription, then, is not only a way to transmit language and images but an indexical marker of identity. Lang’s film criticizes this modern view of identity, which is deter-mined not by individuals but by impersonal organizations and institutions that enact dehumanizing processes of identification and classification.

Such a focused engagement with indexicality might be expected, given the medium and genre to which M belongs. Film, together with photography, has often been de-scribed as the indexical medium par excellence: more than offer a mere likeness of


429an object or person, it seems to capture a part of them, to inscribe their presence. As Rosalind Krauss explains in her influential 1977 essay on indexicality in American art, “Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.”6 According to Krauss’s characterization, which itself relies on Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite division of signs, a photograph is iconic in that the representation resembles the thing represented and indexical in that the representation is in some way continuous with the thing represented.7 André Bazin is thought to have launched this influential, though hardly incontestable, prem-ise of film theory in his 1958 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” even though he does not use the word “indexicality” there. Bazin argues that photography and film involve the “transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction”— in other words, that they contain a trace of the real.8

If film and photography are the media most closely affiliated with indexical significa-tion, the detective story is the genre most devoted to the trace: it narrates the search for signs and clues that point to the presence of someone, somewhere, at a certain time. It is based on the assumption that a criminal, like any other person, leaves be-hind physical clues—fingerprints, cigarette butts, DNA, and so on—as he goes about his business. The marks he leaves on the outside world are indices that point back to him, which enable the careful and astute investigator, detective and reader alike, to identify him.9 Thus, even prior to examining M—indeed, even prior to seeing it—one knows that this detective film, on the basis of its media and genre affiliations, partakes in the indexical arts. Its persistent representation of the techniques and outcomes of imprimatur reinforces and complicates this link.

In his seminal essay on the role of indexical knowledge in detective fiction, the au-thentication of artworks, and psychoanalysis, the historian Carlo Ginzburg grounds the practice of what he calls “symptomatology” both theoretically and historically. Ginzburg wants to prove that these methods of inquiry share an interest in the revealing nature of the insignificant detail: detectives, psychoanalysts, and authenticators of artworks must examine idiosyncratic details to determine identity.10 This is counterintuitive, since one might think that the central and overt features of a person or event are precisely what help us determine who or what they are. According to Ginzburg, however, what is foregrounded is likely to be faked, whereas the inessential is a less probable object of forgery. The minor detail is thus a more reliable marker of truth, be it a question of authorship, criminal identity, or psychic life. From Sherlock Holmes to CSI, the history of detective fiction seems to bear out Ginzburg’s argument: it is always the apparently trivial, easily overlooked detail that counts.11

Lang’s film exemplifies the kind of analysis that Ginzburg identifies: the killer’s identity is revealed not by examining what he writes in his letter to the press, which might appear to be the central matter yet is actually imitable and subject to dissimula-tion, but by seemingly insignificant details: the kind of cigar he smokes, the tune he whistles as he saunters down the street, and the particular location where he happens to compose his letter to the press. These unintentional traces are the clues that reveal


430 identity. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, however, the characters that pursue the murderer in M do not rely on personal, psychological facts about him, and they do not seek to inhabit his mental world—this becomes all too clear during Beckert’s trial by mob, where no interest in or understanding of his inner turmoil is apparent. Lang employs a model of individual traceability, but one that has been thoroughly depersonalized and depsychologized.12

This raises a crucial question: is Lang critiquing the institutions and techniques that identify individuals or merely criminals? For obvious reasons, it was always the case that marginalized and stigmatized figures—immigrants, vagrants, radicals, criminals, and so forth—were the first people that any modern society sought to identify, clas-sify, and keep records on: these were the individuals who posed a threat to the social order. In light of this fact, it is altogether unsurprising that Lang would focus on the specific issue of criminal identification in an attempt to make a broader point about cold, institutional modernity. After all, the point of the movie is to display the search for a criminal among the masses: this means that society at large has to be subjected to the dehumanizing techniques of bodily identification, since it is the unique condition of the modern city—anonymous, vast, atomized—that makes everyone a potential suspect. Lang suggests not so much that the techniques of identification he explores extend beyond the criminal to all members of society but rather—and this is perhaps even more insidious—that everyone in modern society is a potential criminal and should, therefore, be assigned an identity according to the principles of modern criminal investigation.

M thus narrates the process of locating an urban killer by means of the physical trace—the marks, frequently in the form of written signs, that bodies leave behind. This is accomplished through a parallel investigation that occupies much of the film: the police employ the newest techniques of forensic analysis, while the underworld uses blunt but effective methods of surveillance, search, and seizure. Lang brilliantly splices the two pursuits together to great aesthetic and narrative effect: who will find the killer first and how will they do so? Both investigations rely on reading and producing indexical traces. Indeed, both groups succeed at the moment when their investigators are able to find or produce a physical mark continuous with the killer himself. This mark, which takes the form of a written imprint, points to the murderer’s bodily presence, his physical person. Lang thereby demonstrates that the process of identification does not depend on physical appearance (you are what you look like) or the personal name (you are what you are called), the classic markers of personal identity. In Lang’s conception of modern identity, you are the traces you leave behind and the traces that are left on you.

Reading the Imprint

Imprimatur is not only a dominant image in Lang’s film but central to its narrative development: the identity of the murderer is both discovered and produced through material impressions. As many critics have pointed out, M is not a murder mystery—we know from early on who the killer is, which makes it unlike typical detective stories in


431which reader and detective make side-by-side progress in comparable investigations. If M does not generate its narrative drive in the manner of a whodunit, what propels the story? The answer lies in the film’s virtuosic parallel editing of the two investigations, one led by the police and one led by the mobsters. Though the mobsters do “win”—they are able to identify and locate Beckert before the police do so—this fact is less important than a recognition that the race to identify and seize Beckert is a contest of inscription. The investigation has succeeded when the killer becomes traceable, when his body can be grasped as a maker and bearer of physical imprints. Indeed, the film’s two investigations form an economy of the written trace: the acts of making and reading verbal impressions are part of a single exploratory process that determines and produces criminal identity. It is only after Beckert has been marked that the traces of his writing are discovered, which suggests that he must bear the imprint of others in order for his own acts of imprimatur to become detectable.

The first investigation, conducted by the Berlin police, is led by the doughy but devoted Inspector Lohmann. The police base their search on the killer’s anonymous letter to the press, which we see him writing in an earlier scene; this is examined by a graphologist, and reproduced in facsimile version in the newspaper (two of these mo-ments appear in fig. 2). Intent on discovering the scene of writing, Lohmann sends a detective to visit the homes of local men recently released from psychiatric care. Upon entering what he suspects is the killer’s home, the detective is handed a newspaper to read by Beckert’s landlady. The camera lingers for a few moments on the name of the newspaper—indeed, its title takes up the entire frame: Der General-Anzeiger. More than just another example of printed material, this newspaper is, quite literally, an in-dex or indicator—“ein Anzeiger.” By showing the exact date—Monday, November 24, 1930—the shot also gives us a historical index, linking the world of the film to a specific moment in time.13 This brief shot, then, has an explicit indexical function (consistent with the film’s documentary impulse), and it refers to indexical modes of knowing. When the landlady leaves the detective alone in the room, he looks for a third kind of index—a material imprint: the detective uncovers the large desk and scans the surface with his eyes and hands for indentations (i.e., a trace of writing). Though he finds nothing useful, the scene suggests the importance of touch in the search for imprints.

The camera then cuts to Beckert buying and eating fruit, lusting after a young girl, getting “framed” by the reflection of an elaborate display of knives in a store window, and ultimately receiving his brand at the hands of the young thug, Heinrich (more on this later). When it returns to the police investigation, we see the detective and Inspec-tor Lohmann scratching their heads over their partial findings in Beckert’s apartment. They have discovered red pencil shavings that match the letter but not the scene of writing. The detective finally hits on another idea: what if the killer composed his letter not at the table but on another wooden surface—perhaps the windowsill? It is here that the detectives finally find what they have been looking for: an unintended written impression, an indexical trace of a physical activity. Not only does Lohmann feel and see the indentation, he recognizes a part of a word carved into the wooden surface in the killer’s handwriting. The camera, with the help of the magnifying glass, also captures this trace—the letters “P-R-E” from the word “Presse” (fig. 3). Having seen


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Beckert’s letter in earlier scenes, the viewer too can confirm that the windowsill imprint is indeed physically contiguous with the letter. Guilt is thus established by linking a written document to a scene of writing—not through the content of the linguistic sign, but through its physical contours. The three letters etched into Beckert’s windowsill are an indexical sign that points to the event of writing by being continuous with it; they share in the same “reality” that produced the letter. They are an index—a type of sign governed neither by a principle of resemblance or arbitrariness but instead by material contiguity. The physical connection between the signifier (the engraving) and the signified (the letter) confirm that they belong to a single act.

To be sure, this written trace also functions iconically and symbolically, though I contend that the linguistic meaning expressed in this sign emphasizes its indexical quality. The etching, which spells the beginning of the word “Presse,” refers to the modern institution that produces and distributes written imprints on a mass scale. It calls up the most influential apparatus of imprimatur in contemporary society, the print-ing press. Moreover, it denotes the very act by which indexical traces of language are made, whether by machine or hand—namely, by pressing—and thereby foregrounds the mechanics of imprimatur, in addition to its central institution.14

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Fig. 3. The letters “P-r-e” inscribed in the windowsill, seen through a magnifying glass.


433Making a Good Impression

I have suggested that Lang’s film offers a double climax of indexation: the moment I have just analyzed is the second one; the first, of course, is the sequence in which Beckert gets branded with the letter M. Leaving aside for a moment the matter of how the thugs manage to locate Beckert (this involves an acoustic trace), let us take a closer look at the moment of imprinting (Kaes, M, 7). The scene has become so familiar that one almost forgets what a strange action it documents: the killer gets written on; hand and writing implement—here, chalk—come together to leave behind the smallest bit of text, a single letter, on Beckert’s upper back. In a word, the killer gets imprinted, stamped, as if he were a piece of paper or a softened old wooden surface. Just as the police are discovering Beckert’s written imprint, the underground army marks him with a letter, indicating that an economy of the trace is at work in the film. Having produced an impression, Beckert opens himself to the possibility of being impressed on; he has become traceable.15

In marking Beckert, the beggars single him out from among the anonymous crowd of middle-aged Berlin men in long black coats. Until he is written on, he is anyone and no one, indistinguishable from all the other possible murderers roaming the city streets. To receive a mark is to receive an identity—to become someone. It is also, of course, to join the ranks of notorious criminals. Starting with the biblical Cain, who receives a mark, possibly a letter or word, for murdering his brother, a standard way in bygone days of identifying criminals and making their transgressions publicly vis-ible was to brand them with a letter—a T for thieves, an A for adulterers, and so on.16 Though Beckert is not literally branded—his mark is not permanent and it does not cause bodily pain—he is forced to bear on his body an indexical and alphabetical sign of the crime of which he is accused.17 This mark condemns him, but as we will see, it also protects him.18

The film’s logic of the trace extends to its persistent concern with cataloging human beings through fingerprints, signatures, personal papers, and medical records: to capture these bodily marks is to establish identity. This concern is exemplified in images of an inflated fingerprint and in a close-up of a fingerprint card, each of which fills up the entire screen for a few seconds, as well as in parallel scenes that thematize the produc-tion and use of personal records; one portrays a police raid of an illegal bar, in which detectives examine the clientele’s personal papers, and the other depicts members of the criminal elite as they undertake to organize and catalogue the mass of urban un-desirables into a network of spies. The mob bosses enter each person into a logbook, along with the city blocks he is responsible for surveying, and make a carbon copy of the entry. This technology, represented in the film in a close-up (see fig. 2), produces written copies through pressing or pressure. The use of logbooks and carbon copies in this way once again illustrates how techniques of imprimatur are used to determine identities and organize populations.

Not only does M reveal a persistent and necessary connection between inscription and identity; it also dismisses alternative modes of identification as unreliable, such


434 as, for example, the face. What does the killer in M look like? It is difficult to say, since we usually see either his shadow or his back, which renders him indistinguishable from others. When we do glimpse his face, it is a mere reflection, distorted by his hands and exaggerated facial expressions (as in the famous shot where Beckert gazes at himself in the mirror, using his fingers to pull at the corners of his lips, his eyes wide with madness) or it is highly mediated and theatrical (as in the shot where Beckert’s head is seen through a shop window, framed by an ornamental display of knives). It is thus impossible to speak of reality or truth when it comes to the killer’s appearance; physical appearance is a disguise.19 This point is highlighted by the peculiar balloon man that Beckert buys for his first victim in the film and that ominously floats away when she disappears. The balloon stands in an iconic relation to the film’s killer: it is a short, bulbous figure that caricatures the rotund and googly-eyed Peter Lorre. But the balloon is one among many; there are countless duplicates, as several other shots make clear. These replicas suggest that physical likeness cannot be the basis of identificatory practices. In modern society, looks are not unique, and even a strange-looking figure like Beckert can be replicated.

The name likewise proves unreliable in Lang’s film. The most basic problem with names is that they can be concealed or withheld, as in the case of the murderer’s anonymous letter, or they can be falsely assumed, as in the case of stolen or doctored personal papers (a circumstance to which the police raid alludes). Names can also produce false and misleading connections—for example, the uncanny but ultimately insignificant similarity between the name of the killer, Beckert, and that of his first and most memorable victim, Elsie Beckmann. Precisely because names are arbitrary signs that nevertheless invite interpretation, they can misdirect one in ways that disturb rather than aid in determining identity.

Here too, as in the allusion to criminal branding, Lang’s film references traditional methods of criminal identification, in which faces and names were originally used to pick out transgressors.20 More reliable techniques of identifying criminals were eventually developed, such as signatures, distinctive marks, then fingerprinting and anthropometry, and in the contemporary world, DNA analysis, retinal scans, and other more refined methods—ones that use parts of the body that cannot be altered, disguised, or faked. Some historians have claimed that the representative crimes of late nineteenth-century Europe involved violations and distortions of identity, such as forgery, falsification of names, and counterfeiting.21 Since names and signatures could no longer be counted on to establish identity, new modes of tracking and describing individuals were stan-dardized and codified.22 But these new methods remained subjective, and so began the era of photographic criminal registers. Logbooks containing mug shots, profiles, and distinguishing features were produced and circulated for the purpose of identify-ing criminals and fighting crime. Ultimately, these too proved unreliable: people can grow beards, shave their heads, color their hair, get tattoos, lose or gain weight, and, of course, they will eventually grow old. The malleability of physical appearance means that it cannot guarantee identity. Thus, even if photographs could accurately capture “visual reality” (itself a contentious point), this was an unreliable basis for identification.23


435Thus, starting in the late nineteenth century, criminologists began to explore more intimate and individualized ways of measuring and marking the body. For some time Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric method seemed to provide a means of determin-ing individual bodily uniqueness, but the true breakthrough came with fingerprinting, for this offered an easy and effective way of establishing individual identity through bodily imprints. Though fingerprints had been taken and used for various purposes for thousands of years, it was only in 1880 that a scientific article on the use of fingerprints for criminal investigations appeared, and it was only in the first two decades of the twentieth century that the first cases in which fingerprints were used to solve crimes and admitted as valid evidence were heard.24 After this point, forensic experts could no longer content themselves with optical scrutiny and visual records. They insisted on recording and storing the fingerprints of suspected criminals, as these were the only guarantor of bodily uniqueness. The turn to fingerprints thus added a corporeal dimension to the already dominant circumstantial paradigm, in which crimes were investigated and solved based on physical traces and clues. It meant that crime scenes contained not only objects that could be connected to an individual (hairs, cigarette butts, handkerchiefs, etc.), but bodily indices of an individual’s presence. As Tom Gunning writes,

The role of the modern detective did not correspond to the earlier “physiologies” which subsumed criminals under ideal physical types. Identification, rather, relied on the absolute and ineradicable individuality (and unique culpability) of a specific criminal. As Gallus Muller, an American proponent of Alphonse Bertillon’s method for identifying criminals, stated, the goal of such identification was “to fix the human personality, to give each hu-man being an identity, an individuality, certain, durable, invariable, always recognizable, always capable of being proven.” (“Tracing the Individual Body,” 23)

The pursuit of ways of uniquely identifying individuals does not, of course, imply a concern with individual personhood or subjectivity. The historical interest in identify-ing criminals and the modern quest to determine bodily uniqueness should not be taken as a concern for the criminal as a person. In the twentieth century, the physical appearance and in some cases the psychic life of criminals began to be recorded and catalogued with newfound vigor and thoroughness, but it was all for official purposes.25 As historians like Ginzburg (“Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” 99, 104–6) and Michel Foucault (Security, Territory, Population) have argued, modern practices of identification reflect a statistical rather than a personal view of human populations.26 Fingerprinting, for instance, was not considered valuable because it enabled a deeper understanding of a populace but because it proved to be an effective means of orga-nizing, classifying, and controlling it—especially its “unsavory” members, its so-called savages and criminals. Let us turn now to the implications of this depersonalized notion of identity for Lang’s vision of modernity as manifested in modern social institutions and a modernist film aesthetics.


436 Indexicality, Tactility, and Sound

Lang’s film repeatedly suggests that identity rests neither in appearances nor in names but in impressions: identity must be traced, it must be indexed by means of written imprints. Fingerprints, newsprint, carbon copies, and the traces of handwriting are thus the artifacts that establish identity and, in turn, guilt; they enable the legal prosecution and trial of criminals, as well as terror, mass hysteria, and rogue justice. The indexical sign is the foundation of the modern institutions and apparatuses that Lang represents: the police, the mob, the press, and the law. They are interested in identity in so far as it aids in techniques of surveillance and record keeping. Indeed, these institutions, fundamentally concerned with order and control rather than with any form of personal expression or imagination, are the guardians of identity in modernity.

M shows time and again that the trace consists of more than meaningless, fleeting side effects (shadows and smoke) and worthless refuse (cigarette butts and pencil shavings)—or, more accurately, that these apparently frivolous details are in fact the only guarantor of identity in institutional modernity. This view of identity is cold and calculating: it does not consider personality, habits, style, temperament, or other markers of personhood or subjectivity, except in so far as they facilitate the process of identifica-tion. It is about locating, classifying and labeling individuals in order to determine their position vis-à-vis the modern state and its rules and regulations and its counterpart in the underworld, with its different but equally codified practices and conventions. The modern view of identity relies so centrally on indexical knowledge because it seems to offer the most solid proof of discrete bodily existence, and in the end, this is what modern institutions must do: account for each individual as a physical presence.27

Lang’s film participates in this intervention in modern notions of identity and bodily identification by drawing attention to the role of imprimatur, as well as to the significance of the tactile.28 Recall, for example, the scene in which Lohmann’s assistant grazes his hand over the table in Beckert’s room to feel whether there are any imprints from writing, the emblematic hand of the opening title and the poster (fig. 1), and the countless close-ups of fingers and hands featured in the film: Beckert’s hands peeling fruit, rubbing his lips, and writing the letter; Schränker’s hand, gloved in black leather, spread out over the map of Berlin; the blind man’s fingers fondling a coin to determine its value; beggars’ hands laying cards, arranging cigarettes, and inventorying sandwiches (fig. 4). It is not only that hands make and perceive imprints in M; they are also an es-sential way of producing knowledge, as the old blind beggar does when he rubs coins between his fingers to determine their value.

Then there is the hand of the young Heinrich who marks Beckert with an M, whose splayed fingers stretch across the screen while he draws the letter on his open palm, and, in direct contrast to this, the various hands placed on Beckert’s shoulder in the penultimate scene of the film: first the blind beggar grasps Beckert’s shoulder, then the “counsel for defense” taps him, and finally, once the police arrive, a hand is lowered onto Beckert’s upper back “im Namen des Gesetzes” (“in the name of the law”). Much like the economy of the trace, there seems to be a haptic economy at work in this scene.


437

Immediately after the law’s powerful and anonymous hand descends on Beckert’s shoul-der, the members of the mob raise their hands, signaling their acquiescence to the real authorities. Schränker, the boss, hesitates for a moment, but ultimately he too must give in to the higher power of the law. Though they remain gloved, his hands are raised high for all to see (fig. 5). The sea of hands submitting to the law is a powerful image, not least because it reminds us how central these hands have been to identifying and capturing the murderer. By giving over their hands, the beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, and pimps relinquish not only their most useful tool for identifying others but the part of themselves that makes them traceable and identifiable: their fingerprints. Hence the signal of acquiescence—hands up, or “Hände hoch!”—has enormous symbolical

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Fig. 4. Hands.


438

value: by raising their hands, not by showing their faces or giving their names, their criminal identity is made available to the law.

Contrasting with the multitude of hands is the single hand that softly grasps Beckert’s shoulder, indicating that a state-sanctioned system of law and order is replacing the cruel and illicit vigilantism of the mob. This hand calls to mind, and indeed replaces, that other hand that grasped Beckert’s shoulder earlier in the film, the one that branded him a murderer. This one, anonymous and unmarked, reaches out to protect him rather than to destroy him—for the implication is that even though he will be punished, the punishment will be fair and just. The exchange of hands on Beckert’s shoulder sug-gests that the marked body is now subject to punishment and protection. In suggesting that justice will prevail, Lang nevertheless makes it clear that this is a nameless and faceless justice operating according to a haptic economy and indexical traces. It is, in short, an impersonal brand of justice. The judges who enter the courtroom in the final scene are similarly dehumanized, no more than a symbolic representation of the law.

The prominence of hands and tactility in M contributes to Lang’s emphasis on the role of nonvisual modes of recognition in modern identificatory processes. In addition to the emphasis on physical touch, the film is also interested in other kinds of traces and methods of tracking. In the sequence that illustrates the various techniques that the police use to try to find the murderer, we see a dog sniffing around in search of a clue. More prominently, the film features the revelatory power of auditory impressions. M is, after all, Lang’s first sound film, and one in which the balance between speech,

Fig. 5. The gangsters submitting to the law by giving over their hands.

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439noise, music, and silence is very carefully wrought. It is hardly a surprise, then, that what really gives Beckert away is a sound—the whistled refrain from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1.

Indeed, one could argue that the film’s moment of discovery hinges on an acoustic index: a distinctive sound points to Beckert’s bodily presence and confirms his status as the murderer. Significantly, this is a different notion of indexicality than the one I have been describing until now. Imprints are an instance of what can be called ontological indexicality: they capture some trace or residue of the physical being of something, and are thus materially continuous with the object represented. The ontological index always involves touch. It is also marked by pastness, or historicity, as Mary Ann Doane explains:

The index as trace implies a material connection between sign and object as well as an insistent temporality—the reproducibility of a past moment. The trace does not evaporate in the moment of its production, but remains as the witness of an anteriority. Hence, this understanding of the index necessarily aligns it with historicity, the “that has been” of Barthes’s photographic image.29

The whistle, however, functions according to a different indexical logic. It points to its referent without necessarily having had contact with it and without physically capturing any aspect of the thing it represents. Its only means of reference is to point, to refer, to indicate presence. The deictic index says “this” or “here” or “you,” and is entirely embedded in and reliant on a particular context for its meaning, which is why Roman Jakobson calls the linguistic index a “shifter”: it is thoroughly context dependent. It does not refer to a past instance of material connectedness but consists instead in a present and fleeting announcement of “thereness.” As Doane describes it, “The index as deixis—the pointing finger, the ‘this’ of language—does exhaust itself in the mo-ment of its implementation and is ineluctably linked to presence. There is always a gap between sign and object, and touch here is only figurative” (136)

One central task of Doane’s essay is to argue that the index as deixis, which is not usually considered the semiotic basis of the cinematic image (that role is assigned to the image as trace, with light being the medium of inscription), in fact plays a crucial role in cinematic signification. More specifically, she puts forth the intriguing argument that in cinema—and in particular in Lang’s M—“the irreducible intimacy of the two forms of the index—trace and deixis—is persistently elaborated,” for example, in the film’s use of pointing fingers and in the attention it draws to the cinematic frame, “the border between everything and nothing, . . . the cinematic equivalent of the ‘this’” (138, 140). Doane convincingly shows that it is not only the ontological index—imprints, traces, impressions, handprints, in other words, everything that I have elaborated on in this essay—that plays a major role in M and in film as such but the deictic index, the self-consuming assertion of presence, of “hereness” and “nowness.”

Inspired by Doane’s reading of M and by her general comments on the cinematic index as both trace and deixis, I would like to dwell for a moment on the acoustic index in M and ask whether we can rightly see it in the terms Doane provides.30 On the one


440 hand, it would seem that the whistled refrain is a clear example of deixis: it does not record something, and it leaves no indelible mark. It is unlike a footprint or a stamp, in that it has no permanence, no history, no pastness; it only functions as a sign in the moment that it is heard, because that is also the moment that it is produced, which means that that is the moment of presence. The whistle “points” to a person; it says, “here is the man.” On the other hand, sounds can be remembered—and they can be recorded, which is of course crucial in the context of early sound film—which means that the index as deixis can be transformed or refunctionalized into the image as trace. When the blind beggar hears the distinctive whistled refrain from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, his act of recognition is an instance of the index as deixis. But when he con-nects this sound to the previous instance of hearing—on the day of Elsie Beckmann’s death—it becomes an instance of the index as trace. One sound becomes a record or trace of the earlier sound, and this itself is only possible because film itself is (finally) capable of recording and reproducing sound. What connects the various instances of whistling is not resemblance (although that resemblance is undeniable; it constitutes the iconic dimension of signification) but rather contiguity: these sounds come from a single source; they are all effects of the same cause, and this cause—Beckert—is in fact the sum total of what they signify indexically. Both sounds, in other words, are acoustic “impressions”: they are audible “imprints” from a single “mold.”

For the film viewer (and listener), the two kinds of indices at play coincide on ac-count of memory: one deictic index recalls the other, which makes one an acoustic trace of the other; memory, or auditory recall, connects the sound to an earlier one. Sound film is able to activate and validate this memory function of the acoustic index. It is not only the blind beggar, who himself must rely on auditory recall to be able to read the acoustic trace, but the film viewer (and listener) who participates in this act of indexical signification: he or she can confirm that this particular acoustic moment points to and traces an earlier one, both by means of auditory recall and on account of the acoustic record that sound film produces. It seems that there has always been the potential for sound to leave traces, specifically in the form of echoes, but they can only leave permanent and reproducible traces in the era of sound recording. Echoes are a kind of acoustic index that combine deixis and trace—they point to the quickly fading presence of a sound, indicating that a sound is both here and gone, present and past—but their capacity to signify in this way is temporary, lasting only as long as the echo endures. Sound recording allows for the preservation of the echo; it so-lidifies and extends this conjoining of deixis and trace. Once sound can be captured and reproduced at will, it is no longer the case that it functions only according to the deictic mode of indexicality. Sound recording, in an incredible feat of temporal play, allows an acoustic impression to point to something that was, to be continuous with something that no longer is—and this is precisely where deixis and ontology merge. As Doane argues (with regard to the filmic frame rather than the acoustic index, but her comments nevertheless resound), “the dialectic of the trace (the ‘once’ or pastness) and the deixis (the now or presence) produces the conviction of the index. In a way that Peirce did not anticipate, the two understandings of the index collude to buttress


441an almost theological faith or certitude in the image”—or, in my argument, an almost theological faith or certitude in sound.

Lang’s indexical imagination takes an entirely new and radical turn when he moves from material traces—impressions, imprints, handprints, fingerprints—to acoustic traces, for it is in the latter that he is able to exemplify and theorize the productive colli-sion of ontological and deictic indexicality. None of this is meant to deny or undermine the significance of hands and tactility in Lang’s film. Rather, my aim is to elaborate the ways in which M encourages a transformation and reevaluation of the senses based on a logic of the index. At the center of this metamorphosis stands the blind beggar, someone who cannot perceive visual signs but who has a heightened sense of both touch and hearing—that is, someone whose physical disability has forced him to perceive and think indexically. He is, after all, the very same elderly beggar who rubs coins around in his fingers to determine their value. Considering his crucial and absolutely central act of auditory identification together with the film’s marked emphasis on impressions, hands, and the sense of touch, one begins to see that M is engaged in a restructuring of human sensation. The role of hearing and touch should thus be understood as evidence of the film’s interest in nonvisual modes of perception and the challenge they pose to an idea of modern identity as grasped and constituted primarily by the eye. Moreover, the participation of both hearing and touch in indexical modes of signification is es-sential to their perceptual function in M.31 Lang clearly uses his first sound film not simply to valorize and exploit the acoustic potential of the new medium but to urge a reconsideration and reconfiguration of the entire sensorium: we must confront and embrace not with our eyes alone, he seems to be saying, and not even with our eyes and ears, but with our entire capacity for sensation. M demonstrates and declares the power of film, and specifically of sound film, to signify indexically—by pointing to, tracing, and by identifying a past “hereness” and “nowness.”

This reading aligns Lang with recent scholarship that calls for a broader perceptual apparatus for experiencing film. The centrality of sound in cinema has been elaborated from a variety of perspectives.32 More recently, media theorists have explored the role of touch and tactility in film. Laura Marks, for example, has introduced the notion of “haptic cinema” to negotiate the complex role of sensory experience in new media and specifically the ways in which cinematic vision involves and invokes a range of sensory experiences. Jennifer M. Barker, another scholar of cinematic sensation, also argues for film as a tactile medium that engages not only the eye and the ear but also skin, musculature, and viscera.33 While neither Marks nor Barker thinks that “haptic cinema” or “tactile viewing” requires an explicit visual reference to hands or the act of touching, such overt representational strategies are undoubtedly related to their projects. As Gilles Deleuze writes, with reference to Pickpocket,

it is Bresson . . . who makes touch an object of view in itself. . . . The hand, then, takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-motor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes the mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit.34


442 Deleuze is suggesting that hands can produce a specific kind of feeling and knowl-edge for the viewer. Hands draw our attention to texture, to surfaces, to touch, and to contact, all of which draw the viewer’s body into the experience of film, and this is precisely what theories of “embodied cinema” seek to explain. Indeed, one can argue that Lang, in 1930, was already interested in the expansion and reconfiguration of cinematic sensation and the movement toward an embodied cinema (Marks, Touch, 8).

Lang did not anticipate postmodern theories of cinematic phenomenology, nor is it very likely that he would have cared for them, but it is clear that he was interested in the range of sensations that cinematic experience can enable and provoke. My argument has been that the various acts of indexical signification in M draw on the viewer’s body and draw the viewer’s body into the film. To be sure, indexicality is an essential tool of modern criminal investigation (which takes the form of fingerprints, writing, and other traces) and a central operation of the cinematic apparatus (which records traces of light and sound), but it is also a technique for engaging the cinemagoer’s entire body in the encounter with film. Lang’s film scratches the surface of film and insists that we read the imprints left behind not with our eyes alone.

Conclusion

It is the task of this conclusion not only to summarize the two main arguments of this article but to find a way to understand their relationship to one another and, ide-ally, to specify that relationship as a thesis about the social and cinematic implications of indexicality in M. Both arguments, needless to say, are based on an analysis of the role of indexical modes of signification in Lang’s film. One of my claims has been that Lang uses indexicality to critique modern society and the dehumanizing techniques it uses to identify and classify individuals in a world that is highly urbanized and crowded, as well as increasingly anonymous and atomized. The other thesis has proposed that indexicality allows Lang to explore the role of tactile and acoustic knowledge and ex-perience in the cinema, which can be seen as an early engagement with the potential for an embodied cinema.

I would like to relate these apparently divergent theses not by abstract argument but through an analysis of Beckert’s speech before the kangaroo court near the end of the film. This is not only an absolutely central scene in the film that has received far too little scholarly attention. It is also a scene that needs to be addressed in the context of this article, for it seems to undermine or contradict the first thesis: at this admittedly late point in the film, Beckert is no longer simply a marked and marking object but appears as a human subject with a complex inner life that he can express with tremendous eloquence and conviction. Is it really true, then, that the film gives an account of personal identity impoverished through techniques of identification employed by modern institutions of power and control?

The first thing to note about this scene is that it represents the moment when Beckert transforms from criminal into human being; it is the first time he is referred to as a human being, ein Mensch. I have already noted that for Lang the dehumanizing


443techniques of criminal identification are not reserved for criminals and other outcasts; his film suggests that urban modernity’s anonymous crowds seem to necessitate, or at least justify, treating each individual as a potential criminal and thereby subjecting everyone to these techniques. This scene raises the question of what happens next. What happens after an individual has been identified as a criminal? It is at this point that Beckert is given the space and time, on screen, to be something more than the sum of the marks he has made on others (and other surfaces) and that he has sustained on his body.

I want to argue that the moment Beckert becomes a human being he also becomes a monster—or, in German, “ein Monster,” which offers another reading of the letter M with which he has been marked. For the first and only time in the film, Beckert turns himself inside out: he transforms his inner world into an external sign. Beckert’s dramatic, heartfelt confession reveals, shows, or demonstrates an intensely personal reality. In Latin, the verb “monstrare” (“to show, reveal”—as in “demonstrate” or “monstration”) is related to the word “monstrum,” or “monster,” both of which derive from the verb “monere” (“to remind, advise, warn”). This means that monstrosity is also linked at the etymological level to the act of showing or demonstrating: a monster is a creature that puts itself on display, that reveals itself to the world; monstrosity is defined as an act of externalization. Thus, what seems to be the moment of deepest and most genuine humanity—Beckert’s painful, emotional speech before the kangaroo court—is actually the moment when he becomes M: not (only) a murderer but a monster. This suggests that the societal critique I have described is in fact much more radical than it seems at first. Lang is not only showing that contemporary urban life is dehumanizing in the sense that official institutions only register external, physical features of existence for the sake of identification and classification. He is also demonstrating how these institutions do not tolerate any expression of humanity; they “monstrify” the human: M equals “Mensch” (human being) equals “Monster.”35

According to the logic of my argument, Lang’s film is about reading individual traces despite apparent sameness—that is, in spite of mass uniformity and mass anonymity. It is thus the task of the police and the law to find the slightest trace of physical, ex-ternal difference in a world of nondifference. And this is exactly what most of the film painstakingly depicts, when, for example, it presents a sea of faceless bourgeois men in long trench coats or when it dwells on the difficulties of identifying individuals amid near-absolute homogeneity. Mass uniformity and anonymity pose a challenge for iden-tificatory processes but they also result in the development of a system by which subtle physical evidence must be gathered and submitted in order for acts of identification to take place. Beckert’s speech disrupts this system in the most jarring and dramatic way: he refuses to be reduced to the mark on his back (M = murderer), which is to say, he refuses to be the sum of the indexical traces to which he has been connected and insists instead on revealing, or demonstrating, his inner self in an act of verbal and gestural self-expression. It is this performance of the self that has no place in the society Lang seeks to depict. Beckert confronts a world that can tolerate murderers but not human beings, a world that equates expressions of humanity with monstrosity. It is


444 this identity, that of a monster, with which he is ultimately imprinted (M = monster).I conclude by suggesting one final point of connection between the various impli-

cations of the film’s engagement with indexicality. If it is true that in this late scene Beckert truly assumes the identity of a monster, one must also recognize that it is here that Beckert’s humanity and his animality merge to become his monstrosity.36 He is sweating, crouching, writhing, and spitting; he is surrounded and enclosed by a massive audience, as if he were a caged beast or a freak show; the onlookers hurl epithets—“Bestie” (“monster”), “Vieh” (“animal”), “Schwein” (“pig”), “Hund” (“dog”)—that reveal their readiness to see him as less than human. At the same time Beckert is thoroughly eloquent and sympathetic and not merely pitiable. He receives the empathetic nods of individual onlookers, not to mention the sustained attention of the camera, which captures and transmits both his words and voice and the bodily movements, gestures, and poses that demonstrate his humanity. Indeed, what this scene suggests is that Beckert’s humanity is inseparable from his animality, and that this is precisely what makes him a pariah and a monster in the context of urban modernity—not only because his utterly human monstrations disrupt the cold and objective system of discovering and making traces but precisely because this society does not tolerate human self-expression. The moment he is referred to as a “Mensch” by his defense counsel, we hear an anonymous and unseen voice from the audience shout in response, “Das ist ja kein Mensch!” (“That’s not a human being”).

Much like Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin, Beckert finds himself transformed, physically, into a monster. These monstrosities are not metaphorical or allegorical. They are quite real and fully embodied. They are an externalization of an inner state, or, more accurately, they reveal the monstrous effects of externalizing inner states. It is not a coincidence that countless readers and critics of Kafka’s Metamorphosis have tried to visualize and even to draw Gregor Samsa in his new, beastly body. What Lang offers, in a film that is a true instance of embodied cinema, is the sight, sound, and feel of a modern-day monster—which is to say, a human being demonstrating his humanity. It is in this sense that the letter M in M is both a bodily imprint and cinematic one.

Notes1. All stills and quotations are from the 2004 Criterion Collection DVD of M and fall within the

standards of fair use (see http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/summary/v049/49.4.article.html). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are taken from the subtitles provided.

2. See Anton Kaes, M (London: BFI, 1999), 63.3. Tom Gunning’s book on Fritz Lang opens with a reflection on this particular impression and with

some suggestive remarks on the relevance of imprinted emblems for Lang’s filmic oeuvre. Though he foregrounds “this marked and marking hand,” ultimately Gunning wants to use the metaphor of imprimatur to discuss Lang’s work as a process of self-fashioning rather than to read M as a film that transmits knowledge about identity through acts of imprimatur (The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity [London: BFI, 2000], 2–3).

4. I have modified the translation slightly to reflect the original German.5. Another way of describing this difference is to say that M privileges an identificatory model of

identity over an affective-constructive one. The latter, which dominates contemporary discussions


445of identity, reflects various cultural, historical, ethnic, racial, religious and socioeconomic aspects of self-understanding. Whether it speaks about finding or, more often, producing—fabricating, fashion-ing, constructing—identity, that discourse is intimately bound up with subjective self-determination. In his study of identification practices in early modern Europe, Valentin Groebner explicitly steers clear of the term “identity”; he argues that because identity, as it is currently construed, can refer to subjective self-description, external features of identification, and an individual’s participation in a collective, the “term seems useless for analysis” (Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck [New York: Zone, 2007], 26–27). For a complex and illuminating analysis of the discursive shift that transformed identity from external fact to individual choice, see Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, “Identity and Reality: The End of the Philosophical Immigration Office,” trans. James Polk, in Modernity and Identity, ed. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 196–217.

6. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 75.7. Charles Sanders Peirce, “On the Nature of Signs,” in Peirce on Signs. Writings on Semiotic by

Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 141–43. Interestingly, Peirce thinks that all signs are in some sense indexical, since “a sign must have some real connection with the thing it signifies” (141). If the connection is direct and physical, as in the case of a weathercock showing the direction of the wind, then the sign is predominantly indexical. Even if it is indirect, the connection is still causal. Peirce gives the example of a painter painting a portrait: “The appearance of the person made a certain impression upon the painter’s mind and that acted to cause the painter to make such a picture as he did do so that the appearance of the portrait is really an effect of the appearance of the person for whom it was intended” (142). For Peirce, then, all signification is governed by the logic of indexicality.

8. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. Bazin invokes death masks, the legendary shroud of Turin, and the fingerprint—all of which have come to be understood as exemplary instances of indexicality—in an effort to explain this particular power of photographs to transform reality from signified into signifier. Peter Wollen’s reading of Bazin’s film theory in terms of Peirce’s semiology buttresses the idea that Bazin unwittingly inaugurated the influential theory of film as an indexical art, but Wollen also seeks to challenge the notion that the cinematic sign is exclusively indexical and iconic. Following Peirce’s general theory of signs, Wollen argues that film partakes in all three aspects of signification (Signs and Meaning in the Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972], 125–26, 132–34, 136, 140–41).

9. Els Wouters summarizes the scholarship that posits a link between the detective story and “indexation” and goes on to challenge this connection. Wouters argues that certain topoi of detective fiction, such as framing the innocent and red herrings, defy indexical modes of knowing, because they negate causal links between signifier and signified (“Detective Fiction and Indexicality,” Semiotica 131 [2000]: 143–54). Far from invalidating the role of indexical signification in detective fiction, however, the deliberate manipulation of traces confirms its central place in this genre: leaving false clues and tampering with evidence only proves that the detective story fundamentally relies on this type of sign; moreover, these very acts of deception can themselves be—and often are—traced.

10. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81–118. On the insignificant detail or “trifle” in the Sherlock Holmes stories, see the following articles in the same volume: Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “‘You Known My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes” (11–54) and Gian Paolo Caprettini, “Peirce, Holmes, Popper” (135–53).

11. Recent TV series such as CSI and Bones have in fact taken the idea of the minute detail to a new level: it is no longer the case that the clever and perceptive detective can spot a revealing and incriminating minor detail with the naked eye or even with the help of a magnifying glass; the investigator-turned-scientist now works on the level of the microscopic—indeed, the downright invis-ible. Tweezers and magnifying glasses have been replaced by blood spray analysis and computerized facial reconstruction.


446 12. This argument does not contradict research in criminology at the time, which was conducted largely by psychiatrists and for which biological and genetic factors were the primary explanation for criminal behavior. See Richard F. Wetzell, “Criminology in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, ed. Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 401–23. This research focused on understanding the criminal mind for its own sake and in order to develop preventive measures and determine punishments. The argument I present here about M is more about police practice—that is, how to find and catch criminals—than the more academic field of criminology. In another essay in the same volume, Peter Becker makes an interesting distinction between “criminalists,” whose major focus was crime prevention and who believed in social and biographical explanations of criminal behavior (i.e., “the lifeworld of criminals”), and “criminologists,” who sought an academic understanding of the criminal type and took a more scientific approach, often informed by new advances in anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry; the criminalist perspective dominated in the mid-1800s, whereas the age of criminology came in the late nineteenth century (“The Criminologists’ Gaze at the Underworld: Toward an Archaeology of Criminological Writing,” 105–33). M tends to depict the criminological approach to scientific analysis in a somewhat mocking manner (think of the dactylographer and gra-phologist). The film, then, is more “criminalist” than “criminological”: it contains a rich representation of the criminal underworld and the complex social and economic mechanisms that undergird it, and the mind and body of the criminal are of interest only in so far as they lead to the criminal’s capture (i.e., not for the sake of science). Finally, on the institutionalization of criminal psychology in Wei-mar Germany, see Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), especially chap. 5. Wetzell’s fine study emphasizes the debates over the relationship between biology and heredity and environment and society in Weimar criminal biology.

13. On the historical dimension of the film, in particular its relationship to contemporary mass murder trials and the hysteria they caused, see Kaes, M, 30–41.

14. Though the standard word for this in German is “drucken,” the Latinate “pressen” has been present in some form or other in the German language since at least the Middle Ages. The Grimms’ historical dictionary dates the word to the period of Old High German (750–1050 AD) and offers numerous instances of the word in New High German, especially in classical poetry. The Grimms also note that the word was used as early as 1478 in connection with the printing press. See their Deutsches Wörterbuch, 2 vols. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1980), s.v. “pressen,” http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB.

15. As Gunning puts it, “Beckert is caught between two literal impressions and inscriptions: the M imprinted on his back which renders him visible, and the mark he himself left as he wrote the confession to the newspaper” (The Films of Fritz Lang, 188).

16. Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7.

17. It is interesting to note that early advocates of police photography thought of it as a painless, nonviolent kind of “branding.” See Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detec-tives, and Early Cinema,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 21–22.

18. Writing on the body was not only a way of identifying transgressors. In the Middle Ages, such skin marks primarily “designated positive selection”—that is, being close to or like Christ, being among the chosen. To be marked was to be singled out for special treatment or protection (Groebner, Who Are You?, 105).

19. For a masterful analysis of the erosion of trust in visual modes of criminal identification in the Weimar Republic, see Todd Herzog, Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 87–109.

20. On the history of names as guarantors of identity, see Jane Caplan, “This or That Particular Person: Identification in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 49–66.


44721. Of police experts in the first half of the nineteenth century, Peter Becker writes, “Their obsessive concern with deceit and their fear of a well-organized, but also well-disguised criminal class provided the framework for the implementation of identification strategies based on the [Carlo Ginzburg’s] circumstantial paradigm” (Peter Becker, “The Standardized Gaze: The Standardization of the Search Warrant in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Documenting Individual Identity, 140). On the Hochstapler, or con man, see Herzog, Crime Stories, 93–102. See also Cole, Suspect Identities, 21–22. To confirm Lang’s interest in this kind of “modern” criminal, one need only look to his German Mabuse films: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler—ein Bild der Zeit (Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler [1922]) and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933]). Mabuse’s criminal genius consists largely of being able to deceive others through physical appearance, to disguise his true identity and assume other identities at will.

22. Alphonse Bertillon’s “portrait parlé,” the formalized personal description, and the forms that Robert Heindl developed to guide police in their perception and recording of features were crucial for this project (Becker, “The Standardized Gaze,” 145–53).

23. On the use of photography in criminal investigations, both real and fictional, see Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 15–45. Gunning argues that the marked body is an antiquated way of identifying criminals, whereas the use of photography was a modern intervention: “In the modern drama of detection, photography, through its indexicality, iconic accuracy, and mobility of circula-tion, provides the ultimate means of tying identity to a specific and unique body” (20). He goes on to describe how photography was combined with fingerprints (another indexical marker) and body measurement (anthropometry) to perfect the process of criminal identification. His strong emphasis on the role of indexicality within visual processes is worth noting in the context of the present article. See especially the fascinating discussion of the optogramme (37–39).

24. See the “Chronology of Fingerprints” in Colin Beavan, Fingerprints: The Origin of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science (New York: Hyperion, 2001), xiii–xvi.

25. Herzog draws a distinction between the popular and modernist criminalist fantasies: “The emphasis of the popular criminalistic fantasy, in contrast to the modernist criminalist fantasy, lay not primarily in attempts to understand the motivation of criminals and to reflect on the adequacy of our methods of understanding and judging them. Rather, the popular enjoyment of criminalistic fantasy focused on identifying and tracking criminals” (Crime Stories, 88). Herzog associates the public dis-course on criminal detection and anthropology with this popular fantasy.

26. For Foucault, the central means by which the modern state exercises power is by keeping track of individual bodies and general populations. Population control involves such measures as census surveys, residency registration (Meldepflicht), and employment records. Foucault’s discussion of the birth of statistics and the advent of the Polizeistaat reveals this depersonalized view of identity: “What interested the sovereign, prince, or republic in the traditional conception, was what men were, either in terms of their status, their virtues, or their intrinsic qualities. It was important for them to be virtuous, it was important for them to be obedient, and it was important for them to be workers and not idlers. The good quality of the state depended upon the good quality of its elements.” However, Foucault continues, “What is characteristic of a police state is its interest in what men do; it is interested in their activity, their ‘occupation.’ The objective of police is therefore control of and responsibility for men’s activity insofar as this activity constitutes a differential element in the development of the state’s forces” (Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], 322).

27. “Individuals might be two, or even more, but the body was truly one. In fact, all bodies changed slightly over time, but the new identification techniques were able to accommodate these changes, to link bodies to themselves across time and space. With these techniques in place, the authorities . . . could track the bodies of proven criminals” (Cole, Suspect Identities, 3).

28. Lang’s remarkable use of sound in M has led some critics to contrast the role of vision and hearing (e.g., Todd Herzog, “Fritz Lang’s M (1931): An Open Case,” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah Isenberg [New York: Columbia University Press, 2009], 291–309), though they seem to ignore the role of the tactile almost entirely. Gunning is attentive to the presence of hands in the film but does not explore the tactile as a mode of perceiving and knowing.


448 29. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 136.

30. Doane recognizes the significance of the whistling, but for her the whistling is a purely deictic index that allows Lang literally to point to the filmic frame. It is in this frame, for Doane, that the image as trace and deixis collide (“The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” 139–40).

31. Many scholars have remarked on Lang’s innovative use of sound (e.g., Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, 165–66; Kaes, M, 9–14), and some have even made it the central feature of their reading (e.g., Lutz Koepnick, “Rilke’s Rumblings and Lang’s Bang,” Monatshefte 98, no. 2 [2006]: 198–214). Still, little or nothing has been said about the film’s presentation of sound as an indexical sign.

32. Some major theorists include Michel Chion (on the acousmêtre), Rick Altman (on early sound film), and Kaja Silverman (on the female voice).

33. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See also Vivian Sobchak, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” Senses of Cinema 5 (2000): http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/5/fingers.

34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Lon-don: Continuum, 2005), 12.

35. I would like to thank Marc Caplan for introducing the notion of monstrosity into my reading of M and for his helpful remarks on an earlier draft of this article.

36. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first definition for monster “a mythical creature which is part animal and part human” (www.oed.com).

Documents

Indexing Identity: Fritz Lang’s M