Event Details
In person: Academy Governor Howard A. Rodman
One of the most influential filmmakers—whose innovative cinematic language led to such groundbreaking films such as Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929) —is Austrian-born Fritz Lang, who contributed to the premise of sci-fi and noir film domains in American cinema. Lang’s first sound film, M, is set in a 1930s Berlin disrupted by a gruesome serial murder case targeting children. Peter Lorre stars as the creepy murderer, Hans Beckert, who embodies the instability and confusing socio-political shifts that the nation was facing in the early 1930s. Pursued by the city police and criminals from the underworld, Beckert’s heightened anxiety is manifested through an array of daring close-up shots in high-contrast, stark, black-and-white cinematography, an apparent heir of... Lang’s early work in German Expressionism.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
1931 | 111 min. | Germany | Black and white | German | PG-13 | DCP
DIRECTED BY: Fritz Lang
WRITTEN BY: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
WITH: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernickle, Inge Landgut, Gustaf Gründgens