MM

Fritz Lang’s first sound film “M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder” was shot in 1931 in Berlin. Shortly afterwards, the director was forced to flee the country to escape the Nazis, going first to Paris and later to Hollywood. After the end of World War II, the film was remade in 1951. The American Joseph Losey directed the Hollywood version of “M”, transferring the dark portrait of a German metropolis to the streets of Los Angeles. The same year, Losey was blacklisted in the US because of his close ties to Bertolt Brecht and his socialist views. He first emigrated to Italy, where he worked under a different name before finally moving to England.
By juxtaposing film stills and sound bites from both Lang’s and Losey’s version, M/M explores what happens when filmic elements from a specific culture are transferred into another cultural context. What happens when a story, told in the specific context of a European city, is re-shot in a completely different setting? Which parts are conserved, which parts are changed in order to keep the story legible in a different constellation of time and space? The film stills used mainly focus on the portrayal of public space in both films.