The Cold Gaze
Notes on Mobilization and Modernity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7931976 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anton Kaes (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Issue | 59 |
| Pages | 105 |
| Publication date | 1993-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New German Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/488225 |
| OpenAlex | W2315095662 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 1 |
In Fritz Lang's M (1931), there is one fleeting moment, one apparently insignificant detail, that (in the manner of Roland Barthes's punctum') expands and overpowers the reading of the film. A tracking shot moves down a Berlin street and affords a passing glance at a movie poster on a wall, billing the most famous German war film at the time, G. W. Pabst's Wesfront 1918. Admittedly, the allusion to this contemporary film (released exactly a year prior to M) was probably meant to function as a temporal marker, lending Lang's semidocumentary crime film immediacy and authenticity. But why a reference to a war film? The poster may also have been an industry in-joke or advertising gimmick because both Westfont 1918 and M were produced by the same studio, Nero Film. Perhaps, though, there is a more profound nexus at work here, a link between the two films despite their seemingly quite different topographies. For is Berlin not shown in M as a battlefield, a west front 1931, a city in a state of total mobilization prepared to fight the enemy, who takes the form of an invisible serial murderer? I would like to use this intertextual allusion to Westfront 1918 as an impetus for a new reading of M as a war film. Of course, not a war film in the customary sense of the word, with its conventional images of fighting
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Gaze · Late modernity · Mobilization · Modernity · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2003 - 2024 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |