Metropolis Scene Analysis

It is comparable to one of the first scenes where the residents of Berlin are reading out load an article about the new committed crime (00:10:15 – 00:11:12). The scene starts with a previous one because the voice of the reader appears while Bercket is writing his letter. However, in a few seconds one understands that this voice belongs to another character who reads the article in the next scene. Thus, using sounds, Lang creates new frames and various techniques to continue and develop the plot linking visual and audio narratives. Sounds increase the universe of the film, the space of one shot because there is no need to show all acting if the viewer can comprehend it anyway. Instead, Lang pays attention to details, characters that can be

The city there is depicted through panoramas of its landscapes and buildings. In M Berlin is described through its inhabitants, their psychological condition and their way to communicate with reality. The blind old man who recognizes the murderer is not only the symbolic figure of a justice that usually represented as a figure with a blind fold that makes tell the truth impartially. As well as a housekeeper in Beckert’s flat, he has a disability that determines his communication with reality. He is oriented by sounds meanwhile, the housekeeper, being almost deaf, she is dependent on images. Becket himself is the disable person who cannot help hearing the voices in his head, the sounds that submits his own will. Until the end of the film when Beckert reveals his illness, we never hear him speaking. Most part of the film shows how the criminals and the police are searching for him, hunting for someone who is an unwilled hunter himself. Other characters describe him and make conclusions about his physical, mental, and emotional

According to a tradition of the film, the police appears outside of the shot, constructed through the Becket’s angle of the view, inside of the fiction space, and the viewer can understand it through the immediate silence: all criminals raise their hands: they are not judges anymore. A hand touches the Beckert’s shoulder the similar way when he was depicted. The voice pronouns “In the name of the law” and in the next shots we hear “In the name of the people”. For a few seconds we see just an empty table symbolizing the fact that lynching is not the way to deal with violence because it only increases cruelty. The Becket’s fate is an open final of the film. He has been already punished by his illness that leaded him to an isolation from the others. The message of the film is given to Elsie’s mother that returns us to the beginning of the film creating a circle in the plot. A song was a sign that the children are still alive. The voice is a chance to protect oneself through the speech, to communicate with the world, to be