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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers
Sabine Doran
Crowds and Victims: On the Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Fritz Langs M
Email - Profile - Subtheme # 6
ABSTRACT
In the famous lynching scene at the end
of Fritz Langs film M (1931), the roles of crowd and victim are
ironically reconfigured: Fritz Lang places the mass murderer in the place of the
victim asking for the empathy of the spectator, while being judged by a crowd of
persecutors who are also guilty of crimes themselves. The film stages a
spectacle of persecution, in which the crowdwhich is literally a crowd of
criminalsasks for the death of the child killer. Thus I seek to show that
what makes the victim a victim is not his innocence but his vulnerability.
To this end, I will analyze Fritz
Langs reversal of the role of the rightly persecuted mass killer with respect
to Girards analysis of narratives of persecution, which Girard discusses as
occupying a mid-point between archaic mythical representations and radical
demystifications of collective violence. I will explore cinematic mechanisms of
visualizing the transformation of the demystification of violence into a
mythical representation, in which the persecution of the killer suddenly starts
to foreshadow the power of the masses, which is (historically and politically)
about to rise in Nazi Germany.
Sabine Doran is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the German Program at the University of California, Riverside. She was a visiting researcher at Stanford University from 1996-1999 and received her Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in 2004. Her research traces the relation between literature and the visual arts (film, painting, video, plastic art) in terms of the genetic and figural connections between aesthetics, politics and history. Her current book project is entitled The Aesthetics of Yellow in Modern Art and Literature. She is a co-organizer of the 2008 COV&R meeting in Riverside, California.