After reading Emil Jannings’ and Todd Herzog’s articles, I figure that the competition of sound and

image plays an important role in the film M apart from its murder. One impression I got from the
film is that the effect of the sometimes total absence of sound or the voice or sound from an
unseen space is pretty jarring. I want to describe some scenes which the pairing work of sound
track and visual track has created some special effect. At around 00:08:00, all sounds almost
came to a rest (if ignoring the subtle noise exists in the background) after a few shouts of the
missing girl’s name “Elsie” from her terrified mother. There were several cuts of the empty space,
from the empty stairwell, to the empty room where laundry was hung and the empty table with
empty plate on it. There were no moving objects in these three shots, while the two shots that
came after depicted the rolling ball and the flying human body-shaped balloon appeared in front
of a steady camera. I enjoyed the pairing of this piece of blankness of sound with the images but
not sure if it counts as a technique of sound adjustment. If it was a silent film, these shots
couldn’t really create the effect that the cease of voice created.
There is a long shot in this film starts after the leader of the underworld said “the beggars” at
00:42:20 which caught my attention. Then it lasted for more than 2 minutes. In this shot, there
was a point that the camera moved from below to a window, the camera suddenly moved
through it when I almost thought it was doing a zoom out. The role of the spectator in this shot
was between a real person and an unreal object that is not confined by space. But the sound and
voice was based on the real spot of the camera.
But like Todd Herzog said, “Throughout the film, sound is continually revealed as a more rapid
and more reliable conveyer of information than is sight.” Apart from the fact that the blind man
recognized the murderer, there were also the focus of visual clues of the police that didn’t work
well and the woman who had hearing problems in Beckert’s house. These all seem like an ironic
joke. Herzog also said, “sound and image are not in dialogue but often in direct competition with
one another for the audience’s attention and sympathies” What we can say is that this
competition will probably never ends as film develops toward high art since sound film came into
sight.