Nicky Coutts

A City Hunts a Murderer was one of Fritz Lang’s early intended titles for the film M (1931), his first talking picture. Working with the original footage of M, Coutts reframes each shot, zooming in or moving within each frame to avoid all human presence. In this way, the characters from Lang’s original are entirely avoided throughout the length of the reworked footage. The viewpoint scuttles furtively within each scene as characters enter and move within the frame increasing an existing sense of hunting and elusion in the original. The child murderer and his prey, and the child murderer as prey, become unseen targets of the city footage itself.