#the murderers are among us

[forthegothicheroine]

I've been turning over the intense German/Soviet film noir The Murderers Are Among Us in my head, and my feelings on it remain mixed. It's very well made, and I agree with the points it makes! It's beautiful and sad and the way the shadows swallow up the villain in the ending scene will be etched in my memory forever.

Here's the thing:

A movie about the trauma of WWII made for a German audience in 1946 who lived in bombed-out cities is going to tell a very specific kind of story; it would be interesting to view this as a double feature with the recent Hungarian film 1945, also a noir about concentration camp survivors returning to the ruins of home, but much darker and angrier. Susanne, our heroine here, was put into a camp because of her father (implied to be a political dissident), not because she was Jewish or Romani or even a communist herself, and when she gets home, all she wants is peace. Survivors who felt like that obviously existed, no one personality type has a monopoly on suffering, but it feels wrong that the Wermacht soldier is the one depicted as being wracked by trauma and not the woman who went through one of the worst things in human history.

In fact, as far as this movie is concerned, no Jews or Romani existed. It's not Holocaust denial, nothing as heinous as that, but the atrocity which haunts our hero was his superior gunning down a street full of people after one of them fired a shot- not, say, the systematic massacre of millions of his neighbors. The dark thought crossed my mind that maybe German audiences in 1946 might have still thought that was the right thing to do. The trauma depicted is one of exhaustion, and that is a true experience; Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about growing up among broken men who lived their lives knowing their glorious mission had been a brutal and deadly failure. That experience was real, even if it wasn't the same one my family went through. I can believe that.

But a concentration camp survivor being the one to say they can't cast judgment on each other when her love is about to shoot the commander of a massacre? That I can't believe.

[schlock-luster-video]

On July 22, 1948, Murderers Among Us debuted in Italy.

[generichoneydew]

nuclear winters over guys. I'm only accepting nuclear spring. Bite me.

34/52

[fwoggiekeromoto]

Sightseeing

[kelocitta]

awesome games for girls

[enpr-ss]

Is this what y’all mean by MurderBot?

[unlit-myriad]

I got as much shame as Sonic got a heartbeat, NONE HUEHEHEHEHHEHEHEHAHXNXKDNZKSNDKSNS

[fractangle]

Behold, The Meme Jacket

This jacket arrangement position is called "LOOK AT MY ARMPITS."

Here's a close-up of the collar and lapels with the jacket laying normally:

The snaps on the lapels hold them open, but can also be snapped closed, which is nice on windy days.

Here's the front of the jacket as it's intended to be seen:

I was very particular about how I designed and arranged these: much like how the back only has color in the middle, I wanted to keep the bright colors to the center. The two brightly colored patches are meant to read like a two-panel comic, or some sort of call-response thing, whatever. The patches along the bottom are meant to read left to right, almost like a four-panel comic. (The Awesome Face patch is just there because it fit.)

What's not obvious from these pictures is that there are inside pockets, which connect to the zippered side pockets! I don't tend to actually use this feature very much, but it does make the pocket space hugely tall in there.

Another feature I don't tend to use very much is the zip-off sleeves. I think I've only ever taken the sleeves off once (plus a few times when sewing patches on, to make it easier to reach where I was working).

The googly eye buttons are holding up moderately well - I might need to replace one of the eyes by next year. If you're gonna do this yourself, you gotta put a metal keyring of the same size behind the googly eye! Wrap the keyring in a piece of fabric (I used the tubular bit from the bottom edge of a t-shirt), and sew it to the button band. Then, glue the googly eye onto the fabric with enough glue to also glue the fabric to the keyring. (I used superglue for this.)

All in all, it's been an incredibly fun project, and one that I get lots and lots of use out of! I'm sure I'll add to it at some point, but I'm calling its current state "done (v1.0)".

[forthegothicheroine]

New-to-me movies seen in 2024: The Murderers Are Among Us (1946)

"A harmless game with tin soldiers leads down a short, perilous track to the harmless air rifle, to the harmless rifle range. And from there, straight to a mass grave."

The Big Noirvember: 50 International Film Noir Classics that Everyone Should See

[schlock-luster-video]

On July 17, 1948, The Murderers are Among Us debuted in Slovenia.

[fwoggiekeromoto]

⚠️EYE STRAIN WARNING ⚠️

(I’m so sorry I forgot to add this, pls skip if your vision is sensitive.)

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My mind melts when I think of you

[forthegothicheroine]

You all have to stay after class

I have some issues with The Murderers Are Among Us, but I really wish the people on letterboxd who didn't adore it had better things to say than "it was boring" or making Among Us jokes. Say whether or not you thought it dealt well with accountability in post-WWII Germany, I don't care about your epic memes!

[oifaaa]

Something I find really funny about the glass onion among us scene is that no one is actually dead yet which means that blanc either just vented in front of everyone or he was that suspicious that everyone caught on immediately

[sh4rkbug]

color wheel challenge because I can

I spent way too long on this I hope it doesn’t flop 😭

[imetacrab]

At the end of every Hercule Poirot story, he always calls an emergency meeting to find the imposter among us.