“Murder!” At the Intersection of Cinema and Modern Physics

PLACEHOLDER INTRO
In the opening moments of Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) and its simultaneously produced German-language counterpart Mary (released in 1931), a black cat, startled by a scream in the night, skitters away. Given the films’ seemingly endless uncertainties—about guilt and innocence, subject and object, the theatrical and the real—it’s tempting to imagine the cat belongs to Erwin Schrödinger. Even with nine lives, that physicist’s experimental feline wouldn’t dare set paw inside this black box of ambiguities.