There's a further treasure in Early Murnau: Five Films 1921-1925 (Eureka, PG), a fascinating, deep-cut compilation of the German expressionist's less celebrated silent work, from class-conscious murder mystery The Haunted Castle to smoky psychological reverie Phantom, a glorious apparition thought lost until a decade ago.
And even the thank-you was a cold knife, an unacknowledged but conscious act of murder.
So should any environmentalist who can see the difference between their honest concern about industrial chemicals and conscious purposeful mass murder.
That movie was, in its way, no less self-conscious than "Funny Games" — the murder of Marion Crane clearly brandished its own artistry, with Norman's knife rivalled, chop for chop, by the editor's cuts — yet it still maintained its duty to move and terrify.
The public had suddenly become murder-conscious.
On the contrary, the perpetrators of mass murder undertake a conscious decision to do so.
(Later on, he'll commit more murders while fully conscious).
Yet more awkwardly for Elm Harbor's color-conscious locals, the town's first murder victim in decades, Kellen Zant, a flamboyantly driven economist and onetime lover of Julia Carlyle, also happens to be black.
And as staged with inventive efficiency by Trip Cullman and performed by a top-flight cast of four, "Murder Ballad" is also self-conscious in just the right way.
This being the 21st century, an age in which "meta" is the artistic prefix of choice, "Peter" and "Murder Ballad" are openly self-conscious and self-referential about their narrative powers.
Superficially, there are huge differences, ranging from poetic non-fiction essays (Sleep Furiously, Of Time and the City), fables of obsession and murder (Helen, Red Road), overtly self-conscious imagism (Soi Cowboy, Hunger), unsettling, tiny-budget dramas (Katalin Varga, Unrelated).
