GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA 1919 – 1933
Expressionism has its roots in painting (starting about 1910) and
was quickly adopted by
theatre, literature, and architecture. Flashback:
a brief history of film, quotes that:
Expressionism emphasized a given artist’s emotional,
intensely personal reactions; it was thus in contrast to the traditional view
that an artist should strive faithfully to reproduce the natural appearance of
the object or person being painted, sculpted, or written about.
All different definitions of Expressionism acquaint it as a theory
of art that expresses feelings in an abstract way.
The German Expressionist cinema from 1919 to 1933 was a new
cinematic style that revealed a few widely regarded films. As adapted for film, Pam Cook describes
expressionism in her Cinema Book, as
an “ … extreme stylisation of misé-en-scene …” and that “… the stylistic
features of German Expressionism are fairly specific and include chiaroscuro
lighting , surrealistic settings and, frequently, a remarkable fluidity of
mobile framing”. Flashback, adds that German Expressionism “… concentrated on a
heavy use of light and dark contrasts, exaggeration, tilted angles, a
dream-like atmosphere.”
As Pam Cook points out, World War One contributed to the development
of German film productions. After the
closure of the borders the German film producer had to provide the domestic
film market with their own products. The
number of film productions rose from 28 in 1913 to 245 in 1919. Unfortunately, these films quality didn’t
live up to the quantity in which they were being produced. At this time German films were either
blatantly commercial or mere copies of foreign films.
At the end of 1917, the German military and the government founded
the Universum Film AG (Ufa) in order to influence the German cinema audience
with propaganda films. Almost at once
Ufa became the major production company in Germany and swallowed up a number of
pre-existing production companies, thus inheriting their directors, cameramen,
actors, designers, etc. In order to
attract the domestic market Ufa’s producers had to increase the quality of
German films.
The end of World War One in 1918, the collapse of the November
Uprising and massive inflation all contributed to an export boom in the German
film industry which began in 1919. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is generally
regarded as the film which brought Expressionism to the German cinema. It is also one of the most typical examples of
German Expressionism. It is the story of
a madman’s fantasies filmed with starkly artificial sets, make-up, cardboard
backdrops or painted Cubist shadows, which effectively suggest the
disorientation of the storyteller’s mind.
We see the world as the hero does.
The world of the film is literally a projection of the hero’s vision.
As Siegfried Kracauer describes in From Hitler to Caligari, the film’s authors Carl Meyer and Hans
Janowitz’s original story had been essentially changed by the director Robert
Wiene. While Meyer and Janowitz’s story
exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene’s Caligari, glorified authority and convicted its antagonists of
madness. Wiene wanted his film to be
commercial, answering to mass desires.
With his instinctive submission to the necessities of the screen, he put
the original story into a framing narrative which introduces the hero Francis
as a madman.
Caligari was designed by three expressionist artists. One of them, Herman Warm, claimed: “The film must become graphic art … I thought
that the whole film could have been performed on stage.” Kracauer mentions that in accordance with
Warm’s belief:
… the canvasses and draperies of Caligari abounded in complexes of jagged, sharp, pointed forms,
strongly reminiscent of Gothic patterns.
Except for a few slips or concessions – some backgrounds opposed the
pictorial convention in too direct a manner , while others all but preserved
them – the settings amounted to a perfect transformation of material objects
into emotional ornaments.
It is interesting to reflect upon the fact that Caligari was completely shot in the studio. It seems as if the camera did not take the
plunge to go out onto the streets.
Kracauer points out that their withdrawal into the studio was part of
the general German retreat into a shell.
The studio also allowed film producers much more possibilities to
express abstract thoughts. In the early
20th century some art forms such as painting moved towards bigger
abstraction, towards “less topic and more art.”
The art of filmmaking had aspirations on the scale of painting and the
other arts. The Expressionist filmmakers
used manipulative techniques to create a popular art form in the studio. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a big success
in the United States, France and other countries after its release in 1920,
while the Germans seemed too close to it to appraise its symptomatic
value. The French coined the term
“Caligarisme” and applied it to a post-war world seemingly all upside-down,
which at any rate, proves that they sensed the film’s bearing on the structure
of society. After its release in the
United States in April 1921 it gained world fame. Because of its success other films in the
expressionist style soon appeared.
In 1922, a short-lived studio, Prana Film, supplied Ufa with
Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau.
Murnau’s conception of Dracula as a rat in human form as successful at
the box office with its gothic subject matter and visual style.
While the German economy recovered and the U.S. Dawes Plan helped to
stabilise the country in 1924, the German film industry suffered a great
deal. In times of inflation, films were
cheap and therefore easy to sell on foreign markets. Now at the mark was stabilised, expressionist
film budgets were rising and foreign films came in more frequently, offering a
degree of competition unknown in Germany for nearly a decade. The export boom in the film industry
collapsed almost as quickly as it had started.
Murnau’s The Last Laugh was to suffer from this situation, becoming, in
spite of laudatory press notices, a commercial failure. “Murnau was the first to make camera movement
a style sufficient into itself.”
As Pam Cook writes:
Expressionism as a national movement died out around
1924, though Expressionist tendencies can be found in later German films. Metropolis (1926) made effective use of
miniatures and other special effects.
Fritz Lang’s vision of the future was the most expensive German film
to date. Lang had employed some 800
actors, 30,000 extras and taken 310 days and 60 nights of filming. Metropolis’ greatness is in its design, its
geometric use of shapes as well as of masses of people. The film works as a criticism of the
manipulative capitalist system which both oppresses the people and transforms
them into a monstrous destructive power.
An expressionist tendency lingered on in many of the German films
even into the 1930s such as Lang’s M. By
1933, when M was finally released in America, its half-Jewish director as well
as its world famous star Peter Lorre had joined the exodus of talent which to
date included Marlene Dietrich, Robert Weine, Billy Wilder, Carl Freund and
Ernst Lubitsch who went to settle in Hollywood to avoid the impending rise of
Adolf Hitler.
