Unit 3: Art & the Moving Image

German Expressionism (Edited from Where the Horror Came From and German Expressionism by David Hudson)

ETA Hoffmann, Das Majorat

‘We crossed long, high-vaulted corridors; the wavering light borne by Franz threw a strange brilliance in the thickness of the gloom. The vague forms of the colored capitals, pillars and arches seemed suspended here and there in the air. Our shadows moved forward at our side like grim giants and on the walls the fantastic images over which they slipped trembled and flickered...’

Illustration - George Crosz

Historical Context – Weimar Germany German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements in

Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin, during the 1920s. These developments in Germany were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European art.

The First World War was a devastating and long conflict. At the end of World War I, Germany was surrounded by a military blockade. The Allies wanted to ensure that Germany would accept the terms of the peace they had yet to design. It was a blockade enforced with a vengeance. French hatred for the people who'd started the war in the first place was made explicit in Prime Minister Clemenceau's remark that there were still 20 million Germans too many. So, too, was their fear when Clemenceau added that while other nations have a taste for life, Germans have a taste for death.

8.5 Million people died and an estimated 21 million were injured. During the period of recovery following World War I, the German film industry

was booming. However, because of the hard economic times, filmmakers found it difficult to create movies that could compare with the lush, extravagant features coming from Hollywood. The filmmakers of the German Universum Film AG (UFA) studio developed their own style by using symbolism and mise en scène to add mood and deeper meaning to a movie

Weimar Germany

In the months between Armistice Day and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, an estimated 700,000 Germans died of hunger. "The German people," Count Harry Kessler, the eloquent chronicler of post-WWI Berlin, wrote in his journals, "starving and dying by the hundred thousand, were reeling deliriously between blank despair, frenzied revelry and revolution. Berlin had become a nightmare, a carnival of jazz bands and machine guns."

Despite the hardships Germany and particularly Berlin were the centre of an intense period of creativity

George Grosz The City 1916, 1917

Expressionism

Whilst across Europe other movements such as Dadaism arose, in Germany Expressionism in the Arts became a means of interpreting and reflecting on the chaotic social and political Post War situation

Expressionism rather than literally depicting events, attempted to depict the ‘essence’ of them.

Norbert Lynton suggests ‘All human action is expressive; a gesture is an intentionally expressive action. All art is expressive - of its author and of the situation in which he works - but some art is intended to move us through visual gestures that transmit, and perhaps give release to, emotions and emotionally charged messages. Such art is expressionist’.

No More Straight Lines

Germany Like Russia in the early years of the 20th century was moving steadily towards revolution, both political and artistic, this movement would erupt when WWI made life in Germany dramatically worse.

When Germany was defeated and thrown into economic, political and social chaos, those artists and writers knew precisely where to lay the blame. Bourgeois values, cold logic and unattainable beauty were abandoned; their art would be as raw, violent and dark as the world they lived in, driven by furious emotion toward a set of aesthetic characteristics that would later roughly define what we talk about when we talk about "Expressionism.“

In poetry and the novel, this meant staccato yelps and aborted utterances.

In painting and sculpture, it meant a straight line was not a straight line if its perceived "essence" was not straight. Buildings and the human figure creaked and bent under the strain of the perception of artists who'd made it back to the chaotic city from the putrid trenches.

On the stage, it meant isolating an object or figure in light and having everything else fall back into deep darkness.

Max Beckmann, 1919

Theatre & Chiarscuro

Film took on some of these artistic aesthetics. Much of German expressionistic film

developed out of Theatre, Particularly the work of Max Reindhart.

Directors such as Emil Jannings, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau acted under Reindhart

From Reinhardt, they learned, above all, they learned how to light. "Chiaroscuro,"

Essence of Expressionism

Expressionism’s dark and morbid themes clearly emerge from the atmosphere of the time and the experiences of WWI. They also reflect influences from Romaticism.

George Grosz writes "I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing

at the moon," wrote the artist George Grosz in his memoirs. Grosz had enthusiastically enlisted to fight in 1914; by 1917, he was in a mental institution. When released, he wandered "dark, gloomy" Berlin, drawing: "I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands... I drew a cross-section of a tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms... I also wrote poetry..."

George Grosz The Big Push…

Carl Meyer & Hans Janowitz

Meyer & Janowitz both were fascinated in the macabre. Meyer had fought in the war and Janowitz had witnessed his father’s suicide and had been commited at 16.

Janowitz later described an experience that stayed with him and went on to influence the film he would make The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

He'd met a girl at a fair in Hamburg. They were getting along nicely until they lost each other. Tracking her down, Janowitz recognized her laugh in the darkness of a park. He then saw a businessman follow that laugh before he could. The next day, he read about the murder of a girl in that same park. Suspecting she was the one, he attended the funeral -- where he saw the businessman again. He had no evidence. And said nothing.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The story tells the tale of a Dr. Caligari who travels the carnie circuit with a young man called Cesare, who sleeps in a coffin. Caligari’s act is to awaken Cesare him on stage, hypnotized, and predict the future. Cesare later wanders the streets, killing Caligari's enemies.

Two students have their suspicions regarding Caligari and, after a series of events in which one of them is killed, Caligari is chased to to an insane asylum. Caligari, it turns out, is not just a patient, but the director of the Institute.

The student exposes the truth about Caligari and the film ends with the mad doctor bound in a strait-jacket.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrg73BUxJLI

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

…Caligari has a very distinctive look. Pommer and director Robert Wiene hired Expressionist painters Walter Röhrig and Walter Reimann and set designer Hermann Warm to create specific effects.

Caligari was also a great success, creating a new aesthetic that proved art and cinema could be profitable.

Many contemporary directors, for example, Tim Burton are still influence by the film The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Vincent - Tim Burton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASHP-vgnjAw

Inside Out

In 1924, Paul Leni noted the influence of Caligari on his own Waxworks wherein he "tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality... It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event."

Leni would be among the first of this batch of German directors to go to US, developing the horror genre with films such as The Cat and the Canary, the original "Old Dark House" movie.

From Caligari to Hitler - 1947 In the article you have been given by Siegfried

Kracauer he states "Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool -- a technique foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale.“

Do you think its possible to make such a claim? Do you think its possible for Cinema to reflect or

influence a whole nations mood or mindset?

The Brothers Grimm

Germany has a tradition of dark stories and fairytales about ghouls, witches and dwarves. "Most German children delight in tales of horror."

F. W. Murnau

F. W. Murnau was an art historian from Westphalia who, as noted, wound up in Max Reinhardt's circle in Berlin.

His early features sprang from the heart of the horror genre. The Haunted Castle in 1921, and the following year, Nosferatu.

It was the first feature-length film loosely based on Bram Stoker's Dracula,

Throughout his film work from the The Last Laugh to Faust, Murnau (working with the great cinematographer Karl Freund ) created unique and stylised works that played dramatically with light, shadow and reflection.

Nosferatu - 1922

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGRFT1jx0Aw

Faust - 1926

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyzHR9TtXoU

Fritz Lang & Dr Mabuse the Gambler Fritz Lang was also a highly influential Director working in this

period Perhaps his most famous films are Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Metropolis and M (1931).

Dr. Mabuse was "a Nietzschean superman, in the bad sense of the term," Lang said himself. If there were a single film to lend credence to Kracauer's thesis, this would probably be it. Mabuse played on German fears and suspicions, on the conspiracy theories rampant at the time, that someone, somewhere, sight unseen, was pulling the strings of power, ruining Germany and the Germans for the sake of their own ends. It was a set-up that was obviously, dangerously open to interpretation.

Dr Mabuse the Gambler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQqiwIgTUHA

M

Lang's obsessive attention to cinematic language and the techniques to realize an ever-broader vocabulary for it was most fully realized and rewarding, according to many, Lang often included, in his first "talkie," M. And what talk: "Always... Always, there is this evil force inside me... It's there all the time, driving me out to wander through the streets... It's me, pursuing myself, because I want to escape... but it's impossible."

In the case of M, Lang's brilliance lies in what we don't see and don't hear. When Peter Lorre, as Hans Beckert, the role that made him a star, approaches a little girl on the street, we watch the scene from inside the store she's been peering into so eagerly. What he says to win her trust is left to our imagination. Lang doesn't stage the inevitable moment that follows at all; he gives the audiences shots and images around it, again, leaving it to the viewer to do the reconstructing: We hear but don't see the mother call out the little girl's name. We see the places where the little girl isn't: On the stairway, at the table. And finally, the balloon Beckert bought her, abandoned and tangled on telephone wires.

M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VMgLJJKiaA

The end of an era

Lang fled to Hollywood. Murnau and Lubitsch and countless other German and Austrian filmmakers were already there; others, like Robert Wiene, would follow.

Soon, the "war to end all wars" would be followed by another, which would be even more far-reaching and disastrous and leave Berlin far more ravished and ruined than it had been in 1918.

Working in America these directors would go on to influence and infuse Film Noir and the Horror genre’s amongst others with their singular aesthetic.

German Expressionism – Stylistic Elements Anti-heroic characters at the center of the story. Plot often involves madness, paranoia, obsession and... is told in whole or in part from a subjective point of view. A primarily urban setting (there are exceptions, particularly in the case

of Murnau), providing ample opportunity to explore... the criminal underworld... and the complex architectural and compositional possibilities offered, for

example, by stairways and their railings, mirrors and reflecting windows, structures jutting every bit as vertically as they do horizontally so that...

the director can play with stripes, angles and geometric forms sliced from the stark contrasts between light and shadow.

Shadows, in fact, can take on an ominous presence of their own; think of the monster's shadow ascending the stairs in Nosferatu, the shadow preceding the murderer in M or the pursuit and capture of Maria in Metropolis

German Expressionism – Acting The acting in German Expressionist films

comes close to dance at times. The acting attempts a direct correlation to the

violent brushstrokes of Expressionist painting or the staccato utterances of Expressionist poetry, an outward interpretation of the extreme inner emotions felt in extreme situations - fear, anger, and occasionally, though rarely in the films at hand, joy.

Further Watching & Clicking

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Historians quibble over whether it was truly the first Expressionist film, but it is without a doubt the first full-length, big-budget, pull-out-all-the-stops international hit of the genre and probably the most classically Expressionist of the bunch. And, to this day, it's still a trip.

Fritz Lang: Start with Metropolis and M. If you enjoy the bombast of the first, give Die Nibelungen a try. If intrigue and suspense are more your cup of schnapps, you'll probably want to go with Dr. Mabuse the Gambler.

F.W. Murnau: That "icon," Nosferatu, of course. But don't be put off by the heaviocity of the source for Faust; there's a lot more Murnau here than Goethe. And finally, though it isn't an Expressionist film, I wouldn't want to pass up an opportunity to plug The Last Laugh.

The Golem. There's a shade of controversy about the depiction of Jews as masters of the black arts, but Paul Wegener, who plays the monster brought to life himself, approaches the Jewish legend with clearly visible respect. He approached it more than once, actually, but this is the classic. Wonderfully angular sets by Hans Poelzig.

Waxworks. German Expressionism meets Orientalism. Like Lang, Paul Leni enjoyed giving his audiences an eye-full of exotic locales. The result here is episodic and uneven but often delightfully strange.

Suggestions for further clicking: Our two previously mentioned articles, "Where the Horror Came From" and "

What is the Perfect Light?" Anytime you're looking for more info on a filmmaker, the Senses of Cinema "Great Directors"

pages, with their thorough essays, filmographies and links, are a wonderful place to start. SoC has a page for Fritz Lang, but not one for F.W. Murnau yet. Until then, there's The Web of Murnau.

The German-Hollywood Connection is a fun browse, exploring just what its title promises, from Peter Lorre to Franka Potente.

Suggestions for further reading: The two classic books on German Expressionist film are Lotte

Eisner's The Haunted Screen and Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler

Thomas Elsaesser's Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary is an important book.

Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. Jim Shepard's Nosferatu: A Novel Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s is simply one

of the most fun books about the city ever written and its author, Otto Friedrich, is quite a film fan (he also wrote that terrific book on Hollywood in the 40s, City of Nets). He lingers on good, gossipy behind-the-scenes stories about the making of some of the Ufa classics.

Klaus Kreimeier's The Ufa Story is deservedly recognized as the standard telling.