European Cinema

1920s

Soviet Union• Czar deposed in 1917• Vladimir Lenin implemented Marxism and

Collective Action• By 1918, Lenin had sent out the “Red

Train,” which showed Dziga Vertov’s (1896-1954) film The October in various stations along USSR’s western front.

• Man with a Movie Camera (1929): http://youtu.be/8Fd_T4l2qaQ

Vertov Man…

Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)

• Believed the essence of cinema was editing (not the script or photographing of actors)

• “Took shots of Red Square and the American White House, individual closeups of two men and a closeup of two hands shaking and cut them all together to create a continuous effect, an impression that all action takes place at the same time, in the same place.”

• Influenced by D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance

• Vsevelod Pudovkin (1893-1953) agreed. Mother: http://youtu.be/aZy3qO3bdy8

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzhh6yezQpQ&feature=share&list=PL510F043EC6922DC4

Mother

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)

• Stage director dabbling in revolutionary theatre, an engineer, from a comfortable middle-class Jewish family.

• Overriding principle was that of kineticism—of jagged intense movement within the frame and in the cutting of shots. Movement was all. The only true sin was a static shot. Focus again on editing.

• Potemkin (1926) Odessa step scene: http://youtu.be/Ps-v-kZzfec

• Scene parodied in films such as Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables (1987).

Potemkin

Eisenstein’s Decline• 1930s a time of frustration:

• 6 months in Hollywood led to 2 screenplays which Parmount declined to make.

• An independent production in Mexico turned disastrous when its backer, Upton Sinclair, withdrew support after Eisenstein exceeded absurdly small budget

• At home Joseph Stalin deemed him untrustworthy.

German Filmmakers• Germany’s 3 leading filmmakers eventually

emigrated to the U.S.• Ernst Lubitsch: Concealed his seriousness behind

a slyly comic exterior.• F. W. Murnau• Fritz Lang: Most effectively captured the

pscyhological mood of the era: “Germany entered a period of unrest and confusion, a period of hysteric despair and unbridled vice full of the excesses of an inflation-ridden country…. Money lost its value very rapidly. The workers received their money not weekly but daily and even so… their wives could hardly buy a couple of rolls or half a pound of potatoes for a day’s work” (63).

German Expressionism

• A theory of art that emphasized a given artist’s emotional, intensely personal reactions.

• In contrast to the traditional view that artists faithfully reproduced the natural appearance of the object or person being painted, sculpted, or written about.

• In film (preferably in studies with claustrophobic feel)• a heavy use of light and dark contrasts• Exaggeration• Tilted angles• A dreamlike atmosphere• A distorting of the external world to reveal a psychological state.• Evocation of “stimmung,” an intense atmospheric mood.

Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari

The Epic vs. The Intimate

• Epics: Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry and Fritz Lang’s Siegfried

• Intimate films=Kammerspiel• Films of psychology rather than action• Strict unities of time, place, and action• Best written by Carl Mayer (impressionistic poems for Murnau,

Robert Wiene, and Walter Ruttman)

• Between the two poles was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariundiluted expressionism

• Madman’s fantasies filmed with starkly artificial sets of cardboard backdrops or painted cubist shadows “drawings come to life”

• Expressionism exerted an enormous influence on American film noir of the 1940s.

Siegfried

Fritz Lang• Most earnest: began career with novelettish

thrillers like The Spiders (1919).• Evolved into more folkoric movies with

Siegfried (1924) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)

• a Gotterdamerung (ring cycle)• Bracketed with Wagner and reissued under Hitler• Music hated by Lang• Used techniques such as double exposure.• Used melodrama and sensation to deal with moral

themes (inspired Alfred Hitchcock)

The Spiders

Metropolis• An elaborate vision of the world of the future• Most expensive movie made in Germany• Universally deplored for silly story• Written by Lang’s wife Thea von Harbau• Greatness in its design

• Geometric use of shapes as well as masses of people

• Bravura scale and set pieces, such as the coldly beautiful robot Maria.

Metropolis

F. W. Murnau (1888-1931)

• Most influential German Director.• Former soldier like Lang but more poet than

architect• First major success was Nosferatu (1922)—

adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. • Integrated the patently unreal vampire with

realistic settings• Ability to obliterate the line between real and

unreal

Nosferatu

The Last Laugh (1924)

• Written by Carl Mayer (1894-1944)• Silent movie without titles except for conclusion• Emotionally complex—doorman demoted to

lavatory attendant and crumbles• Story of differing social spheres and human pride• Moving camera which tracked, panned, and

moved without tripods.• Emil Jannings plays the old man with great talent• Contains only 300 shots (vs. 540 in Nosferatu):

used long takes.• Influenced Hollywood filmmakers to use

expressive camera movements.

The Last Laugh

G. W. Pabst (1887-1967)

• Realistic, plot-oriented stories• Slices of life like The Joyless Street (1925)• Juxtaposed street-wise profiteers and the destitute

middle class and drew on journalistic style of films like A Corner in Wheat.

• Pandora’s Box (1929) most famously with Louis Banks• Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Three Penny Opera

(1931) led to Pabst’s decline.

The Joyless Street

Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003)

• Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures.

• With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.

• The Blue Light (1932): http://youtu.be/6zGvQlyifHQ

French Cinema of the 20s

• Influenced by experimentation in the arts:• Dadaism emphasized the illogical or absurd,

using buffoonery and other provocative behavior to shock and disrupt a complacent society.

• Despised Realism as a “superficial style.”• Reacting to the violent, disillusioning debacle

of WWI with irony, cynicism, and anarchic nihilism—Politics were morally outrageous, authority a joke, so only sardonic laughter possible, not tradition and convention.

Dadaism

From Dadism to Surrealism

• Characteristics:• Slightly more positive manifestation of the

worldview of life as absurd.• Aggressive form of cultural terrorism.• Aimed to broaden and transform life by

attacking the logical, objectivist view of reality.• Dreams, the instinctive, the subconscious seen

as superior.

Examples include Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, primarily centered in Paris.

Dali and Surrealism

Post WWI French Film Industry

• Devastated by the war• By 1919, French films decreased from 50-15 %• Either allied to or in reaction against the tenets of

the avant-garde surrealists

• Jean Vigo=• Surrealist who used slow motion and disjunctive

compositions that isolated characters from conventional surroundings.

• As an anarchist, presented authority figures as grotesques. Zero for Conduct (1933) influenced New Wave: http://youtu.be/YUkW1LBuQcg

Zero for Conduct

Rene Clair (1898-1981)

• Lighter tone of surrealism: farces brushed with the absurd and social comment.

• Inducted into Academie Francaise in end (reentering the Establishment).

• Left France for England in 1936 and to US during WWII.

• Under the Roofs of Paris (1930),Le Million(1931), etc.• Heavily patterned—an object is passed from hand to

hand, and each person in the chain is defined by what he or she does with the article: http://youtu.be/vUS56JGKNUE

Le Million

Abel Gance (1889-1981)

• Often reviled because of extravagance, 19th C romantic sensibility, and wildly expressive avant-garde techniques (hand held camera, staccato editing)

• Style may transcend the period with technical excellence in development of “Polyvision,” the precursor to Cinerama and Imax.

• Napoleon (1927): http://youtu.be/cMlnRP3qOYE

Napoleon

Luis Bunuel (1900-1983)

• Widely regarded as the greatest of the surrealists.• A dashing young Spaniard lured into film by Fritz

Lang’s work.• Work stood apart because of rigorous psychological

harshness fueled by his frustrations as a renegade Catholic and interest in ideas and the sensual.

• Teamed up with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dali for Andalusian Dog (1928), an amalgamation of dreams and images with no rational explanation—influenced by Freud: http://youtu.be/BIKYF07Y4kA

• Land without Bread (1932) kicked him out of Franco’s Spain: http://youtu.be/G5h_zzWiI1Q

Andalusian Dog