expressionist film

LECTURE TWO: The early ExpressionistCinema: fairy tales, magic

and the mysterious shadow world of early Weimar

First aim of module is to explore Weimar cinema as a national cinema

Later we will look at the transnational connections

What does Weimar refer to?

The German cinema (in its broadest sense) from 1919 to 1933 (corresponds to the ‘Weimar Republic’, which was the first democratically elected national government that Germany had encountered)

WEIMAR CINEMA

Stresses political and ideological aspects of the period and acknowledges aspects of the film’s reception.

Term which embraces all forms of filmmaking during the period. ‘Expressionism’ just one of these.

‘Golden age’

Key era for development of film as artistic and avant-garde medium

Strong influence on subsequent film production

Important and exciting era for all the arts, including those closely related to cinema, such as visual arts, architecture, photography, dance

MODERNISM

Kurt Schwitters

Georg Grosz

Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari )

Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, Destiny, Dr Mabuse)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (The Last Laugh, Nosferatu, Faust)

Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Joyless Street)

Paul Wegener (The Golem)

EXPRESSIONIST FILM

Specific type of film which came to the fore in the early Weimar period

Modernist Art movement (early 20th century)

Term stresses the formal or aesthetic aspects of film production with emphasis on the author or director

Strongly evident in the first few years of the Republic, 1918 – 1923)

Film as an art form

Art movement

Abstraction, fragmentation, distortion

Focus is on the expression of psychological rather than physical realism

Impressionism (late 1800s)

Claude Monet

Expressionism (early 1900s)

Wassily Kandinsky

Closer connection to ExpressionismCaspar David Friedrich 1818

Prestige art films aimed at raising profile and reputation of the German film at home and abroad

Artistically ambitious

Pushing the boundaries of what film could achieve aesthetically and thematically

Prefigured avant-garde film as well as Hollywood genre films (horror, film noir, family melodrama for example)

The outsider/insider

Doppelgänger (doubles)

Narrative structure:

Oedipal scenarios (rebellion followed by submission to the law of the father)

lack of continuity of narrative (interiority)

Sources from other media (literature; theatre: Max Reinhardt)

Intertexuality

Scratching beneath the surface of reality and fantasy, appearances and disguise

Anxiety; Insanity; Uncanny; Ghostly

Set designs:

Artificiality

Painterly

Angular Shapes

Fragmentary

Distorted perspectives

Action:

Emotional

Unnatural

Jerky movement

Exaggerated gestures

Fragmentary

Lighting:

Soft light

Hard keylight

Chiaroscuro (single key light from the side)

Extract from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari:

What aspects of Expressionism can you recognise?