Dr. Mabuse, in the famous film by Fritz Lang: "Expressionism is just a game. But why not. Now everything has become a game.” So, in the early 1920s, Expressionism apparently became a commonplace phenomenon.
The term
Expressionism is used in different senses. In 1911, the critic Wilhelm
Worringer used it to designate a set of paintings exhibited in Berlin (1) and
to contrast them with Impressionism. By extension, the notion becomes more
particularly the label under which the German avant-gardes manifested
themselves at this time in the plastic arts, but also in literature and the
theater, later still in architecture and cinema. This expressionist period of
the arts in Germany spans the years between approximately 1910 and 1925.
Moreover, the term "Expressionism" also refers to a style characterized by an expressive pathos and a mode of representation based on distortion - a style that can then be identified in works of art from different eras and peoples. The epithet "expressionist" therefore designates sometimes a specific period in the history of the arts in Germany, sometimes a general stylistic quality. This ambivalence also concerns the use of this notion in relation to film world.
Watching the film The
Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919) is to witness the crystallization of a potent
visual vocabulary. All the key tropes of German expressionism are present and
correct: macabre imagery hewn from nightmares, the sinister ubiquity of opaque
shadows (actually painted onto the sets), and a twilight zone dominated by
oblique angles and spatial distortions, consciously designed to disorient and
intoxicate. These fantastic elements can be seen in numerous classic films, such as
Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920), Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, The
Gambler (1922), Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924), Henrik Galeen’s The
Student Of Prague (1926) and F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926).
Expressionism
had been the dominant form in most other German arts since 1910, most notably
in the theatre of Max Reinhardt. But after Germany’s defeat in World War I, the
artistic form acquired a resonance with the whole zeitgeist, unexpectedly
acting as a mirror for a country that had lost land, money and pride in the
Versailles Treaty. This body blow to national confidence resulted in a morbid
introspection and a renewed interest in mysticism. Caligari was released in the
year after the war ended. And Wiene’s film was so strongly associated with
expressionism that the style was alternately known as Caligarism. But Caligari
was more than a design classic: the movie’s philosophical undertow – its
concerns with the individual’s relationship with empirical reality – was
disturbing and influential. The whole movie’s action could simply have been
located in the mind of its deluded protagonist. And this, for some critics, is
the crux of expressionism: the subjective expression of an inner world, the
fractured realities of the damaged.
Waxworks, the
masterpiece by painter and film director Paul Leni, was a portmanteau movie
about three different historical figures, all filtered through a writer’s
febrile imagination. The stars of the show are undoubtedly the phantasmagorical
sets but, according to the director, they weren’t constructed exclusively for
aesthetic reasons, but to render an internal landscape and events that cannot
be seen “through everyday eyes”. For others, expressionism is all about the
startling chiaroscuro: the bold application of one strong key light amidst
stygian gloom. Nosferatu (1922), film directed by Murnau, took expressionism
out of the studios and into the open air, while somehow retaining the intense
poeticism and pervasive sense of diurnal nightmare, achieving a gothic alchemy
by transforming the natural into the supernatural. And it gave the horror movie
an instant icon in Count Orlok (played by Max Schreck) – a spectral, skeletal
and curiously erotic presence with bat ears, rat teeth and scissor fingers.
Indeed, expressionism specialized in creatures of the night, as found in Der
Golem. But expressionism also influenced science fiction. Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), with its modernist and majestic vision of the city of the future
(constructed from steel, concrete, glass and light) became one of the major
building blocks of sci-fi.
Expressionism
came to an end in the late 1920s following a shift in German cinema pioneered
by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst towards a new realism or objectivity (Neue
Sachlichkeit). The demise of silent movies also played a part in
expressionism’s decline, as the invention of sound ushered in a more
naturalistic and prosaic cinema. Then the Nazi party’s ascension to power in
1933 had repercussions for both the German and American film industries, with
the exodus of talent from one country to the other. Fritz Lang, Karl Freund, Billy
Wilder and Robert Siodmak brought expressionism with them as they fled to
Hollywood. The result was a hybrid of American pulp, wartime disillusion,
French poetic realism and German Sturm und Drang: film noir. Early shadings of
it can be detected in Lang’s 1930s output, including Fury (1936) and You
Only Live Once (1937), but expressionism really flourished again
immediately after the war, once more holding up a mirror to national
insecurities and psychic wounds. Noir’s tales of betrayal, disillusionment and
fevered desire adopted expressionism’s destabilizing effects to reflect the
frazzled identities and neurotic perspectives of its disturbed protagonists,
particularly in such flashback classics as Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949)
and Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950). Although its last gleamings can be
detected in neo-noirs such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the
natural heir to expressionism – and Murnau in particular – is arguably Werner
Herzog. This legendary eccentric walked all the way from Munich to Paris to pay
tribute to Lotte Eisner, the fabled critic and champion of expressionism, when
she was seriously ill, and he even remade Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1979 to
make explicit the connection between New German Cinema and its dimly remembered
predecessors.
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