German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning 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 culture in fields such as architecture, painting and cinema.

Introduction

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 studio developed their own style by using symbolism and mise en scène to add mood and deeper meaning to a movie, concentrating on the dark fringes of human experience.

1920s-1930s

Among the first Expressionist films, ''The Student of Prague'' (1913), ''The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'' (1920), ''The Golem: How He Came Into the World'' (1920), ''Destiny'' (1921), ''Nosferatu'' (1922), ''Phantom'' (1922), ''Schatten'' (1923), and ''The Last Laugh'' (1924), were highly symbolic and stylized.

Various European cultures of the 1920s had embraced an ethic of change, and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films). Later films often categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionism include ''Metropolis'' (1927) and ''M'' (1931), both directed by Fritz Lang.

The extreme non-realism of Expressionism was short-lived, fading away after only a few years. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into later films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery, light, etc. to enhance the mood of a film. This dark, moody school of film making was brought to America when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. These German directors found American movie studios willing to embrace them, and several German directors and cameramen flourished there, producing a repertoire of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on film as a whole.

Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism are horror film and film noir. Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's ''The Phantom of the Opera.'' German filmmakers such as Karl Freund (the cinematographer for ''Dracula'' in 1931) set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing a model for later generations of horror films. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Carol Reed and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1940s, expanding Expressionism's influence on modern film making.

Interpretation

The first two seminal works of the era are Lotte Eisner's ''The Haunted Screen'' and Sigfried Kracauer's ''From Caligari to Hitler''. Kracauer examines German cinema from the Silent/Golden Era and eventually concludes that German films made prior to Hitler's takeover and the rise of the Third Reich all hint at the inevitability of Nazi Germany. For Eisner, German Expressionist cinema is a visual manifestation of Romantic ideals. She closely examines staging, cinematography, acting, scenarios, and other cinematic elements in films by Pabst, Lubitsch, Lang (her obvious favorite), Riefenstahl, Harbou, and Murnau. More recent German Expressionist scholars examine historical elements of German Expressionism, such as inflation/economics, UFA, Erich Pommer, Nordisk, and Hollywood.

Influence and legacy

German silent cinema was arguably far ahead of cinema in Hollywood. As well as the direct influence of film makers who moved from Germany to Hollywood developments in style and technique which were developed through Expressionism in Germany impressed contemporary film makers from elsewhere and were incorporated into their work and so into the body of international cinema from the 1930s onward.

A good example of this process can be found in the career of Alfred Hitchcock. In 1924, Hitchcock was sent by his film company to work as an assistant director and art director at the UFA Babelsberg Studios in Berlin on the film The Blackguard. An immediate effect of the working environment there can be seen in his expressionistic set designs for ''The Blackguard''.

The influence can also be seen throughout the rest of Hitchcock's career. In his third film, ''The Lodger'', Expressionism's influence extends to set designs, lighting techniques, and trick camera work to the British public against the wishes of his studio. In his later films, this influence continued through his visual experimentation. For example, in the shower scene from ''Psycho'', Norman Bates' blurred image seen through a shower curtain is reminiscent of Nosferatu shown through his shadow. The development of these themes and techniques are not coincidental. Hitchcock said, "I have acquired a strong German influence by working at the UFA studios Berlin". Hitchcock's film making has in its turn influenced many other film makers and so has been one of the vehicles which have propelled German Expressionist techniques into the present day.

Expressionism has also had an influence on contemporary films. For example ''Dark City'' is influenced by German Expressionism's stark contrast, rigid movements, and fantastic elements.

Werner Herzog's 1979 film ''Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht'' was a tribute to F.W. Murnau's 1922 film. The film uses Expressionist techniques of highly symbolic acting and symbolic events to tell its story. Notably it links the vampire myth with the black death through the use of black rats. One may even notice the link between the evil character of the vampire portrayed by Klaus Kinski, and Nosferatu's star, Max Schreck.

Stylistic elements taken from German Expressionism are common today in films that do not need reference to real places such as science fiction films (especially Ridley Scott's 1982 film ''Blade Runner'' and the many films influenced by it).

Ambitious adaptations of the style are depicted throughout the contemporary filmography of director Tim Burton. His 1992 film ''Batman Returns'' is often cited as a modern attempt to capture the essence of German Expressionism. The angular building designs and severe-looking city squares of Gotham City evoke the loom and menace present in Lang's ''Metropolis''.

Burton's influences are most apparent in the fairy tale suburban landscape of ''Edward Scissorhands''. The appearance of the titular Edward Scissorhands (not accidentally) reflects ''Caligari's'' somnambulist servant. Burton casts unease in his candy-colored suburb, and the tension is visually unmasked through Edward and his Gothic castle. Burton subverts the Caligari nightmare with an inspired narrative branding, casting the garish somnambulist as the hero and the villagers as the villains.

The familiar look of Caligari's main character can also be seen in the movie ''The Crow''. With the tight, black outfit, white makeup, and darkened eyes, Brandon Lee's character is obviously a close relative to Burton's film ''Edward Scissorhands''.

Burton was also reportedly influenced by silent films and German Expressionism for his film adaptation of the musical ''Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'', describing the musical as a "silent film with music."

Cinema and architecture

Many critics see a direct tie between cinema and architecture of the time, stating that the sets and scene artwork of expressionist films often reveal buildings of sharp angles, great heights, and crowded environments, such as the frequently shown Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang’s ''Metropolis''.

Strong elements of monumentalism and modernism appear throughout the canon of German expressionism. An excellent example on this is Metropolis, as evidenced by the enormous power plant and glimpses of the massive yet pristine 'upper' city.

German expressionist films produced in the Weimar republic immediately following the First World War not only encapsulate the sociopolitical contexts in which they were created, but also rework the intrinsically modern problems of self-reflexivity, spectacle and identity.

Following the esteemed critiques of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, these films are now viewed as a kind of collective consciousness, so inherently tied are they to their social milieu. Briefly mentioned by J.P Telotte in his analysis of German film, “German Expressionism: A Cinematic/ Cultural Problem”, expressionism focuses on the “power of spectacles” and offers audiences “a kind of metonymic image of their own situation”.

Footnotes

See also

1920s Berlin

Chiaroscuro

Expressionism

Expressionist dance

Expressionist architecture

Expressionism (music)

Expressionism (theatre)

Film noir

Horror film

German film history

Kammerspiel

List of films set in Berlin

UFA

Silent film

References

External links

GreenCine primer on German Expressionism

German Expressionist Cinema at Indian Auteur

Online Films

Leicester's Collection of German Expressionist Art

Expressionism Category:Expressionism Category:Film theory Category:German culture Category:Movements in cinema Category:Weimar culture

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Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
Name	Fritz Lang
Birth date	December 05, 1890
Birth place	Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Birth name	Friedrich Christian Anton Lang
Influences	Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced	Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Ken Russell
Death date	August 02, 1976
Death place	Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, film producer
Years active	1919-1960
Spouse	Lisa Rosenthal (1919-1921)Thea von Harbou (1922-1933)Lily Latté (1971-1976)}}

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known ''émigrés'' from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the groundbreaking ''Metropolis'' (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and ''M'', made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the ''film noir'' genre.

Life and career

Early life

Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940), an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.

Lang's parents were of Moravian descent and practicing Roman Catholics, his mother having been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded three times. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.

Expressionist films: the Weimar years (1918-1933)

His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as ''Der Müde Tod'' ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as ''Die Spinnen'' ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's ''Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler'' (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's ''Die Nibelungen'', the famed 1927 masterpiece ''Metropolis'', and the 1931 classic, ''M'', his first "talking" picture.

Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of ''film noir'', with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin.

In 1931, after ''Woman in the Moon'', Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: ''M'', a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. ''M'' remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in ''M'', he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. His wearing a monocle added to the stereotype.

At the end of 1932. Lang started filming ''The Testament of Dr. Mabuse''. Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. ''Testament'' is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character.

Whereas Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, his wife and screen writer Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1932. They soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under Nazi eugenics laws he would be identified as a Jew even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

Emigration

Shortly afterwards, Lang left Germany but the circumstances of his emigration remain controversial: According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him that ''The Testament of Dr Mabuse'' was being banned but that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially ''Metropolis''), he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had been, unbeknownst to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long that the banks were closed by the time it finished, and Lang fled that night without his money, not to return until after the war.

This account is problematic as many portions cannot be verified, while those that can, run counter to other evidence: Lang actually left Germany with most of his money, unlike most refugees, and made several return trips later in the same year. There were no witnesses to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but Goebbels's appointment books, when they refer to the meeting, mention only the banning of ''Testament''. No evidence has been discovered in any of Goebbels's writings to affirm the suggestion that he was planning to offer Lang any position. Jean-Luc Godard's film ''Contempt'' (1963), in which Lang appeared as himself, presents a bare outline of the story as fact.

Whatever the details, Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris after his marriage to Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, ended in 1933.

In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's ''Liliom'', starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of ''Testament''). He then went to the United States.

Hollywood career (1936-1957)

Upon his arrival in Hollywood in 1936, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama ''Fury'', starring Spencer Tracy as a man wrongly lynched for a crime he didn't commit. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavorably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, ''film noir'' in particular.

One of his most famous ''film noirs'' is the police drama ''The Big Heat'' (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, ''While the City Sleeps'' (1956) and ''Beyond a Reasonable Doubt'' (1957).

Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest in remaking ''The Indian Tomb'' (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May), so Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his "Indian Epic". Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of ''Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse'' when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was ''The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse'' (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

Death and legacy

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the ''Cahiers du cinéma''. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Filmography

Pop culture

Lang appears as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film ''Le Mepris''. During the film, his reputation is discussed, and he somewhat lampoons his own reputation for being a temperamental director.

A fictional Lang appears as a main character in the Fullmetal Alchemist movie "Conqueror Of Shambala".

An old German director with the demeanors of Lang appears during the filming of a bank robbery in Woody Allen's 1969 comedy ''Take the Money and Run.''

In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, Lang is mentioned in tandem with James Cameron on page 48.

In episode 11 of season 1 of City Hunter, the antagonist's name is Fritz Lang.

References

Further reading

Friedrich, Otto. ''City of Nets'': ''A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s''; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0060156260 (See e.g. pp. 45–46 for anecdotes revealing Lang's arrogance.)

McGilligan, Patrick. ''Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast''; New York: St. Martins Press, 1997; ISBN 0312132476

Schnauber, Cornelius. ''Fritz Lang in Hollywood''; Wien: Europaverlag, c1986; ISBN 3203509539 (in German)

- Contains interviews with Lang and a discussion of the making of the film ''M''

External links

Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)

Senses of Cinema - Biographie

Fritz Lang at filmportal.de

Interview with Fritz Lang from 1967

Bibliography

"Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse. Représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933/1959-1960)", un article de Nicole Brenez extrait de ''De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier'' (1998).

Category:1890 births Category:1976 deaths Category:American film directors Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American people of Moravian German descent Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American people of Jewish descent Category:American screenwriters Category:Austrian expatriates in France Category:Austrian expatriates in Germany Category:Austrian film directors Category:Austrian emigrants to the United States Category:Austrian people of Jewish descent Category:Austrian Roman Catholics Category:Austrian people of Moravian German descent Category:Austro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I Category:Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) Category:English-language film directors Category:German-language film directors Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:People from Margareten Category:People from Vienna Category:Vienna University of Technology alumni Category:Western (genre) film directors Category:Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

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