Werner

Werner may refer to:

Gustav Fröhlich

Gustav Fröhlich (21 March 1902 – 22 December 1987) was a German actor. He landed secondary roles in a number of films and plays before landing his breakthrough role of Freder Fredersen in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis.

Biography

Fröhlich was born in Hanover, Germany, and was raised by foster parents. Before becoming an actor in the mid-1920s, he was an editor and a journalist. During World War I he volunteered for a duty in occupied Brussels as the press' supervisor.

In 1922 he played the role of composer Franz Liszt in Paganini, and in 1930 he was called to Hollywood to play roles in German versions of American films such as Die heilige Flamme and Kismet.

Between 1931 and 1935, Fröhlich was married to Hungarian opera star, and actress Gitta Alpár, with whom he had a child, Julika. He was engaged to the actress Lida Baarova until she became involved with the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. In 1937, he rented his house in Berchtesgaden to Hitler's architect, Albert Speer. In 1941 he married Maria Hajek. In the same year he served the Wehrmacht Landschützen-Regiment.

Brigitte Helm

Brigitte Helm (17 March 1906 – 11 June 1996) was a German actress, best remembered for her dual role as Maria and her double, the Maschinenmensch, in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis.

Career

Born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm in Berlin, Helm's first role was that of Maria in Metropolis which she began work on while only 18 years old. After Metropolis, Helm made over thirty other films, including talking pictures, before retiring in 1936. Her other appearances include The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), Alraune (1928), L'Argent (1928), Gloria (1931), The Blue Danube (1932), L'Atlantide (1932), and Gold (1934).

Though having a 10-year contract with UFA expiring in 1935, Helm incurred the wrath of Nazi Germany for "race defilement" in marrying her second husband Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist of Jewish background. Helm was also involved in several traffic accidents, and was briefly imprisoned. According to Otto Dietrich's book The Hitler I Knew, Adolf Hitler himself saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.

The script was inspired by various experiences from the lives of Janowitz and Mayer, both pacifists who were left distrustful of authority after their experiences with the military during World War I. The film's design was handled by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, who recommended a fantastic, graphic style over a naturalistic one.

The film thematizes brutal and irrational authority; Dr. Caligari represents the German war government, and Cesare is symbolic of the common man conditioned, like soldiers, to kill. In his influential book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer says the film reflects a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant, and is an example of Germany's obedience to authority and unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority. He says the film is a premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and says the addition of the frame story turns an otherwise "revolutionary" film into a "conformistic" one. Other themes of the film include the destabilized contrast between insanity and sanity, the subjective perception of reality, and the duality of human nature.

BioShock Infinite

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games. It was released worldwide for the Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 platforms on March 26, 2013; an OS X port by Aspyr was later released on August 29, 2013 and a Linux port was released on March 17, 2015. Infinite is the third installment in the BioShock series, and though it is not immediately part of the storyline of previous BioShock games, it features similar gameplay concepts and themes. Irrational Games and creative director Ken Levine based the game's setting on historical events at the turn of the 20th century, such as the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and based the story on the concept of American exceptionalism, while also incorporating influences from more recent events at the time such as the 2011 Occupy movement.

The game is set in the year 1912 and follows its protagonist, former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, who is sent to the floating air city of Columbia to find a young woman, Elizabeth, who has been held captive there for most of her life. Though Booker rescues Elizabeth, the two become involved with the city's warring factions: the nativist and elite Founders that rule Columbia and strive to keep its privileges for White Americans, and the Vox Populi, underground rebels representing the underclass of the city. During this conflict, Booker learns that Elizabeth possesses strange powers to manipulate "Tears" in the space-time continuum that ravage Columbia, and soon discovers her to be central to the city's dark secrets.