Defining German Expressionism

German expressionist cinema derives most directly from the modernist art movement, Expressionism, typified by the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch. In Munch’s most famous painting, "The Scream" (1893), we are presented with a distorted figure, crying out in pain, standing on a bridge. "The Scream" represents the two important features of Expressionism for our purposes: 1. Its "narrative" concerns the artist’s attempt to present to us a symbolic representation of a tormented, interior psychological state, and 2. Its aesthetic practices are built upon distortions of figure and mise-en-scene meant to simulate the experience of said psychological state. German Expressionism of the 1920s applies this tradition to narrative cinema. To understand why a mainstream narrative cinema would turn to modernist representational practices, we must consider the economic and political status of Weimar Germany (1919-1933). Germany had just lost a brutal World War I, driven to ruin by an archaic totalitarian government headed by Kaiser Wilhelm. To make matters worse, an economically devastated Allied resistance to Germany punished the country via a stern fiscal reparations program outlined at the Treaty of Versailles (1918). This plunged the Germany economy into a period of stifling inflation and the zeitgeist of the nation into a large-scale social malaise. It was out of this climate that German Expressionist cinema arose. In his book, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer outlines the ways in which these post-WWI economic and political pressures came to roost in the German cinema of this period. Kracauer’s assertion is that the Expressionist films so clearly describe the malaise of Germany that the rise of Hitler, who offered simplified passifications for this malaise, should come as no great surprise to us.

An Example of a German Expressionist Film

Out of the many examples of German Expressionist cinema, I have chosen to begin with Nosferatu, the German Expressionist adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel, Dracula. The film very clearly describes the aforementioned German social malaise. Unlike Stoker’s novel, which thematically concerns the nature of Victorian sexual puritanism (Mina eventually decides to leave behind the Victorian prudes to be with the sexually promiscuous Dracula), Nosferatu uses Teutonic legends to present the vampire figure as horrifically grotesque. Thus, the thematic interest of Nosferatu lies elsewhere, in the description of a horror that is supernaturally able to terrorize the entire landscape of the film, a landscape which allegorically comes to represent post-war Germany.

CLIP: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922): Harker crosses the bridge to the castle

In fact, Nosferatu is an example of what literary critic Tsvetan Todorov calls the Fantastic, a genre which exists in the liminal state between the supernatural and the melodramatic, that is between the horror of the made-up and the real. Todorov argues that the fantastic is built on a hesitation between deciding whether what we are reading or seeing is imagined or real. It is in this hesitation that the power, in this case, the allegorical power, of the fantastic can be appreciated. Thus, Nosferatu engages a hesitation between seeing the monstrous vampire as merely supernatural and seeing him as a larger social threat that has to do with the real conditions of post-war Germany. This can be seen in the scene where Harker crosses the bridge. Clearly, the bridge represents a transition between one world (the real) and the other (the supernatural). Yet, the film does not radically change its representational practices, making us wonder in what other ways this bridge between the real and the supernatural is breaking down the distinction itself. This breakdown in the separation between the two worlds can best be seen in the use of fast-motion photography to represent the vampire’s carriage which takes Harker on the last leg of the trip to the castle. On the one hand, the fast-motion photography gives the moment the appearance of the other-worldly, yet on the other hand, we know that this is merely a gimmick special effect, that the image itself was recorded in the same way as all other real, photographic images.

This hesitation between seeing Nosferatu as a fiction of the supernatural and seeing it as an allegorical engagement with the real conditions of post-war Germany was, not surprisingly, also being theorized by contemporaneous social thinkers, including psychologist Sigmund Freud in his essay, "The Uncanny" (1919). In "The Uncanny," Freud analyzes the short story, "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The story concerns a scientist who invents a female robot. Freud analyzes the narrator of the story’s desriptions of how odd the female robot made him feel. It is this feeling of the uncanny (an vague sense of unease and dread felt in response to something) that links to my discussion of the fantastic above. Freud traces the etymological roots of the term uncanny (Unheimlich in German) to produce this analysis. Freud argues that the uncanny encapsulates both the supernaturally mysterious (unheim) but also the close to home (heim). This description replicates the hesitation described by Todorov as the fantastic: the uncanny is both the strange and unfamiliar (the supernatural) and simultaneously the close-to-home and familiar (the "real"). Thus, in Freud’s terms, Nosferatu is, on the surface of the text, an uncanny tale about an otherworldly vampire, yet, at some thematic level, a too-close-to-home tale about the social malaise of post-war Germany.

An Institutional History of the German Silent Cinema

The German silent cinema derives from particular political and social circumstances outlined above. First and foremost, it is the product of a relatively stable center-liberal government, referred to as the Weimar government. The tolerance of this liberal government allowed for relatively bold critiques of the German culture that would have been unthinkable under the Kaiser previously or Hitler subsequently. The strength of German cinema was the massive film studio, UFA, which along with Hollywood, had the strongest studio filmmaking tradition in the world. UFA, like most other German industries in the post-war era, suffered terribly due to the deteriorating economic conditions. The German economy was finally stabilized in 1924 under the Dawes Plan, an Allied-brokered plan for Germany’s recovery that of course was designed in the interest of Allied nations’ corporations. Such can be seen in the case of the film industry, with the Paraufamet Agreement, a plan to salvage the economic crisis of UFA via a very Hollywood friendly partnership with Paramount and MGM. For example, the primary result of the Paraufamet agreement was the draining of German film talent into Hollywood.

The Three Phases of the Golden Age of German Silent Cinema

Despite the fact that German cinema of the 1920s is usually reduced to being called German Expressionism, the height of the Expressionist cinema in Germany occurred in the early 1920s, and was gradually being altered toward more classical realist, less modernist, forms of representaiton by 1924. For this reason, it is worthwhile trying to periodize German cinema of the 1920s into a series of movements, all of which feature Expressionist influence, but each discrete and identifiable in its own right.

Phase #1: Expressionism "Proper" (1919-1924)

First, with the release of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919 we can truly see the arrival of Expressionism into the cinema. The film features the two important tenets of Expressionism defined above:

1. It has an expressionist set design, such that the backgrounds are not recognizable views of what we know a town should look like, but instead highly stylized, angular papier mache symbolic representations of a town in a state of torment.

CLIP: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919): Cesare kidnaps the girl

2. The film concerns itself with the madness produced as a result of the pressures on the collective German psyche of the post-war period. In its original version, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ends with the serial murderer Caligari being revealed as a well-respected director of a mental asylum. Thus, the film would represent a powerful critique of the nature of authority, one in which the leaders are represented as the truly mad. UFA producer Erich Pommer forced a frame narration around the original plot of the film, in which it turns out that only the mental patient telling the story thinks the head of the asylum is a serial murderer, thus indicating to us that he has invented the tale of Caligari out of a hatred for the doctor trying to help him get well.

CLIP: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: The ending (Caligari declares he can cure the man)

In a simplistic reading, we would conclude from this that the film, in its new version, has been drained of its original devastating social critique of Germany’s attachment to authority. However, in From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer argues that the release version of the film actually quite accurately describes German culture’s inability to decide upon the diabolical nature of authority, and thus, in its final version fits much more neatly into describing the reality of German life than the original, more radical version.

Phase #2: The Kammerspiel Film (circa 1924)

In 1924, UFA produced Der letzte Mann (literally, The Last Man), a film that would come to revolutionize global cinema through its bold camera movements and use of subjective camerawork. However, for our purposes of periodization, it is important to note that Der letze Mann marks a relatively significant change in German cinema itself. The film has expressionist moments (and clearly many film scholars talk about it as a full-blown expressionist film), but these moments are contained by its larger narrative concerning the intimate life of its central character, a doorman at a hotel who is demoted to lavatory attendant. This intimate presentation of one character’s life has led some film scholars to declare Der letzte Mann to be the quintessential example of the Kammerspiel film (the film of "Intimate Theater").

An Extended Reading of The Last Laugh

1. The opening of the film shows how and why the Hollywood community was so struck by the film when first seeing it. The film uses the long take and extended camera movements in such a provocative way, a way that was unheard of before the release of the film, and a way that was quickly imitated by countless Hollywood films.

CLIP: Der letzte Mann (F. W. Murnau, 1924): The opening (the doorman in charge)

2. The film’s expressionist moments are contained within an otherwise classically realist film style. In particular, look at how the dream sequence is one of the ways that expressionism is present in the film while at the same time being narratively contained (it’s only a dream).

CLIP: Der letzte Mann: The drunken dream sequence

3. The film’s status as Kammerspiel can best be seen in the film’s original ending, in which the doorman is alone and isolated in the bathroom of the hotel, groveling in the corner like an animal. The moment epitomizes what the critics mean by the intimate theater of the Kammerspiel film: it captures the experience of the doorman’s utter degradation.

CLIP: Der letzte Mann: The original ending (The doorman alone)

4. UFA producer Erich Pommer again enforced a more happy ending hoping that the change would make the film fare better on the international market, particularly in the United States. Titling the film, The Last Laugh, for the American market, Pommer insisted that the doorman not be left in a state of degradation. So, a title card after the original ending tells us that, while this is the way the story would end in real life, the authors have taken pity on the doorman, and now he has become rich by winning the lottery!

CLIP: Der letzte Mann: The ending (The doorman is now rich)

Rather than just dismiss this as outright stupidity, I think the additional ending of The Last Laugh produces a film that links to an equally important cultural tradition, Romanticism. Like Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the ending of The Last Laugh shows us, in Kammerspiel style, the important human lesson that the doorman has learned. In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean learns from the Bishop that he must be kind to people if he is to be fully human. The last scenes of The Last Laugh find the doorman not using his money to get vengeance against his former oppressors, but instead to share his good luck with other less fortunate employees of the hotel.

Phase #3: Street Realism (late 1920s-1933)

The mainstream Expressionist style of the early 1920s, had, by the late 1920s almost completely drained away in lieu of a more traditional, classical realist style. However, late silent German cinema used this realism, like German expressionism before it, to comment upon the depressed nature of the German psyche. In a sexist form that would come to roost in American film noir, some late silent German films used a so-called street realism to tell the stories of upstanding men led astray by vampish women. The director who mastered this form of street realism was G.W. Pabst, who used the star Louise Brooks to maximal effect as the foul temptress ruining German men at an alarming rate.

CLIP: Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929):Ending (the jilted lover murders Louise Brooks)

So, even though the street realist films use a different stylistic practice, they still make political commentary about the degradation of the German psyche. As the lover wanders around the street after having snapped at Christmas-time, he is just as alone and isolated at the doorman in his bathroom or as the madman at the end of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Early German Sound Cinema

German cinema of the early 1930s created some of the most impressive uses of sound in film history. For example, Fritz Lang’s M (1930) uses visual style and an aggressive sound design to show us the world from the point of view of a serial killer. In general, sound did not produce a disruption in the trajectory of German cinema, but instead further contributed to the aesthetic and thematic attributes of "street realism."

For example, The Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, 1930) tells a very similar story to that of Pandora’s Box, but does so in the form of a musical. The Blue Angel is about Professor Rath, led into a degrading relationship with nightclub singer Lola Lola (played by Marlene Dietrich).

CLIP: The Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, 1930): Lola sings "Programmed For Love"

Thus, Professor Rath’s degradation, as revealed through the images of him walking, in isolation, through the streets, is ironically compounded by the musical number which presents his degrader as a "love machine" who does not care at all about the feelings of her victims.

The Blue Angel is also an example of a multiple-language film, produced under the auspices of the Paraufamet agreement. With the coming of sound, a huge problem presented itself: how to do deal with the various languages spoken by the audiences of Hollywood product. Under Paraufamet, Hollywood studios began using the UFA studios to produce films in many languages as they were being shot. The Blue Angel/Der Blau Engel is one such film. Shortly after the making of this successful film, both the director, Joseph Von Sternberg, and the actress, Marlene Dietich emigrated to Hollywood to produce a series of Blue Angel-like sexual desire films for Paramount Studios.

The case of The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931) is even more complicated in how it allows us to track the effect of the coming of sound on German street realist films. The Threepenny Opera is based on a play by the modernist Bertolt Brecht. In Weimar Germany, Brecht was perfecting a modernist theater that he termed Epic Theater, that would use radical modernist practices to bring about a vast critiqe of the classical theater (what he calls dramatic theater). Brecht uses the modernist practice of "separation of the elements," in which one aesthetic practice would be used to comment critically on another. For example, in The Threepenny Opera, the diabolical Mr. Peachum (who is using beggars to run a business), is training his beggars, when suddenly a sign falls from the rafters which states "It is better to give than to receive." Thus, one element, the mise-en-scene (the sign from the rafters), is produced in radical juxtaposition to another element (the blocking of the characters on the stage). Brecht believed that this separation of the elements aesthetic practice could produce a radical political message, what he calls, the "gestus."

During the production of the film version of the play, Brecht, a modernist, and Pabst, a realist, were constantly at odds with one another. We can see the results of this conflict between modernism and realism in the film’s opening.

CLIP: The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931): Opening ("Mack the Knife")

The film opens with the singing of a politicized Brecht song about the cruelty of humankind. There is no image during this musical number, so here we have a perfect example of Brechtian separation of the elements: the major pleasure of cinema–visual movement–is being denied to us. However, next we get a Pabstian moment, as Pechum walks around the streets of Berlin, in keeping with the practices of street realism. Then, we hear the "Mack the Knife" musical number, a very politicized Brecht number which presents Macheath as a criminal, but it turns out the the capitalist Peachum is the true criminal in the narrative. Note also that the presentation of "Mack the Knife" as a sort of carnival barker "newscast" narrativizes the moment, stripping it of some of what Brecht envisions by the separation of the elements. Thus, early German sound cinema–in this case the musical number--is again revealed to be forwarding the goals of late silent cinema’s street realism.

The Nazi Takeover

The Weimar government came to an end with the Nazi takeover in 1933. With the liberal Weimar government also went the experimentation of the Weimar cinema. The Nazis declared challenging films about the ambiguities of German social life to be the result of "degenerate artists," by which they meant either Jewish artists or artists with whom they did not agree. As a result, the German narrative cinema of the Nazi era became very formulaic, producing expected stereotypical vilifications (like anti-Semitic filks like Jud Suss), and also more innocuous genre films, such as the "mountain films" which celebrated Aryan men and women who tamed nature with their physical prowess.

It was in the realm of the documentary film, however, that the Nazis perfected the use of cinema to rally people to their simplifications and vilifications. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl produced two films in the mid-1930s which represent the Nazi documentary at the height of its propagandistic powers: Triumph of the Will (1935), about the Nazi Nuremberg rallies, and Olympia (1936), about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The Influence of the Golden Age of German Silent Cinema

German silent cinema’s global effect on cinema can be most forcefully seen in the adoption of a darker visual style by Hollywood.

Horror films at Universal Studios in the 1930s and 1940s were influenced by the emigration of many German filmmakers. These filmmakers, like cinematographer Karl Freund, reproduced some of that visual style in Hollywood horror films.

CLIP: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Roy William Neill, 1943): Opening (graveyard)

However, these Universal films did not maintain the thematic intensity of the German Expressionist films. What made films like Nosferatu so horrifying was its fantastic hesitation, constantly representing that the horror truly lay within one’s own soul and its culture. The Universal horror films represented the horror as coming from a decaying and decadent Europe, always foreign and separate from the good old United States. It would not be until the New Hollywood, with films like Psycho and the 1970s slasher film, that American horror films would begin to represent the thematic legacy of German Expressionism, that is, that horror lay at home.

German Expressionism can be most directly felt in the post-WWII American film movement known as Film Noir. Many of these films were made by German emigres, the most famous of whom is Fritz Lang. However, the legacy of German silent cinema in American film noir lies well beyond individual films or filmmakers.

CLIP: Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945): Ending (Criss Cross goes insane)

Thus, even though Scarlet Street is a Fritz Lang film done in an Expressionist noir style, what is most memorable about the ending of the film is Criss Cross’ social isolation, a feature of the street realist films of Pabst and Von Sternberg. The question this opens up, is why an American film from 1945, with the winning of a war, would use the same pessimistic imagery from films associated with Germany in the 1920s, with the losing of a devastating war. The answer lies beyond the scope of this course, but involves issues of national guilt over the deployment of atomic weaponry as well as a destabilization in gender roles in America in the 1940s.

Many contemporary American films use the material from German silent cinema for expressive ends. Science fiction films like Blade Runner clearly harken back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Both films are dystopian science-fiction; that is, they argue that the future will merely be the logical extension of a screwed up present.

CLIP: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982): Opening

Again, the question arises as to why a 1980s American film would return to the depressing world of Germany in the 1920s. This time, I believe it has to do with a fear over the rapid expansion of technology, as well as the delusions of the Reagan era.

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This page was last updated on January 8, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theater Arts, Montana State University–Bozeman