1. LECTURE TWO: The early
ExpressionistCinema: fairy tales, magic
and the mysterious shadow world of early
Weimar

2. 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)

4.  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.

5.  ‘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

6. Kurt Schwitters

7. Georg Grosz

12.  Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari )

13.  Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, Destiny, Dr Mabuse)

15.  Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (The Last
Laugh, Nosferatu, Faust)

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

18.  Paul Wegener (The Golem)

19.  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

20.  Art movement
 Abstraction, fragmentation, distortion
 Focus is on the expression of psychological rather than
physical realism

21.  Impressionism (late
1800s)
 Claude Monet
 Expressionism (early
1900s)
 Wassily Kandinsky

22. Closer connection to Expressionism
Caspar David Friedrich 1818

23.  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)

24.  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

25.  Set designs:
 Artificiality
 Painterly
 Angular Shapes
 Fragmentary
 Distorted perspectives

26.  Action:
 Emotional
 Unnatural
 Jerky movement
 Exaggerated gestures
 Fragmentary

27.  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?