German Expressionism
In late February 1920,
1)a film premiered in Berlin that was instantly recognized as something new in cinema: The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
2)Its novelty captured the public imagination, and it was a considerable success.
3)The film used stylized sets, with strange, distorted buildings painted on canvas backdrops
and flats in a theatrical manner.
4)The actors made little attempt at realistic performance; instead, they exhibited jerky
or dancelike movements.
5)Critics announced that the Expressionist style, by then well established in most other
arts, had made its way into the cinema,
6)and they debated the benefits of this new development for film art.
In the following scene, the heroine of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari wanders through the Expressionist carnival set. It almost seems that she is made of the same material as the fairground setting.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920)
Is my father...Dr. Olfen here...?
She starts to freak out - and runs out.
German Expressionism
1)was one of several modernist movements around the turn of the century that rejected realism.
2) Its practitioners favored extreme distortion to express an emotional reality rather than
surface appearances.
3)Expressionist artists avoided the subtle shadings and colors that gave realistic paintings
their sense of volume and depth.
4)Instead, the Expressionists often used large shapes of bright, unrealistic colors with dark,
cartoonlike outlines.
5)Figures might be elongated; faces wore grotesque, mask-like expressions and might be livid
green.
6)Buildings might sag or lean, with the ground tilted up steeply in defiance of traditional
perspective.
7)Such distortions were difficult for films shot on location,
8)but Caligari showed how studio-built sets could approximate the stylization of
Expressionist painting.
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