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German expressionism characteristics
Expressionism origins
Expressionism essays
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__Expressionism__ is an artistic style that distorts and exaggerates reality to cause a strong emotional response from the audience. It attempts to depict the subjective, rather than the objective reality, through the use of shapes, color, and contrast. Specifically, __German Expressionism is an innovative and influential movement that began as a response to World War II. German Expressionists included novelist, poets, playwrites, and filmmakers. German Expressionism, in its early years, was a response to the massive casualties of the war and developed into an anguished style which tended to explore death, the supernatural, and the darker sides of the human psyche. !!!Elements of Expressionist Films __Expressionist films__ were prevalent in
The film illustrates the common social and sexual anxieties that the Germans were undergoing at that period of time. It also employs cinematic aesthetics alongside with new technology to create what would be considered as one of Germany’s first sound-supported films. Furthermore, it was the film that popularized its star Marlene Dietrich. The film is also known for combining elements of earlier expressionist works into its setting without becoming an expressionist film itself. It is important also to point out that the visual element has helped to balance the film easily against the backdrop the nightclub lifestyle that Lola leads the professor to fall into.
Calhoon, Kenneth S. “Horror vacui.” Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema. Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 2001.
Where Schlondorff, Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder and Kluge once investigated the extremities of the German character and the Americana that infested West German culture through the New German Cinema of the late 60s, 70s and early 80s, the Germany of today has through its cinema acknowledged past hardships but with a more positive emphasis placed on the possibilities of forgiveness, redemption and hope for what can be made of tomorrow. Bibliography A Reversal of Fortunes? Women, work and change in East Germany. Rachel Alsop.
When audiences think of Lang's Metropolis they almost unanimously think of the same image: that of a golden, mechanical being brought to life. It is one of the most recognizable images in German expressionist cinema, on par with the spidery shadow of Max Schrek's Nosferatu creeping up the stairs in Murnau's vampire film, or that of Cesare the somnambulist sleeping upright in Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, yet what separates this i...
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920’s German silent-horror film. Robert Weine, the director, collaborated with the German cinematographer, Willy Hameister to create this German Expressionist masterpiece. The idea was taken from the screenplay written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer. It is also considered one of the greatest horror films during the silent period. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and its historical context in terms of the German Expressionist movement will be discussed further in the essay.
The Importance of Aesthetic Distance in American Horror Movies What then do we make of American horror movies? In the canon of horror pictures they almost always come second in respect to foreign horror movies and any American horror film that is considered to be artful is the one with the most aesthetic distance. Upscale slashers like Johnathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or David Fincher's Seven (1995) are both gruesome and bloody borrowing many of the same shock techniques as their lower budget counterparts (for example, Russell Mulchahy's Sevenish thriller Resurrection (1999)), both focus on the body and its violation, either through sexual means or violent means, and both feature villains who fit easily into Carol Clover's
Film scholars around the world agree that all genres of film are part of the “genre cycle”. This cycle contains four different stages that a specific genre goes through. These stages are: primitive, classic, revisionist, and parody. Each stage that the genre goes through brings something different to that genre’s meaning and what the audience expects. I believe that looking at the horror genre will be the most beneficial since it has clearly gone through each stage.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the first film by Germany to be an Expressionist film. Authorities of an avant-garde movement believed that by using Expressionism in films (as they did in paintings, theater, literature, and architecture) this might be a selling point in the international market. The film proved that to be true and because of its success other films in the Expressionist style soon followed.
Specific techniques of German expressionism, such as dark vs. light, religious themes and spirituality, and the use
The link between expressionism and horror quickly became a dominant feature in many films and continues to be prominent in contemporary films mainly due to the German expressionist masterpiece Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari. Wiene’s 1920 Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari utilized a distinctive creepiness and the uncanny throughout the film that became one the most distinctive features of externalising inner mental and emotional states of protagonists through various expressionist methods. Its revolutionary and innovative new art was heavily influenced by the German state and its populace in conjunction with their experience of war; Caligari took a clear cue from what was happening in Germany at the time. It was this film that set cinematic conventions that still apply today, heavily influencing the later Hollywood film noir genre as well as the psychological thrillers that has led several film audiences to engage with a film, its character, its plot and anticipate its outcome, only to question whether the entire movie was a dream, a story of a crazy man, or an elaborate role play. This concept of the familiar and the strange, the reality, the illusion and the dream developed in Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari, is once again present in Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island.
The same pattern also applies to foreign horror. Foreign horror is "moody" and "atmospheric" while American horror is "cheap" and "exploitative." What many fail to notice is that both foreign and American horror use many of the same images and devices. In the distinct universe that is the horror film both the higher end pictures (in this case the foreign horror movies) find themselves amongst the so-called exploitative low-end (American horror). Frequently in film analysis it is, as Joan Hawkins writes, "overlooked or repressed...to the degree to which high culture trades on the same images, tropes, and themes which characterize low culture."
One of the fundamental aspects that determine the genre of a film is the iconography and the
It is no doubt that Martin Scorsese has heavily influenced the emulating of American film making from European influences. He is a prime example of a ‘New Hollywood Cinema’ director, not only from his ethnicity and background, but from his sheer interest in this form
When a person feels sad, they sit by a rainy windowsill, bathe in despondency, and belt along to Celine Dion’s 1996 hit, “All By Myself”; when they turn terrified by the circumstances surrounding them in the post-WWi era, wrought with unemployment and economic ruin, they invent art-house, pastiche horrors that influences large-scale branches of cinema. In Robert Wiene’s ground-breaking German Expressionist, Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari) (1922), and F.W. Murnau’s Expressionistic-Kammerspielfilm, Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) (1924), a range of audience-broadening experiments are taken within silent film; rooted in the up rise of German expressionism, socio-political horrors of post-war Germany are exploited in
The expressionist movement in German art and cinema was very sensitive to the current state of the country after a huge worldwide conflict. Prior to the rise of the next Nazi Regime, German filmmakers incorporated many aspects to their films that had never been used together before this period of time. M is no exception to