Page 41 - Studio International - January 1970

Bari sometimes recall Heckel and sometimes emphasize the relationship between film and about a possible ground plan for a set. 'Plan ?'
Feininger's series of drawings Die Stadt am the visual arts at this time.7 asked Murnau, 'That's theatre. Film is pro-
Ende der Welt (The Town at the End of the Most striking about the film is its powerful jection. You either see it or you don't. That is:
World) which dates from 1911. In Lang's anti-naturalistic bias, in the acting, the sets you have an impression. If I were a painter I
two-part Dr Mabuse, where the borrowings and story-line. In Caligari we enter a fantasy wouldn't need to trouble anyone else.'"
from expressionist painting are less obvious, world that is, in fact, the mind of a paranoiac One of Caligari's most influential aspects was
certain interiors are decorated with pseudo- inmate of a madhouse who tells the story. its original and exaggerated use of shadows,
primitive sculpture and paintings that look Houses, furniture, gesture and facial ex- its exploration of extreme darks and lights,
like Brücke work. The street outside the hotel pression are violently distorted. The brick- and also, related to this, its use of iris dia-
where the sinister hypnotist goes to gamble, work, flagstones, windows, even the shadows phragm dissolves which isolate in a single
with its taxis and teeming crowds, is close to cast by buildings, actors and furniture have circle of light a face or significant detail.
some of Meidner's night paintings. In Mur- been painted on to the sets with more concern Shadow is an element common to all ex-
nau's Faust (1926) Mephisto hovers ominously, for their vitality as forms as such than for any pressionist films, is as much a feature of
cloak outspread, over a typically cubo- approximation to reality. It is as though the Metropolis, whose imagery is anything but that
expressionist townscape. Films like Raskolni- actors are walking around in an enormous of an expressionist painting, as it is of Mabuse
kow (1923), which seems to have drawn con- expressionist painting.8 and Nosfratu. A preference for chiaroscuro is
siderably on Feininger again, and which was `Film', said Hermann Warm, one of Caligari's one of the many links between Expressionism
designed by a professional architect, Andrei designers (the fact that the film had three is and German Romanticism, which created a
Andreiev, and Genuine, whose sets are covered evidence of the designer's importance at this wealth of misty, unclear or shadowy images
with fractured and riotous expressionistic time), 'should be drawings brought to life', symbolic of the soul and of man's imperfect
patterns, make the parallels even clearer. and he further believed that they should exert perception of the infinite that was itself a
It must be emphasized that Caligari and a pull on the emotions in the same way that, symbol of the deity. Significantly, the film
Genuine were the only films to use backgrounds for example, Kandinsky believed that purely The Student of Prague was based on Peter
that were painted in a fully expressionist way. abstract forms could communicate specific Schlemihl, a famous story about a man who
Nevertheless the visual style of many of the emotional states. Rudolf Kurtz whose book sells his shadow, and there was even a film
films now being discussed parallels expres- Expressionismus und Film (1926) first defined the called Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1923)
sionist images and forms in other ways. In style and the movement, spends much time which relies on them as much as the title
them a graphic, two-dimensional conception discussing how the abstract configurations suggests. In Caligari, lights and darks are
of each scene came first. It became usual for work in Caligari, and there is no doubt that violently contrasted and this insistence on
the designer to produce sketches, visualiza- the film's designers gave a great deal of extremes has a direct parallel in expressionist
tions of each shot from which the director thought to the subject. The girl's bedroom is poetry which heavily relies on jarring contrasts
worked. At the time such an arrangement was decorated with soft, yielding patterns, and of words, syllable and metre. The farther the
most uncommon, and it first became a her acting style is comparatively graceful and jump from one extreme to another, the more
rigorous method at the hands of Eisenstein, rhythmic. This is in marked contrast to the powerful the effect.
an admirer of the German cinema and a cramped and crazily-angled police office,
talented draughtsman who often made hund- where two officials are perched on impossibly
C. D. Friedrich
reds of drawings before taking a single shot.° high chairs, and to the claustrophobic prison Two Men Looking at the Moon
One of the most impressive collaborations cell where the man, wrongly imprisoned for
2
between visual artist and film director was the murder, sits trapped in the centre of a Destiny, directed by Fritz Lang—one of Lang's many
Poelzig's work on Der Golem. Poelzig, one of large, sharp, claw-like cluster of black borrowings from Friedrich's work
the first architects to explore the possibilities shadows. The composition of each scene in
of an exaggerated, highly emotional archi- terms of lights, darks and patterns on the set
tectural style, had made his name with his mirrors the tone or predominant feeling of
pre-war reconstruction and transformation of each stage of the action, and the completely
the Circus Schumann into the Grosses Schau- unrealistic style which the film is given
spielhaus for Max Reinhardt. After the war complements the story-line which demands
Poelzig was unemployed and gladly accepted that the denouement reveal that what has
Wegener's offer to design his film. He not gone before has been the waking nightmare
only produced many evocative drawings of a of a lunatic.9
forbidding Gothic town but even had a model Even the makeup is exaggerated; the ex-
made on which the final sets were based.6 pressions of Caligari himself and of the som-
nambulist were applied line for line and
CALIGARI shadow for shadow as though they are painted
Although Lotte Eisner points to several pre- caricatures. The film's original titles are also
cursors, Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (The Cabi- in eccentric expressionistic lettering. These
net of Dr Caligari) is generally considered to titles are now lost, but the style was the same
have announced the rise of the classic German as that of the words 'Du musst Caligari werden'
film. In almost every way it is thoroughly ex- (you must become Caligari) which float across
pressionist and was directly responsible for a the screen during the hallucination scene.
new style of film which appeared in Russia The belief that film was a medium close to
and France as well as in Germany. It even painting was held by many of Wiene's con-
led to the introduction of a new word— cali- temporaries. Murnau, the ex-art-historian
garisme—into the French language which used wrote that 'the camera is the director's
it to express the idea of a post-war world crayon', and one of his designers, Robert
turned upside down. It was directed by Herlth, recalled a discussion with the director
Robert Wiene, who was associated with Der about his fundamentally two-dimensional
Sturm, and the circumstances of its production conception of film. He wanted to find out