excerpts on anonymous' essay on German expressionism
In a 1934 essay, Lukács argued that “expressionism was undoubtedly one of the diverse bourgeois ideological currents that would later result in fascism” as its tendency towards subjectivism and romanticism linked it ideologically to the irrational mysticism of Wilhelmian philosophy, and therefore one of the central sources of Nazi beliefs.
German expressionist film offers a penetrating analysis of the society along with the philosophy and psychology of its age. It is important also because of its filmic process. Unlike other forms of art, it is not static (before the advent of pop art and kinetic models), and transforms inert photographic frames into rendering a semblance of truth. Thus, film can make an object assume personality and vice versa. As he confronts the mass of people assembled to indict him, the camera pans around the group. It is not a moving mass that we see, but a still photograph: the image is frozen. It has thus taken the nature of an inert, static painting.
Buildings become demoniacal in expressionist films; foreboding houses are used for shock effect, and rooms and enclosed spaces create a sense of claustrophobia. n general, diagonals and oblique angles in the sets are employed, and the buildings and streets are distorted, ghostly, and with painted shadows and streets that seem to lead nowhere.
To back to the lighting in the early Weimar Republic cinema, the use of chiaroscuro effects of artificial lighting was unsurpassed. Lighting was used as a narrative device, and while in some early Weimar cinemas it was a little more than a decorative element or a creator of mood, in later films chiaroscuro elements and specifically shadow assume a precise communicative element. The employment of shadow as a communicative metaphor is found as early as Plato’s Republic, where he talks of the cave-men perceiving shadows and echoes as reality itself, which is not totally false; it results from reality even though it might be a weakened, diluted version of the real. Shadow’s significance is neither good nor evil but instead projects an ‘other’ reality, another interpretation of sorts. Instead of seeking an escape from the pursuing shadow, one needed to acknowledge and accept it. In M, the character of Beckett was seen running away from his shadow, which relentlessly pursued him, stronger than the man himself, and the only way out for him was to embrace his darker side, even if it made him commit cruel, inhuman acts of violence.
