German Expressionism
Continued from Part One.
Murnau
Who knows what F.W. Murnau might have gone on to accomplish had he not died in a car crash in California in 1931 at the age of 42. But even so, based on the stunning work he left behind, his reputation deservedly lingers right up there in any cinophile's pantheon. Lotte Eisner cuts to the chase, calling him "the greatest film director the Germans have ever known... He created the most overwhelming and poignant images in the whole German cinema."
Born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (the name change was a good idea) to a fairly well-to-do family, Murnau was studying art history at the University of Heidelberg when Max Reinhardt caught his performance in a student play. Off to Berlin.
Of the 21 films Murnau made, only a handful are out on DVD, so, until the Foundation that bears his name gets cranking, those are the films we'll concentrate on. Beginning, of course, with Nosferatu (1922), Murnau's "Symphony of Horror" and second only to Caligari in the number of Expressionist elements chocked up in a single film. The element it strays from most obviously is the exclusively urban setting. The forces of nature, both "natural" and "unnatural," are a powerful presence in much of Murnau's work.
For film theorist Janet Bergstrom, Nosferatu, played by the marvelously named actor Max Schreck, is "the very icon of cinematic Expressionism," and yet the creature comes not from some urban underworld but from a distant, mysterious, mountainous and very dark land. And while Lang's special effects are wonderfully innovative, they do call attention to themselves as technological feats; Murnau's effects - like the negative footage inserted into the sequence bearing the coach to the monster's castle so that the trees glow ominously (a sequence quoted by both Cocteau in Orpheus and Godard in Alphaville) - are often "of a piece" with the eerie drive of the story.
In The Last Laugh (1924), we're back in the city, we have an aging protagonist and we often see things, sometimes unreal things from his subjective point of view, and there are mirrors and reflections at play and marvelous lighting set-ups... But this is not an Expressionist film. Justifiably famous for its moving camera, the film rests on the shoulders of Emil Jannings, who turns in a performance of convincing psychological realism, all the more astounding for the fact that the film is not only silent but also has just one intertitle.
Faust
With Faust (1926), we return to the realm of "supernatural nature," Murnau's unique brand of Expressionism. Jannings is back, but the realism is gone. His Mephisto looms as darkness itself, swallowing light, even as swirls of it around him resist. For Eric Rohmer, Faust was Murnau's greatest achievement: "It is light that models form, that sculpts it. The filmmaker allows us to witness the birth of a world as true and beautiful as a painting, the art which has revealed the truth and beauty of the visible world to us through the ages." Rohmer was a fan.
Sunrise (1927), the first film Murnau made in America and the one that scored Murnau his spot on the 2002 Sight and Sound top ten poll, pulls the urban-vs.-rural conflict lurking out from the subtext of his earlier work and places it front and center (as JMVerville notes in his review).
Jonathan Marlow: "The story, in its simplest sense, concerns the attraction of a city girl for a humble farmer and the tragedy, planned and unplanned, that results. But that's merely a framework for some of the most astonishing visual storytelling ever committed to celluloid, thanks largely to the remarkable achievements of co-cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss."
The compositions are gorgeous, occasionally fantastical, often dark and yet nearly all traces of the Expressionism rooted in painting and theater are now gone. Even more so in Tabu, the moving and movingly beautiful tale Murnau made in the South Seas in 1931. That auto accident kept Murnau from seeing the film's premiere.
Karl Freund
Cinematographer Karl Freund is due at least this modest mention here, if only for shooting The Golem, The Last Laugh and Metropolis. But he's also an intriguing character. On the one hand, with director Walter Ruttmann, he co-wrote and produced the experimental Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. On the other, once he joined the wave of talent crossing the Atlantic, taking with him all his experience in creating haunted and dramatic compositions, he shot Dracula for director Tod Browning and directed two horror films himself, The Mummy, with Boris Karloff, and Mad Love/The Hands of Orlac. Though those films were admired by fantasy enthusiasts, he never directed again. Returning to cinematography, he'd shoot Greta Garbo in Camille and Conquest and Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo before moving on to work in television. But anyone looking for a concrete connection between the look of German Expressionism and the American horror films of 30s would do well to start with Karl Freund.
G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks
With Georg Wilhelm Pabst, we're teetering on the border of true Expressionism, so we won't loiter long. The closest fit would be Pandora's Box (1929) which, blast it all, is not available on DVD. But not only do we find more than a few examples of Expressionist composition in this urban tale of an erotic dancer who pays for the spell she casts by fatefully crossing paths with Jack the Ripper, we also have the film that put Louise Brooks on the map.
Pandora's Box
For Lotte Eisner, "Pabst's case is extremely curious; he is both remarkable and disappointing." But Brooks is a "miracle." And, whatever his faults might be, Pabst could draw great performances. If Brigitte Helm was "frigid" as both the good and bad Marias in Metropolis, as Eisner claims (though I'd argue that both characters are meant to be the opposite sides of the same ideological coin; humanity was hardly called for), she is "moving" in The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927). But after Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl (also 1929) finds Pabst moving towards realism, away from Expressionism.
Honorable Mentions
Waxworks (1922), definitely. Painter, designer, director Paul Leni:
For my film Waxworks I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality... It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event... I may perhaps cite the example of Caligari and The Golem... I cannot stress too strongly how important it is for a designer to shun the world seen every day and to attain its true sinews...
Waxworks also gathers quite a collection of Weimar Germany's acting talent: Emil Jannings, Wilhelm Dieterle, Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt, who played Cesare, the somnambulist in Caligari, and is probably most remembered as Major Strasser in Casablanca. Leni, too, would head off for America, where he'd direct The Cat and the Canary (1927).
The primary feature of Othello (1922), directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, a Russian working in Germany, is yet another complete transformation by Emil Jannings, looking nothing at all here like either Mephisto or the old doorman in The Last Laugh.
Aftermath and Influence
With most of the talent behind the classics of German Expressionism gone and Ufa turning back to propaganda for another world war, German film during the Nazi years becomes not exactly an uninteresting topic to explore, but certainly not the cultural force it had been. The most direct and immediate influence of Expressionism on postwar cinema can be found, of course, in the work of the German directors, designers and cinematographers who picked up their careers again in Hollywood, Britain or France. The American films of Fritz Lang are the most obvious example of the thematic and aesthetic legacy of Expressionism pressing on in different forms. Film noir took and refined the Expressionist elements of urban settings, the criminal underworld, foreboding shadows or shadows used to enhance the architectural composition of a shot (thank heavens for Venetian blinds!). But in place of the supernatural, that holdover from German Romanticism, noir pictures delved into city life with a nitty gritty realism and more of a penchant for Freud than for ETA Hoffmann.
Lang made more than a few of these himself: You Only Live Once (1937), Scarlet Street (1945), for example, or my own favorite of the batch, The Big Heat (1953), Lang's most blatant critique of his adopted country.
It seems strange to mention German Expressionism and the French New Wave in a single breath, and yet, as we've seen in Rohmer's comments on Murnau, the Cahiers crowd were fans. Lang in particular saw his reputation revived in the early 60s, the highlight of the revival being his role as, basically, himself in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1964). Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan describes the supreme moment of hommage:
The director is seen lighting up a cigarette, after the others have exited the scene; the camera tracks beside the elder statesman of film as he walks slowly along the street, alone, apparently lost in thought. Godard's camera watches him contemplatively while, in the background, Georges Delerue's eloquent score rises on a gorgeous note.
Then there were the Germans themselves. After something of a postwar lull, a fresh wave of cinematic Autoren (a slightly different concept than the auteur, but in the same ballpark) emerged in the 70s. One of them, Werner Herzog, did a rather interesting thing in 1974 when he'd completed Kaspar Hauser. He packed the cans of film in his backpack and headed off on foot from Munich to Paris, where Lotte Eisner lay ill in bed. In New German Cinema, Thomas Elsaesser casts a sour eye on what he considers a stunt:
That the historian of Expressionist cinema, émigre Jew and woman, friend of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang... should... give a young German filmmaker her blessing, by assuring him that his work was once more "legitimate German culture," could itself be read as a founding myth of origins and identity. By endorsing continuity, bestowing the right of inheritance, mediating between fathers and sons, enemy nations and two rebel film movements, Lotte Eisner, thanks to Herzog, became the super-mother of New German Cinema...
And yet Herzog and Murnau, the work of both shot through with an awed yet agnostic spiritualism and a simultaneously horrified and admiring obsession with the natural world, the "other-worldliness" of that world, are quite a match. Consummated, of course, in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu in 1979.
But Herzog wasn't alone. His generation wasn't as reluctant as the previous one to examine - or even mention! - the Third Reich or the Weimar years that were somehow blamed for giving rise to it. In Ulli Lommel's The Tenderness of Wolves, we find essentially another remake, this time of Lang's M. Wim Wenders would nod in Lang's direction in Kings of the Road.
The case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is particularly intriguing. The director who compressed at least three careers into such a tragically short lifetime (and has gone through at least as many revivals since his death in 1982) began under the influence of the French New Wave (and the alternative theater scene in Munich) but his later films find him tunneling back through German history, examining the postwar years in the BRD Trilogy (1979 - 1982), the war years in Lili Marleen (1981) and back to the Expressionist period itself with his magnificent Berlin Alexanderplatz, made for German television in 1980. His last film, Querelle (1982), is widely viewed as a noble failure, but it's perhaps most interesting as a possible answer to the question: What would the most experimentally inclined Expressionist lighting directors and set designers have done if they'd had color? A lot of color?
Gotham City in Batman Returns. Look familiar?
With the 80s came MTV, and a slew of young directors scoured film history for iconographic images to plunder. They found a motherlode in German Expressionism. With any band that dabbled in gothic overtones like, say, The Cure, the affinity was obvious, but the style popped up everywhere, from heavy metal and hardcore industrial all the way over to the slick Munich sound of disco prince Giorgio Moroder.
Traces of the Weimar era continue to emerge in popular fare such as Tim Burton's Batman Returns (Christopher Walken's evil businessman is given that delicious name, Max Schreck) and in not-so-mainstream work, like Shadow of the Vampire (in which Willem Defoe plays the actual Max Schreck). Our fascination's still going strong.
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