After the First World War and until the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, Germany was the cradle of a new cinematographic style based on the stylistic features of the expressionist movement such as the use of chiaroscuro, dreamlike atmospheres and exaggerated angles. . and compositions. The exact date of birth of this movement must be placed at the end of 1917, when the German government and army founded Universum Film AG (UFA).
There are many in-depth studies on this movement in books, magazines, and even on the WWW, but this little essay is just my personal and original reflection on the movies I had the opportunity to see and love.
Caligari! CALIGARI!!
Directed in 1919 by Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the most paradigmatic film of early German expressionism.
Brief synopsis: A traveling fair visits a small German town. The main attraction of that fair is the Dr. Caligari booth, where a sleepwalker named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) is advertised. One of the visitors asks the sleepwalker a very clever question: “How long will I live?” The weirdo replies, “You’ll die tomorrow…” Interestingly, the man -instead of laughing- seems very concerned about the sleepwalker’s prediction. Even more interesting, he dies the next day…
Art direction was provided by Walter Reimann and Walter Roehrig, members of the “Group Der Sturm”, a Berlin expressionist art group, with world famous artists such as Bruno Taut and Herwarth Walden. They created an original and fantastic makeup that fills the film with delusional imagery and emphasizes the protagonist’s own psycho-destruction.
Caligari’s brutal domination over half sleepwalker/half zombie Cesare is easily interpretable as a metaphor for the fascist and authoritarian governments that emerged in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, as Siegfried Kracauer explains in his famous book From Caligari to Hitler.
Nosferatu of Murnau
Don’t ask me how, but a few years ago I was lucky enough to get my hands on a print of Friedrich Murnau’s oldest film, Schloß Vogeloed (The Haunted Castle, 1921). It didn’t thrill me much, but the beauty of the make-up, the strange and disturbing ending, and the surprising use of chiaroscuro were enough to draw me into Murnau’s light/dark universe, which will reach its zenith in film I. I’ll review now.
A year after filming Schloß Vogeloed, Murnau was ready to shoot his unrevealed masterpiece: Nosferatu, eine symphonie des grauens is based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, but a lawsuit with the writer’s widow forced Murnau to change some aspects. of the film, such as the title or the name of the protagonist (Count Orlok) However, it was not enough and, due to the demand, almost all copies of the film were destroyed. Deutsche Film Production was able to save one of them and the film was finally released in the United States in 1929.
Max Schreck’s incredible performance as the sinister Count Orlok (extremely thin, pale, rat-toothed, raven-nosed, like a Transylvanian version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons), the charm and artistry of his landscapes, and the beauty The lyrics of the texts place the film at the pinnacle of the horror genre. Nosferatu is the most cryptic and necrophilous film, but also oneiric and romantic, based on the Transylvanian vampire, a true masterpiece that neither Tod Browning, nor Terence Fisher nor Francis Ford Coppola have ever surpassed.
Metropolis
Along with 2001, a space odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick and Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is considered the pinnacle of what was then called science fiction cinema. The influence on both later films is evident: Blade Runner’s opening sequences of dark, futuristic, neo-industrial Los Angeles seem to pay homage to the jaw-dropping cityscapes of Metropolis (see image left), while in Kubrick’s masterpiece the tribute is even in the title: Metropolis. The argument takes place in the year 2000, and Kubrick places his film a year later as a tribute.
But while Blade Runner and 2001’s predictions had been pretty wrong (I haven’t seen any replicants out there, and Saturn is still a bit elusive), Metropolis’ fatalistic vision of the working class is a cruel metaphor that lives on today. Our times. Almost 40 years later, and with no direct relation to this film, Julio Cortázar wrote a sentence that alone sums up the tragic message of Metropolis: “…humanity will begin to be worthy of its name the day that the exploitation of being human for the human being stop”