german expressionism

The term came from Der Sturm, the Berlin gallery and magazine that had spent the 1910s calling Kirchner's and Kandinsky's distorted paintings "Expressionist"; the label crossed over to film when The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opened in Berlin in 1920 behind a poster campaign announcing "You must become Caligari." Weimar Germany's currency was collapsing through the same years, and the studio shot the film cheap, painting its asylum and rooftops onto canvas flats instead of building or filming them for real, so the crooked world on screen came out of what the studio could afford, and started doing the work of a state of mind instead. Caligari is the clearest case of that trade: a fairground doctor exhibits a sleepwalker he wakes for a few minutes at a time, in rooms whose tilted angles are already telling you not to trust the story before the ending does. Murnau carries the same distortion out of the painted sets and into pure shadow, sending a clerk to sell Count Orlok a house in Transylvania and back to find the danger has followed him home, in Nosferatu. Lang keeps the geometry and drops the gothic subject for a contemporary one: a child killer at the centre of a Berlin manhunt run by the police and the underworld at once, the whole city arranged around one man the way Caligari's asylum was arranged around one story, in M.

Distinguish from Film Noir inherited Expressionism's shadow-work and moral ambiguity but grounded them in American crime narratives and naturalistic acting. Surrealist Cinema shares the rejection of realism but pursues dream logic and the unconscious rather than psychological externalization through visual design.