After World War I, Germany faced a period of extreme poverty and instability. As a defeated country, Germany was burdened with the huge war reparations negotiated in the "Versailles Contract". Germany lost its imperial status, political turmoil, civil conflict, inflation, market collapse, and poverty spread. In this context, German Expressionism came into being. German Expressionism began in Munich in 1910. It first appeared in painting, and then appeared in literature, drama, music and architecture, forming a literary movement. Expressionism was influenced by Post-Impressionism and opposed to Impressionism. The remaining traditional spatial laws of central perspective and the simple depiction of light, they are especially influenced by Gauguin's "savage school", emphasizing the intuitive feeling and subjective creation of the works, opposing copying and imitating reality, opposing rationality, and advocating primitive art The non-real, decorative beauty, and the strong color and strong contrast of light and dark create an extreme pure spiritual world, which leads to the further development of the surreal tendency. The aesthetic pursuit of expressionism developed rapidly in the turbulent society after the defeat of Germany, and posters, advertisements and decorative designs were covered with a layer of expression in Berlin's weighbridges, shops, theaters and cafes. German artists were dissatisfied with social reality, and adopted expressionist deformation, exaggeration and peculiar artistic language as an expression of their inner fear and anxiety. In such a socio-political and cultural context, expressionist films were born.
The Spiritual World of Expressionist Films
In the face of the reality of defeat in the First World War, German avant-garde film artists clearly differed from the aesthetic exploration of French avant-garde films in terms of creative ideas, routes, styles and forms, and they were more closely related. focus on the social reality of Germany. However, whether it is Expressionism with surrealist tendencies, or in-room dramas and street movies among the tendencies of realism, their general tendency and general trend in creation is still to pay great attention to the sociality and seriousness of the works, and to pay attention to the works' sociality and seriousness. realistic meaning.
From 1919 to 1924, there were many representative figures and their representative works in the expressionist films that lasted for 5 years: Robert Vine's "Dr. Caligari" (1919), with the character Francis in the play. The narrative reveals the evil of Dr. Caligari and the violence and terror he inflicts on society, creating a fantasy world that is purely mentally ill. Paul Wegner's "Clay Man Collin" (1920), described the residual nature of a despot created by social politics, and thus turned the fate of Germany in the early Weimar Republic. Fleet Lange's "Three Lives" (1921, also translated "Death of Exhaustion"), a conflict between love and death in the high-fortified castle where the god of fate imprisoned thousands of lives , finally conquered the god of fate. Friedrich Murnau's Nosferadu the Vampire (1922), about Bram Stoker's vampires, and the swarms of rats in the film foreshadow that. Terrible plague. Paul Laney's "Wax Museum" (1924), three wax figures in the wax museum come back to life, each telling the story of their brutal domination of mankind with cruel punishment. In these representative works of expressionism, the characteristics of the subject matter are obvious. Expressionist film artists often look for materials from the distorted and dark world, in the closed world that seems to be isolated from reality, to go to Dig into the loneliness, brutal, terrifying, and frenzied mental states in the characters' hearts. However, this just reflects the social and psychological state of the German nation after the defeat. Expressing inner reality with symbols and disproving social reality with subjectivity are the actual social significance and social value of expressionist film art works.
"Ghosts are everywhere
and they're all around us and
driving me out of my home, my wife and my kids
."
When it comes to German expressionist films, the film representative that has to be mentioned is the film "Dr. Caligari", which marks the birth of German expressionist films. The above sentence is from the opening lines of the 1920 German Expressionist film "Dr. Caligari's Cabin". Screenwriters Karl Mayo and Hans Janovich provide an unconventional narrative for the film, which begins with Francis telling another person about what he's been through and involved in. Next, the film Then there's the incident itself: several murders raise Francis' suspicions about Caligari, the eccentric hypnotist on the playground, but police deny Francis' suspicions with no evidence. With another attempted murder, Francis followed Caligari to the mental hospital, only to find that he was the director of the hospital. While Caligari was sleeping, Francis and the doctors read his diary. , discovered the truth that he controlled and instructed his patients to commit murder by hypnotism. When revealed as the murderer, Caligari is hysterical like a psychopath, and the film returns to the beginning, with Francis closing out his narrative with a victory over his opponent. But the film is not over, Francis came to the mental hospital again, and in his conflict with Caligari, he confirmed to us that Francis is actually a patient in the mental hospital, and Caligari is completely a kind doctor , which means that all the previous pictures are Francis's fantasy. When Caligari arrives to analyze Francis' condition and confirms that his condition can be cured, the whole film will end there. The play structure of the film is very characteristic, and there are multi-layered narratives. Especially the last stroke adds a layer of ambiguous narrative to the narrative form that is already a play within a play, making the structure of the film more complicated. People not only ask who Is it the real patient? Who is irrational? This kind of unanswered handling is precisely the originality of the work. It is the creator's expression of the state of the social truth and error, rational and irrational at that time. It is a symbol of the authoritative figure of the bourgeoisie— - Caligari's description and exposure realize the tortuous critique of the morals, ethics and social order of capitalism by the creator.
Expressionist film styling
Expressionist filmmakers accepted the influence of the expressionist plastic art, and adopted the expressionist style in the film to deal with the shape of the film for the absurd society in their eyes. In "Dr. Caligari", a grotesque visual language was found to express, and the film set was drawn by three expressionist painters of "Crazy Floating Society": Hermann Valer, Hua Hua Gerald Roerich and Walter Lehmann. The building is tilted, the ground is lost, and the perspectives of far and near are reversed. Expressionist painters created a hallucinatory world in a surreal twisted form. This set not only effectively reflects the narrative background and emotional requirements of the work, but also plays a visual leading role in the film, creating a precedent for the artist to determine the visual style of the film in the history of world film. The treatment of the characters in the film is also consistent with the set, and the actors create a series of characters such as Caligari (Werner Krauss) with bizarre costumes, dramatic makeup and exaggerated performances. These figures, especially Caligari, are called "the type of tragedy" in George Sadur's evaluation, and he also points out: "This type represents not so much a person as a psychological state, that is, a mixed mental state of cruelty and impatience, fantasy and madness". Another aspect of the modeling characteristics of "Dr. Caligari" is that the film's treatment of light and shadow pays great attention to the contrast of light and dark. In the process of shooting, the film did not use natural light effects, and completely relied on artificial lighting to create the visual effect of shadows of characters projected on the white wall, which further highlighted the mystery and horror of the film. After the expressionist film, the expressive use of lighting effects eventually developed into a feature of all German film forms, and also provided experience for the expressive means of film horror.
Of course, it should also be pointed out that under the influence of Hermann Valm's idea that "the film should be a moving picture", the film "Dr. Caligari" has indeed become a moving expressionist painting, Completely deprived of the materiality of the film, it becomes a reproduction of the Méliès-esque concept of "the screen is the stage". Dr. Caligari, however, is not a simple repetition, but from Méliès's audience-pleasing magic show, to the film's mysterious, complex and profound narrative; From the use of the film to the creation of the visual modeling of the film's environment and atmosphere; from the formal expression of the surface state of Méliès's fixed viewpoint, to the film's exploration of the inner and spiritual state of the characters, and so on. Although the stage is also objectively recorded, and it is also the mise-en-scene that belongs to the stage of the drama, the characters in "Dr. Caligari" are not simple horizontal movements, but peculiar deep movements (for example, the game field at the beginning of the film) and the treatment of the sequence of chasing the murderer at night, etc.), making the characters interact with the set, creating a three-dimensional effect. And give inspiration to explain the importance of picture composition and scene scheduling in front of the camera.
Expressionism was embraced as a stylized form after Dr. Caligari, and filmmakers no longer saw expressionism as just a madman's narrative, but as a way to create fear and The style and type of fantasy story. After "Dr. Caligari", a series of films such as "Nosferadu the Vampire", "Three Lives", "Clay Figure Colin", etc. appeared, all of which were the performance of the themes of murder, death and violence. Highlighting the horror, fantasy and crime of expressionist films, they are all works full of mysticism created by subjective means. However, the difference is that these films are not restricted to the stage setting of "Dr. Caligari", but partly adopt the characteristics of live-action shooting, but the people moving in front of this natural background are still expressionist dramas Stage-style heavy makeup and exaggerated performances. The experiment of expressionist film aesthetics is the development of the surreal tendency of film, especially the expression from content to form, which is based on the special psychological state of the German nation at that time. Therefore, just like Howard Lawson As analyzed: "The social environment reflected in these films is generally chaotic. Some films show madmen conquering society; Crime and depravity are inherent properties of human society. Most of the films have implicit criticism of capitalist society. But some criticisms are just a low voice of dissatisfaction, while others are cynical acceptance of the status quo. More films show pain and disappointment And helpless anger, and occasionally there is a glimmer of hope.
Notice
Part of this article is excerpted from Zheng Yaling/Hu Bin's "History of Foreign Films".
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