THE LONG SHADOW OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

          It began as a response to isolationism.
          During WWI, Germany could import no films. This resulted in an influx of highly original material expressing thoughts and emotions through strikingly stylized cinematic elements: Dark, angular worlds reflecting a purely subjective eye.
          Stories featuring themes of madness, betrayal, and mind control flowered in an environment of artistic freedom throughout the 1920s. In particular, the work of Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang influenced contemporary filmmakers and continue to do so nearly a century later.
          Witness the geometrically absurd angles of the first horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921). The distorted scenery and optical effects (including painted shadows) are routinely reflected in the films of Tim Burton. Three of the biggest heavyweights in film--Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Stanley Kubrick--owe much of their aesthetic and many of their techniques to German Expressionism.
          Expressionism is a form of Gothicism, which itself arose largely as a need to process the events of the French Revolution.
          To compare James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with its predecessor, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is to see homage, to put it kindly, at its fullest extent. Indeed, horror films and film noir result directly from German Expressionism.
          Bluntly stated, these directors were simply way ahead of Hollywood.
          From The Maltese Falcon and The Third Man to Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner, the influence of Expressionism, with its emphasis on the exaggerated and the surreal, cannot be overstated. To look at Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands is to see Conrad Veidt as the Somnambulist in Caligari.
          Just as Franz Kafka emphatically did not write The Metamorphosis in hopes of appealing to a readership looking for stories where people turn into big bugs, the Expressionists produced unprecedented films of emotional depth, often eerily prescient of events to come, which work precisely because realism is done away with entirely.
          Eventually, Germany did import films, and this highpoint in cinema took an inevitable nosedive. But like fine wine, Expressionism only gets better with age.

Stewart Kirby writes for

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