GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism evolved before the First World War in Germany, initially in the work of painters and writers. In painting it was part of a search for expressiveness of style by means of exaggerations of line and colour; a deliberate abandonment of the naturalism implicit in Impressionism in favour of a simplified style which was meant to carry far greater emotional impact. This style evolved from the drastically simplified outline and very strong colour of Van Gogh, and also from the so-called 'hysterical art' of Edvard Munch. The tendency to a sentimental hysteria and the clear derivation from Negro art are two of the factors which explain Hitler's denunciation of 'Degenerate Art', and the esteem it now enjoys. Some of the major expressionist painters were Beckmann, Ensor, Nolde, Kokoschka, Rouault, and Soutine. Expressionism, therefore, grew out of the ferment of intellectual and artistic endeavour before the First World War, and did not, like Futurism or Vorticism, find its demise in that conflict. Of course the First World War brought great changes to Europe: in the East the Bolshevik revolution had reshaped Russia, and was to throw it into an era of ferment and change; the Austro-Hungarian empire had fallen leaving a host of nation states (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Slavic states) in its wake; in Germany the second Reich and the Kaiser had fallen, to be replaced by a democratic regime, the Weimar Republic. The war had also wiped out a host of immature artistic tendencies, each characterised by a set of ever more hysterical manifestos. Many of these tendencies did not survive the war, although the individuals associated with these groupings did go on to participate in the new artistic ferment in the post-war years.

Expressionism, it must be remembered, was only one artistic tendency among many competing factions. It attempted to question established notions of reality and realism, and to divulge the innermost workings of the psyche by means of vivid distortions of the normal and the everyday world. Expressionism reaches back into the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. This was associated with romantic concepts of nature and man's place in the world, and was characterised in the work of the young Goethe, Klinger and Lenz. Nature was perceived as sudden and elemental, the imagery of the romantics was excessive and violent. They used short clipped and chopped sentences to indicate the emotional ferment of their writings. Furthermore, in the work of E.T.A Hoffmann we see full rein given to an imaginative world where the supernatural mingles with the realistic. In such stories as The Sandman Hoffmann was able to divulge worlds of unspeakable horror as well as morbid feelings of sexuality.

Another inheritance of the Expressionists was that derived from the philosophy of Frederich Nietzsche, and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche's philosophy is thought by some to be a premonition of Hitler and Nazism (Nietzsche did, indeed, provide inspiration for Hitler's view of nationhood, race and class). Nietzsche's main themes, the Superman (Ubermensch), the will to power and the notion of self-overcoming, provided a set of values directly or indirectly assimilated by the Expressionists. Sigmund Freud had begun his work on female hysterics in Vienna in the late nineteenth-century. Female hysteria was not an illness but a consequence of the repression of women in the 19th century, part of what we now think of as 'Victorian morality'.  In short women were not meant to experience orgasm and the resulting frustration they experienced had to be treated medically.  Sometimes a doctor would offer his patient 'genital massage' to relieve the symptoms of 'female hysteria' but ultimately the medical establishment had to resort to mechanical means of stimulus and so the vibrator was developed.  Soon it was available commercially.  Freud's interest in hysteria, as well as his belief that children had a well-defined sexuality was revolutionary and controversial, and was scorned by the contemporary Viennese medical establishment. Furthermore, his interest in dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes, and their relationship to the unconscious, was to provide a vast reservoir of potent metaphors for the expressionist painter, writer or film-maker.

METROPOLIS

Metropolis is a futuristic film dealing with a society which has come to be divided between two classes, an elite group of rulers, and a mass of workers who live and work underground. The workers are cruelly exploited by their rulers in the factories below the ground, but appear to hope for salvation through the girl Maria, who outlines a prophetic vision to them, based upon an appeal to the hearts and emotions of the cruel elite. Freder, the son of a member of this elite finds Maria with a group of children in one of the ornamental gardens of the upper city, and decends into the underworld of the worker's city to observe its conditions and find Maria. He finds that the conditions underground are extremely inhuman, and that the worker's must become part of the machine they serve in order to survive. At one point in the film the machine is identified with the Babylonian god Moloch, spitting the workers out from a gigantic gaping jaw. Moloch is a typical expressionist motif, representing the pernicious effects of the machine and mechanised labour upon man. The film at first seems to have a Marxist understanding of the relationships between classes and the relationship between man and machine. The machine itself is identified as an inhuman, pumping organ, a symbol indicating that man is no longer in control, and that he is subjected by the machines that he has created.

As Freder pursues Maria, Rotwang, an inventor, and rival of Freder's father, is building a robot. Rotwang and Freder's father, John Frederson, attempt to subjugate the workers with it, by making it in the image of Maria. The false Maria attempts to destroy the machines, but by doing this the underground homes of the workers are destroyed and their children almost drowned. The false Maria is burnt to death, and the real Maria establishes a settlement between the workers and the elite. The film has sometimes been seen as being crypto-fascist in its political leaning, since it insists upon the establishment of agreement between the ruling and the working classes, rather than the overthrow of the ruling class.

The film's form is very stylised, as is much of the acting. Images of the city and of the pumping machines have a very abstract quality. The narrative of the film sacrifices coherence sometimes, and indicates the importance of dreams, fantasies and hallucinations. For instance, Freder's dream of Death and the Seven Deadly Sins reaches back into his unconscious fears of what is happening, but also may be seen as another example (like the image of Moloch) of Sturm und Drang supernatural fantasy. The crowd scenes are well orchestrated and architectural. The mechanised ranks of mass man with its images of mass de-humanised marching ranks anticipates fascist images and propoganda. The robot is a typical Gothic symbol, its main archetype being Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The destruction of the robot is the revenge of the massenmensch upon the machine which will finally make them in its image. The city is another important correlative in the film. The city is an archetypal image of the twentieth-century and it indicates a revelation of man's constructive powers, as well as his destructive.

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

The main theme and correlative of this course will be the development of German cinema in the Twentieth-century, through the expressionists to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. However, the idea of influence will also be a major consideration, and we will examine the influence which early German cinema has had upon later German cinema and upon contemporary American or British cinema. Literary critics, particularly Harold Bloom, talk about the anxiety of influence - the wish to be influenced by another writer or film-maker, or conversely - the wish to escape from an overwhelming influence. This is felt to be pejorative because of the visible trace which influence leaves upon a work, which is ineradicable. In the Twentieth-century the Modernist movement in art and literature seemed to raise influence to an iconic status, whereby synthesis in form, manner and content was foregrounded. The Modernists were particularly willing to make literature out of literature - to re-use past artworks, and to synthesize their parts into another coherence. Three concepts are of importance at this juncture. The first is parody. Parody is the deliberate re-use of another or older art work in order to humourously condescend to it. For instance, the speech of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland is a deliberate parody of Tennyson's poetry to comic effect. Parody utilises a host of ironic comic effects, which may be detailed as synechdoche, hyperbole, litotes and zeugma. These techniques either exaggerate or understate - hyperbole, for instance, exaggerates the trivial to comic effect. Pastiche differs from parody in that in it the artist is much closer to the work he or she is attempting to imitate. It stands half-way between parody and homage. Thus it may exploit comic and ironic effects to distance itself from the work it is attempting to exploit, but it will also admire this work. A homage is simply a work which seeks to praise another particularly admired work. A very good example of modernism is the poetry of T.S.Eliot. In it we can observe the synthesis of classical literatures into a muti-cultural whole. Eliot's poem The Waste Land re-uses elements from past and recent literatures and exploits them to either serious or comic effect. Eliot also included songs and examples of demotic speech to produce humorous effects.  In James Joyce's Ulysses we can also observe the tendency towards pastiche and parody, textual jokes and self-referential games, which deeply involve the reader, who is, at times, deceived or mis-informed. But this process can also be seen in a host of modern painters, composers and photographers who all use elements of synthesis, pastiche and parody in their work, for sentimental or ironic reasons. A particularly good antecedent of this tendency can be seen in the Spanish novel Don Quixote. Later lectures and seminars in this series will consider how influence works in relation to cinema.

Bladerunner is based upon a novel by the science fiction writer Phillip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The novel has two primary concerns - the destruction of the planet's ecology, and the morality of building quasi-human androids. These concerns spill over into the film, providing a powerful backdrop to the film's drama. In its visual style and concerns Bladerunner is obviously influenced by and derives much from Metropolis. This can be observed in the futuristic designs of the city. These designs, and the technical means with which they were constructed were revolutionary in 1926, when Metropolis was made. Technology is an important aspect of the development of cinema. The pioneers of photography and of persistence of vision developed the first vestigal cinema. Later developments included sound, the development of colour, and the later development of television. All of these developments met with great hostility from within the film establishment.

BLADERUNNER

Bladerunner examines a post-ecological universe, where most natural things, such as animals, are synthesized, and where the city dominates the imagination as it dominates the screen. The city is depicted as drab and decaying, with huge electronic advertisements dominating the cityline. Certain elements of design, such as the city and the nightclub are evidently parallel to Metropolis - Yoshiwara, the den of sin in Metropolis is transmuted into the nightclub in Bladerunner. The society in Bladerunner is evidently post-ecological; except at the end, the film maintains a grim view of earth. The mixture of ethnicity suggests that the society has undergone huge transformations, and is alien to ours. Language itself has undergone change, the inhabitants of the city speak a kind of debased lingua franca ie. a language which is polyglot, made up of many languages. The off-world colonies represent the one means of escape from the city and its oppressive gloom and darkness. On these colonies android slave labour is utilised. The film details the attempt by four of these androids, called 'skin jobs' by Deckard's boss, to approach their creator, Tyrell, and to demand more life. The revolt by the workers in Metropolis is parallel to the revolt of the androids in Bladerunner, just as Rachel is parallel to Maria, though without her demonic and demagogic aspect. The androids are beginning to develop emotions and have memories, but live only for four years. They therefore want more life; they approach their creator at the Tyrell Corporation - 'the God of bio-mechanics' - but he is unable to reverse their condition. The androids therefore destroy their creator, as they are to be destroyed in their turn by Deckard and Rachel.

The morality of slave labour is examined in the film: Tyrell is the authoritarian god whom his progeny wish to destroy; Roy Batty is 'the prodigal son' returning to face his creator. Roy is the leader of the group, and also the one who destroys Tyrell. The decaying mise-en-scene mirrors the destruction of the androids who are compelled to destroy their creator as their termination dates approach. Deckard (Harrison Ford) becomes Rachel's lover, but must depart from the city at the end of the film. Only at the end of the film do we see anything natural. The city is purely synthetic and artificial.

THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is perhaps the seminal and originary German Expressionist film. It is one of the first films to have been made entirely in the studio.  It exemplifies a variety of stylistic imprints, which include primitivism, naturalism and expressionism. Before the development of what we would see as a standardised cinematic language - as exemplified by Hollywood cinema - film went through what may be identified as a primitive stage. All artforms, painting, sculpture or literature go through this stage of primitivism. In film primitivism connotes a naivety about the construction of the shot, which is the basic building block of cinema. Medium/long shots are evident, though there is very little use of the close-up. Continuity editing, which conveys a spatial sense to the viewer is the hallmark of Hollywood cinema; it involves the close-up, the shot/reverse shot, the positioning of the camera to maintain the flow of the narrative, the maintenance of what is called the three hundred and sixty degree rule. All of these things are described in more detail in the David Bordwell book Film Art.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is situated somewhere between primitivism and expressionism. It exhibits the kind of naivety which is characteristic of primitivism. However, the expressionist component is equally prevalent and important. It can be observed in the two-dimensional painted flats which were especially made for the film. According to a piece of apocrypha the flats were a money-saving necessity, rather than an aesthetic innovation. They were designed by the expressionist painters Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig. The flats tend to effect our spatial sense. They insist upon artificiality, theatricality, and produce an enclosed effect, where space is telescoped and reduced in size. The peculiar lighting effects maintains this sense of inclosure, of the everyday made perverse, terrible and frightening. The actors also adopt stylised poses, and engage with the very artificiality of the sets. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is also indebted to the legacy of German Romanticism and to the Gothic style in literature which swept through Europe in the nineteenth-century.

The third aesthetic influence on The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is naturalism. This can be observed in the scenes in the asylum at the beginning of the film. Naturalism tended to depict reality as corrupt, decaying and sordid, yet inherently 'realistic'.

The formal aesthetic qualities of the film affects our consideration of its content. The original script ommited the framing sequence in the asylum, which was added later by the director Robert Wiene. Fritz lang was initially contracted to make the film but had to withdraw from the contract in order to finish his film series Die Spinnen (The Spiders). According to Lotte Eisner it was Lang who first suggested the idea of the framing sequence. This addition was opposed by the scriptwriters Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. As Siegfried Kracauer has said, "The original story was an account of real horrors; Weine's version transforms that account into a chimera concocted and narrated by the mentally deranged Francis. To effect this transformation the body of the original story is put into a framing story which introduces Francis as a madman...Janowitz and Mayer knew why they raged against the framing story: it perverted, if not reversed, their intrinsic intentions. While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Weine's Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness. A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one..." Caligari has been seen by some as a premonition of Hitler and the rise of Nazism but it is also about the break down in social cohesion that occured in Germany at the end of the Great War. The film exhibits an ambivalence about authority: the simultaneous desire to overthrow and submit to a higher power, while the very figure of authority, Caligari, is depicted as a murderer, and then as the benign director of the asylum. The film may have two messages, the first attributable to the director, the second to the writers. The naturalism of the framing sequence is pointed against the primitivism/expressionism of the main sequence. Formal effects may therefore help us to tease out the more important contentual aspects of the text. The name Caligari, incidentally came from a book by the French writer Stendhal.

The film has been criticised on two levels: firstly, some critics see it as being too theatrical and artificial; secondly, some are dismayed by its attitude to Caligari and his premonitory facism. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari became an instant success in Germany and abroad. Siegfried Kracauer tells us that the French coined the term Caligarisme to denote the idea of the world turned upside down depicted in the film.

INTRODUCTION TO FREUD

Sigmund Freud was one of a number of Victorian intellectuals, thinkers and philosophers who were to have a profound effect on their own century, and upon the twentieth-century. Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Richard Wagner; these and others revolutionised the disciplines they encountered. Freud's effect on the philosophy of the mind had as great a bearing as Marx's findings in political philosophy, Darwin's on the evolution movement and Wagner's upon music.

Freud was born in Freiburg in Moravia but his family moved to Vienna when he was four and he continued to live in that city until he was forced to flee from the German invasion of Austria one year before his death. He initially worked under Brucke at the Institute of Physiology in Vienna, but later moved to Paris to work under Charcot at the Saltpetiere. It was at this point that his interest turned towards hysteria and hypnosis. He first evolved pschoanalytical concepts through his encounter with predominantly female hysterics in his practise in Vienna.

This will not, of course, prove to be an exhaustive discussion of Freud, but will highlight his main areas of discovery and innovation. Freud's most important discovery is the unconscious. The unconscious is the domain dominated by instinctual drives, such as the Death drive or the sexual drive. These were denoted as Eros and Thanatos by Freud, and they were seen to dominate mankind's instinctual and preconscious life. These drives, however, were seen to be transmuted into civilising processes, such as creativity and artistic endeavour, or anti-social and destructive processes, such as warfare . Freud felt that the unconscious workings of the mind were accessible to the analyst. Access to the unconscious was given by a number of processes. Firstly, slips of the tongue (or parapraxis) gave access to the actual or real unconscious wishes of the individual. In these parapraxes a word may be replaced by another word. The slip of the tongue uncovers a pre-conscious concern, doubt, anxiety or neurosis. These are described in Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which, indeed, is the source work for this lecture. Secondly, dreams were seen to be another important route of access to the unconscious. Typical dreams, like the death of a family member, or even incestuous dreams were not to be discarded, Freud maintained. In the works The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud describes the workings of these processes which reveal the unconscious.

Freud's other important discovery was the Oedipus complex. In this the child's latent aggressivity and incestuous feelings are articulated as an overwhelming human neurosis. The discovery of the child's sexuality was unacceptable to the medical and academic establishment of his day, and even his close friend Breuer deserted him when he presented his research findings on this area. It was supposed by them that the child was essentially asexual and did not discover its sexuality until at least adolescence. However, Freud's findings maintained that the child was overwhelmingly sexual, and first discovered its sexual feelings in relation to its father and mother. For the male child incestuous feelings towards the mother were transposed into filial affection, and aggressive feelings towards the father were transposed into friendly rivalry. In Freud's later work Totem and Taboo he finds a metaphysical extension of the complex, and believed that the complex accounted for the beginnings of religious rites, of art and science, of society as a whole. This was because he felt that creativity was the substance of a neurosis. He says, "I put forward a suggestion [in his work Totem and Taboo] that mankind as a whole may have acquired its sense of guilt, the ultimate source of religion and morality, at the beginning of its history, in connection with the Oedipus complex." Again he says [in Totem and Taboo], "I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex."

NOSFERATU

Nosferatu rehearses the Freudian assertion that the repressed, the unspeakable, the taboo unremittingly return to haunt the living. In Nosferatu it is the dead who once more return to explain the meaning of the present to the living. Nosferatu the vampire is the demoniac aristocrat who returns to evoke the unspeakable fear and terror which is repressed at the heart of bourgeois society. Freud himself observed that repression was an unconscious drive, as potent and powerful as the other major drives which he observed, death and sexuality. Jonathon's journey to Transylvania is a symbolic, dreamlike descent into an underworld, where the hideous and the unspeakable are raised from the unconscious to confront and terrorise the living. The film elicits a peculiar form of male bonding in Jonathan's encounter with the vampire. But the vampire is always identified as death, and with morbid forms of sexuality which are described in Gothic literature and which find their ultimate personification in the shape of the vampire. Nosferatu is both living and dead, he occupies the area where the deepest fears of death and sexuality are evoked. It is the figure of Lucy who evokes the film's most startling demonstration of repression and who articulates the desire for death and pleasure, which are bound together in the unconscious, and which we regard as fundamentally unspeakable, taboo, repressed. The vampire's castle is placed in the land of dreams, nightmares and fantasies where Jonathon must make sense of his own unconscious desires and repressions or be destroyed by the vampire, who desires the taste of blood to invigorate his undead lifeforce.

The film's full title is Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror). Perhaps the film has a musical construction, but it is one which we must acknowledge as fundamentally discordant. The film is certainly technically innovative, and its use of light is particularly significant. The vampire comes to signify something beyond terror itself, he is something latent and repressed which we must, however, acknowledge, and it is as a mere play of light and shade that his ultimate terror is evoked. The terrifying and grotesque shadow of Nosferatu gauges our own fears as much as those of the protagonists. If the vampire is insubstantial shadow then he must represent ultimate tangible truths which are founded in the reality of the unconscious and which are made accessible to us through our dreams and nightmares, and through our unconscious slips of the tongue. The world of the supernatural leads us into a world which we must acknowledge as our own, however seemingly oblique its relation is to our particular universe. If our own dreams admit the desire which is perversely fulfilled in Nosferatu, then we are implicated as onlookers, or voyeurs of a situation which we can only feel ourselves to be implicated in. The sea journey is another important locus for own fears. The idea of unwitting destruction by a force as insubstantial as light and shadow, but as real as the plague plays upon our deepest feelings of loss and fear. It perhaps returns us to our childlike fear of darkness and horror, our first premonitions of death. But Nosferatu originated from the European tradition of Gothic horror, which finds its fullest articulation in Bram Stoker's Gothic-Celtic novel Dracula.  Nosferatu incorporates some aspects of that novel, yet it also adds substantially to it: the rats and the plague are Murnau's own creation. The film weighs both tradition and innovation in the balance.