A Very German Expression

My passion for film came about entirely by accident. I’d originally wanted to study Photography at A-Level, but the college didn’t offer it at the time. (I now work at the same college, and annoyingly, they now do photography.) Film Studies was a last minute choice, but one that ended up shaping my entire future. Because of that course, I decided to study Film at university, and am currently saving up the funds to study a PGCE in teaching English and Film. (Note: obviously I decided to pursue an MA and PhD in English instead of this, but in 2013 this was my plan.) It was also this course that introduced me to German Expressionism.

I’d encountered German Expressionism before, when a teenage obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire novels inspired me to seek out as much vampire media as possible. This was before YouTube was a huge thing, before MySpace even, and the internet was entirely for homework research and MSN Messenger. I didn’t get very far, but on one of the few movie channels I had back then, I stumbled across the final twenty minutes of Nosferatu. At the time, I had no idea what German Expressionism was, but I was utterly transfixed. It would take me another four years to see the entire film.

My real introduction to German Expressionism came with Robert Weiner’s seminal The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which I watched once in class, then watched a further three times at home just in that week. Many cite it as the first horror film. That’s debatable, but its influence on the genre is unparalleled. Caligari, in the most simplified explanation I can give, is the story of an evil doctor who commands the somnambulist Cesare to commit murders in his sleep. The “evil doctor” trope has existed since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and possibly even before, but the archetypal portrayal of the character in cinema comes from this film. As does the dark, menacing, somewhat sexual figure of Cesare, creeping into the lovely Jane’s room in the middle of the night with the intent of killing her as she sleeps. Even though Cesare is too struck with Jane’s beauty to actually kill her, his predatory nature can be felt throughout cinema, from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula right down to Twilight. (I also like to think that Watchmen’s Adrian Veidt was named after Conrad Veidt, because they’re both fabulous.)

But the biggest influence of all comes in the visuals. The sharp, surreal, over-stylised backdrops of Caligari opened the door for visual experimentation. Without Caligari, we may not even have had Inception. It also pioneered the use of shadows for visual effects. Shadows are a major factor in Caligari, and would be seen to greater effect in Nosferatu, and clearly Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho owes a little to the technique in its memorable shower scene.

I finally got to study F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in my final year of undergraduate study, by which point I’d seen it many times. I was doing a course called “The Cinematic Vampire”, which is as awesome as it sounds, and Nosferatu was the first film on our viewing list. Ostensibly a retelling of Dracula but with the names changed for copyright reasons, Nosferatu changed the game when it came to Bram Stoker’s character by making Count Orlok not a sexual predator, but physically monstrous. Max Schreck’s performance remains the only cinematic vampire to leave me terrified, such is the power of his physicality. That’s an important aspect to the whole thing. As many, though not all, films of the movement were silent, emphasis was placed on appearance, facial expressions, and body language. A lot of silent films can seem a bit “pantomime” to modern eyes, but in these films, the silence only adds to the growing dread. The silence before a scare in modern horror films is all down to the silent era. As I mentioned before, Nosferatu takes Caligari’s shadow play and turns it up to eleven. The single most lasting image from the film is that of Nosferatu’s shadow stalking up the stairs, with his spindly, elongated fingers reaching for the door. It also provides one of my favourite deaths in all of cinema. Orlok causes a heart attack just by the shadow of his hand clutching over a woman’s heart.

If Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari were the pioneers of horror cinema, then Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is the archetypal sci-fi story. Set in a futuristic urban dystopia, Metropolis was the first full-length feature of the genre and was greatly inspired, stylistically, by the Art Deco movement. The thing everybody knows about Nosferatu is, of course, the creation of Maria’s robot double. And rightly so. Robot Maria paved the way for Colin Clive to cry “IT’S ALIVE!” in Universal’s Frankenstein, and its influence can be felt even as far down as The Truman Show. Metropolis created life, which is essentially what all cinema does.

The last two films I want to mention, I won’t spend a great deal of time on, but they are two of my favourites. Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs was technically an American production, but with a German Expressionist director, and it’s star being Cesare himself, Conrad Veidt. It was one of the first films to experiment with sound, using the Movietone sound system, and a good job, too, because Veidt’s terrifying cackle was the inspiration for the character of The Joker. Where would we be as geeks without The Joker? I dread to think.

Finally, there’s the matter of Fritz Lang’s M.Considered by Lang to be his finest work, M was his first sound film, and absolutely stellar it is too. Starring Peter Lorre, it’s the unsettling tale of a child murderer facing a kangaroo court populated by other criminals who are disgusted in his crimes. The deeply weird thing about this film is, at some point, you end up sympathising for Beckert. The guy who murders children. It’s a fascinating glimpse at our own morality, and you owe all your morally grey anti-heroes to it. Beckert is as evil and yet as compelling as Walter White.

German Expressionism has had a profound effect on my own endeavours. It is the reason I have such a vested interest in horror and sci-fi. When I finally got to study photography, my first exhibition involved recreations of some of the most iconic scenes from Caligari and M. They were the first films I saw that really inspired me to look in depth into all the elements that go into making a film great. And they’re all just pretty damn awesome to watch.