“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” –Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying (1889). 

It is a common notion, though popularly shortened to the phrase “life imitates art”.  As an art student, I often hear this phrase from my peers and professors alike – the idea that one’s life is inspired by the art that they consume. It is a notion that may be used to inspire students like myself to create pieces of work that is meaningful not only to ourselves but to those who may become consumers of our work once completed. It may be argued that, throughout the history of cinema, many filmmakers have created their respective pieces of work under the premise of “life imitates art”, and in doing so have created works to inspire (change, thought, etc.). Film, however, did not always, and did not originally, exist predominantly as a storytelling medium –In his landmark paper titled “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, renowned theorist and scholar of film Tom Gunning states that early cinema, named by him as “the cinema of attraction[s]”, “is a cinema that bases itself on… its ability to show something…this is an exhibitionist cinema” (Gunning 382). This cinema of attractions, however, only lasted until about 1906 when, from 1907 to 1913, the narrativization of cinema occurred, wherein the film industry adopted “the legitimate theater as its model” (Gunning 385). While the narrative model soon after became, and continues to be, the primary model for films through the world, the cinema of attractions that dominated early cinema did not completely disappear after 1906. According to Gunning, the ideas and methods of the cinema of attractions went “underground”, only to reappear in some avant-garde movements throughout the history of cinema thereafter as the cinema of attractions’ exhibitionist qualities were attractive to and aligned with certain notions of the avant-garde (382).  In accordance to the aforementioned, it may be argued then that when film became art (if the argument is that avant-garde movements gave film the opportunity to turn into an art medium), it continued to imitate life. Therefore, it may also be argued that German Expressionism as an avant-garde movement showed that art continues to imitate life post the cinema of attractions era through German expressionist films’ metaphorical imitations of the unseen (ie. the public’s subconscious emotive reactions to society’s issues).

The avant-garde is a phenomenon through which filmmakers could create and experiment with the technology and art of film. While avant-garde films date back to as early as 1910, larger avant-garde movements were born out of an environment of lack (of resources, of support, and of full utilization of what film as a creative medium has to offer) fostered particularly by the first World War (Tsai 454). The first World War blew a hole in the European market through which Hollywood pumped American films; with many European film studios closed and film workers/talent fighting in the trenches, this infiltration of American film into the European market was not met with much competition or resistance.  Since the beginning of the 20thcentury, Hollywood has attempted to establish a relationship with foreign film industries and secure positions within foreign film markets in an effort to strengthen its own international market. Of the major foreign film markets, however, the European market has been the most valuable to and made the largest impact on the American film industry. In the years following World War I, the amount of film reel exported to Europe had increased five-fold, and exports to Europe accounted for approximately 65% of Hollywood’s overseas revenue (Guback 466). By the mid-1920s, when foreign filmmakers were in an economic position to produce content once again, the American film industry had gained almost complete control over the European market.  In the years following the First World War, European nations began to express their concern about Hollywood’s engagement with the European market. The avant-garde not only challenged traditional film aesthetics and convention, but also traditional business and strategies of distribution – a vital strategy if national European film industries wanted to survive into the 1920s and beyond (Tsai 454). While the defining early avant-garde movements, such as French Impressionism, Italian Futurism and German Expressionism, differed in their specific conventions and design that as a whole made them what they are, the avant-garde became a transnational phenomenon (Tsai 466). Furthermore, German expressionist cinema was, like French Impressionism and Italian Futurism were to their respective countries, particularly important in reestablishing the dominance of German cinema nationally in addition to allowing German film to assume a distinct form of its own within the international cinema space. 

The German cinema of the Weimar period – the period from 1919 to 1933 during which the Weimar Republic reigned as the governing body for the German state – is considered a “golden age” in world cinema history (Elsaesser 15). The political, economic and social instability that occurred under Weimar’s Germany had a profound impact on German film culture and industry post World War I. In a post-war Germany, contemporary filmmakers were keen to explore film as an art form in and of itself – this, in addition to the aforementioned “lack” (of resources, of support, and full utilization of what film as an art had to offer), allowed German filmmakers to explore new cinematic spaces without fear, and what came out of this desire to explore film as an art was the avant-garde film movement of German Expressionism. Expressionism started first as a modernist art movement in the late 19thcentury. Expressionism is an artistic style that “seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Expressionism”). The roots of this movement are found in the work of painters such as Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor. The movement of Expressionism that developed by virtue of these artists explored more personal themes of fear, horror, and the grotesque.  The first expressionist artists rejected the artistic standard of creating literal recreations of nature as popularized by the works belonging to the preceding art movement of Realism in favor of creating more abstract pieces of art that reflected more subjective states of the mind (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Expressionism”). A second wave of Expressionism, and the beginning of German Expressionism specifically, started in 1905 by a group of primarily German painters including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.  Similar to the first expressionist artists, the German expressionist artists sought to explore more personal themes, more specifically the darker sides of German society’s psyche, in their art in an effort to reinvigorate German art with the emotional vigor they felt it lost (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Expressionism). 

The expressionist style was soon adopted into German literature and theater around 1910, and then into film around the time of the First World War. The German expressionist cinema movement was particularly influenced by expressionist stagecraft as early expressionist films utilized and heavily relied upon expressionist inspired set design to convey and reflect the subject states of their protagonists (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Expressionism). Tilted camera angles, shadows, dream-like sequences, unsettling ambiance, fantastic sets with nightmarish structures – these filmic elements became telling characteristics of German expressionist films.  Among these filmic elements however, one of the most important to define the movement of German expressionism was chiaroscuro lighting, which “distinguishes foreground and background and highlights figures and objects, and, in so doing, animates and mobilizes narrative space” (Hake 335). The juxtaposition of light and dark through the utilization of chiaroscuro lighting was used to accomplish popular themes of the conscious vs. the unconscious and good vs. evil often found in German expressionist cinema. Chiaroscuro, in addition to set design and specific camera movements associated with expressionist film, allowed German expressionist filmmakers to clearly express its preoccupation with the psychological state, which was their primary goal. Many of the expressionist films released in the 1920s seemed to come from a place of genuine feeling and soul in an effort to escape from the harsh realities of the post-war era. The exposure of the German soul through these films showed a macabre side of German society and heart. 

Throughout the decades following the rise and fall of the German expressionist movement, some film academics have tried to link films of the Weimar era, and specifically German expressionist films, to the theories founded within Feud’s work on psychoanalysis in an attempt to analyze and argue for the subjective states that German expressionist filmmakers attempted to achieve. Of the academics who attempted to connect ideas of psychoanalysis to German expressionist film, German film critic Siegfried Kracauer was the first in his 1947 study entitled “From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film”.  According to Kracauer, “the films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way…inner life manifests itself in various elements and conglomerations of external life…in recording the visible world – whether a current reality or an imaginary universe – films therefore provide clues to hidden mental processes” (3,7).  In the decades after Kracauer’s landmark analysis, academics likeArthur Mitzman take the psychoanalytic perspective bit further by arguing that “since individuals internalize the standards of society, conflict does not, in general, occur openly between the individual and society, but rather within the individual psyche”, relating the idea of Freud’s superego, or the internalized ideas that an individual may gather from the environment in which they grew up (ie. their parents and society) to the German expressionist filmmakers’ inclination to express the subjective “hell they felt in themselves they believed the existing order of society to be responsible for” (101). 

In their research, many of these academics also use the film Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) as their primary example for and of analysis. Throughout the years, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari has come to be considered not only as one of the first (great) works of the German expressionist movement, but also one of the defining films of the German expressionist genre (Hake 321).  The film’s incredible success, both nationally and internationally, invigorated the expressionist movement and allowed future filmmakers to find success in creating art films that utilized the medium specificity of film to establish themes of subjectivity (Hake 324). The things that German expressionist filmmakers were known for and what people appreciated about films like Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligariwas their “outspoken feelings for impressive settings, their virtuosity in developing action through appropriate lighting… the conspicuous part played in German films by a camera which the Germans were the first to render completely mobile… and (perhaps most importantly) the organizational power operative in these films” (Kracauer 3).  Directors like Robert Wiene, in their ability to envision and materialize a withdrawal from the harsh realities of the post-war era and escape into the “intangible realm of the soul” that the mass German population longed for, were only able to make such films however with a concept that Kracauer termed as “studio constructivism” (76). This concept alluded to the essential role that the writer, the designer and the technical staff played in the making of the film, and the ability to organize in a way that allowed for intense collaboration to make stories of the soul come to life (Kracauer 76). The idea of studio constructivism not only what allowed German films to take on the styles of expressionism that expressionist filmmakers so desired, but also allowed for the success of such films within a larger national and international setting. In addition, the urge to create artful films with subjective themes mirrored the German public sought forms of entertainment and activity through which they could achieve some semblance of escapism from the political and economic woes of the Weimar era (Hake 338).  Thus, it’s not much of a surprise that the films that came to dominate German cinema during the post-war era were in the style of or embraced the styles of expressionism. 

As one of the most contemporary art forms to come out of the development of modern technologies, cinema has time and time again expanded beyond the anticipated or perceived limits placed upon it by existing film technologies, techniques and industry practices at the time.  Early film, in its cinema of attractions format, used to be a literal reflection of society – of what was visually seen, of spectacle. The idea of film as an art, which came about with the popularization of many early European avant-garde movements, allowed cinema to expand beyond a showcase medium to an art medium. A historical significance of expressionism within film history comes from its metaphorical imitations of the unseen, which shifted the paradigm of film from the material to abstract while still keeping elements of the cinema of attractions (or the spectacle). 

References

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde” (1986). Reprinted in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 381-388. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Guback, Thomas H. “Hollywood’s International Market.” The American Film Industry, edited by Tino Balio, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 463-486. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/auckland/detail.action?docID=3445105.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA—STYLE AND DESIGN IN FILM HISTORY.” Expressionism in the Cinema, edited by Olaf Brill and Gary D. Rhodes, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2016, pp. 15–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bgzcff.8.

Hake, Sabine. “Expressionism and Cinema: Reflections on a Phantasmagoria of Film History.” A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, edited by Neil H. Donahue, NED - New edition ed., Boydell and Brewer, 2005, pp. 321–342. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt169wfmh.17.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. 1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print. 

Mitzman, Arthur. “Anarchism, Expressionism and Psychoanalysis.” New German Critique, no. 10, 1977, pp. 77–104. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/487673.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Expressionism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 8 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism.

Tsai, Beth “Reframing the Historical Transnational: A Look at Early European Avant-Garde Films (1910-1930),” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 34, no. 5 (2017): 445-458