GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM TRADITIONS IN WOLRD CINEMA
deeper logic only emerges as it explores how easily all
people are seduced by appearances - by the very stuff of silent cinema. Certainly,
audiences even today are immediately taken by the look of Lang's city of the future:
its monumental buildings, pleasure gardens and massive machines. Drawn in by
those images, we only gradually learn, like young Freder, Joh Fredersen's son, that
they disguise a subjugated populace, a culture ultimately at odds with itself. And
the key emblem of that conflict becomes the robot that Fredersen and the scientist
Rotwang create to manipulate the workers and maintain their hold on power. A sign
simultaneously of the ideal worker - obedient to orders, tireless, inhuman - and of
the ruling class - able to lead the workers as they see fit - the robot is first tested on
the wealthy young men of the city. Dancing at a nightclub, it draws all eyes, as a
montage of staring faces underscores, excites their passion and easily induces them
to believe it is a real woman, not a cold metal creation.
Following that debut, the robot, in the guise of Maria, similarly rouses the workers,
turning a kind of sexual excitement into a revolutionary mania, one in which they
destroy the machines supporting the city while forgetting about their homes and
children that depend on those same machines.
It seems that no one here is quite safe from those visual seductions that
the film pointedly lodges in modern technological life, and which it extends to
various subplots: the worker Georgi, who changes places with Freder and becomes
enchanted by the world of the privileged; the ancient inhabitants of Babylon, who,
as a flashback recounts, became obsessed with the image of a tower as a monument
to their own greatness; Rotwang, who fantasises that Maria is a reincarnation of his
lost love Hel; and even Fredersen, who, gazing through the panoramic windows of
his rooftop office, often seems mesmerised by the city as if it were a giant cinematic
spectacle.
CONCLUSION
As Richard Murphy reminds, the expressionist movement is finally 'a notoriously
difficult phenomenon to pin down to any clear ideological line', both in its owntime
and today. Thus its subjects range from the highly fantastic - as in The Golem or
Lang's Destiny (1921) - to the historical and naturalistic - as with Danton (1921)
and Asphalt (1928). Yet its very position as an oppositional mode served an
important 'decentring function'.28 Certainly, it opened the way, at least for a brief
moment in film history, for an alternative, non- realistic approach to film narrative,
as well as for a newly stylised inflection in established film genres.
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Because of various economic and political imperatives in the 1920s and
early 1930s, many of those involved in the expressionist movement - notably
figures like Fritz Lang, Karl Freund, F. W. Murnau and Paul Leni - would leave the
German cinema and help spread an expressionist tradition, particularly in America.
And there expressionism would pay special dividends in the development of
fantasy-oriented genres for which it would furnish a sustaining style, and from
which American fantasy films of the 1930s, especially works like The Man Who
Laughs (1928), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and Mad Love
(1935), would draw so profitably. In that notion of 'decentring', though, we need to
see more than just a generic function, more than simply the opening up a new vein
of fantasy.
It speaks as well of expressionism's insistently subversive nature. For what the
expressionist film tradition ultimately decentred, as this discussion has suggested,
was point of view itself, a normally stable and unexamined because it
conventionally was rendered as invisible component of film narrative. Images of
how we see, images of the spectator, images of the careful construction of
perspective abound in expressionist films, as well as in those which draw on
this tradition. Thus, in trying to link Lang's German films with his later American
ones, Raymond Bellour would note how they are similarly disjunctive, provoking
the eye'.29 Through that sort of provocative attitude, the expressionist tradition has
repeatedly forced viewers to confront the extent to which conventional narratives
and, indeed, conventional society carefully constructs their everyday experience.
Paul Virilio has noted how in the modern technologized world we all risk becoming
'victims of the set', thanks to the 'industrialization of perception, the ultimate coup
d'état' that has become the very condition of modern life.30 What
expressionist cinema did was, often through its own stylised and rather strange sets,
to struggle against that victimisation by reminding viewers of the extent to which
they were all, in a sense, being Potemkin-ised by the status quo, by the 'set'
constructed for them by the same culture that had produced the slaughter of the First
World War.
It is a struggle that we see repeated today, in the various works of Tim Burton,
David Cronenberg and David Lynch, and in such expressionist-influenced films as
Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999) and the Japanese anime version of Metropolis
(2000). These and other works underscore the widespread, truly international
impact of the expressionist tradition, and its continuing influence on a
postmodern cinema. As R. S. Furness declares, the expressionist artist seemed to
respond to a 'need to point beyond', to suggest
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