The Roots of German Expressionism and Beyond

[Knappen]

The film is still unseen by me. I just picked the juicy bits.

[Mr Sausage]

Interesting to run across this old, old thread and be reminded how infrequently German Expressionism in cinema is actually contextualized in the larger Expressionist art movement. Just looking through the thread, not only are members unable to prove their (correct) suspicion that Caligari wasn't the origin point of Expressionism, but, aside from a couple stray references to Kandinsky, no one actually mentions the Expressionist painters. You wouldn't know by reading the thread that Expressionism had much to do with painting, let alone had its origin primarily in painting. And this doesn't surprise me, because despite an interest in German Expressionism dating back to childhood, I never heard Expressionism discussed in terms of any other medium. It was treated almost exclusively as a cinematic style, rooted in Weimer politics and society, but unattached to the wider movement. I don't know if that's changed since, or if Eisner and Krakauer's work went in to it more than I noticed. But, like some other members here, I knew plenty about Caligari and Nosferatu and Der Golem, but for the longest time could tell you nothing about Expressionism outside film. If you'd asked me to picture an Expressionist painting, I'd've probably pictured a Caligari set.

And that's a shame. I think it's a mistake to view Expressionist cinema outside of the larger movement. Maybe it's been done and I missed it, but what I've always felt lacking from the releases of the key Expressionist films is a documentary or commentary on the Expressionist movement, its origins in painting and literature, especially drama, and the way movies interacted with the style and the ideas behind it. I don't see how you could fully understand the style otherwise.

Because like me most film fans know Expressionism mainly from Weimar cinema, I'd guess their mental image of an Expressionist painting would be something dark, oppressive, and cramped, with bizarre angles and architecture, and a nightmarish feel. A lot of people would be surprised to learn this is an Expressionist painting. This too. I know I was. They're bursting with bright colours, aren't they? And they're not ugly, winding cities, but bright natural scenes. The Expressionists could do cities, like this one by Kirchner, which is a little more ominous, true, and has the odd angles and perspective; or this one by Kandinsky, which is a bit less ominous but still oddly angled. But they aren't nightmarish, ghastly brainscapes, either. It's an odd step to go from them to Caligari.

Expressionism in the graphic arts was a very early 20th century phenomenon. The pioneers of the style formed themselves into two distinct groups: Die Brücke (The Bridge), formed in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Fritz Bleyl. The group was a close and collaborative bunch, often working together in a small house in the countryside for months. As such, sometimes it can be hard to tell their paintings apart. The other, looser, more theoretically inclined, and arguably stronger group was Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in Munich by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Many avant garde artists were associated with the group at one time or another: August Macke, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Alexei von Jawlenski, etc. Even artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckman who became famous for a style contra-Expressionism, The New Objectivity (Die Neue Sachlichkeit), dabbled in Expressionism in their early days. It was a fecund and vital movement, but while it lasted past the first World War, it never saw the same success (and many of its leading lights either died in the war like Franz Marc or, like, like Kirchner, had mental breakdowns during combat from which they didn't recover).

Expressionism doesn't have such a strict definition, but one of its leading tendencies was to subordinate the tangible world to the mind's perceptions of it. Natural features, buildings, figures, landscapes, they tend to be barely sketched, or blurrily outlined, or even merely hinted at with a brush stroke or two. What you get instead is an overwhelming impression of shape and colour. The paintings approach (and in the case of artists like Kandinsky, Klee, and Marc, would eventually outright become) abstraction. The physical world, the world of objects, is not represented as a tangible reality, but serves instead as the occasion to explore the interaction of shapes and colours to produce a feeling or emotion. The physical world becomes distorted, accruing outlandish colours and seeming to fade into the background as the artists explore their own mental dramas, emotional landscapes, and personal beliefs. Colour and shape as pure expression rather than representation. To get a good sense of this, contrast the paintings linked above with some paintings from the style that opposed Expressionism, the New Objectivity: Prager Strasse by Otto Dix and The Night by Max Beckmann. Here you have bizarre angles, flattened perspectives, lurid content, and, in the latter, ugliness and horror. But unlike the Expressionists, the focus is entirely on the physical objects in the painting. Nothing dissolves into shapes and colour contrasts; everything is in focus, sometimes brutally, helped by the flattened perspectives and geometrical arrangements. It's a style that gives primacy to the figures and objects under observation. The physical world and the eyes of the observer are emphasized over the personal mental landscape of the painter. Turning from them back to the Expressionists, you see how indistinct the world looks, how much detail isn't there. For Expressionism, the object was secondary, the world a kind of phantom amidst the feelings it produces, the colours it suggests.

So given these qualities of Expressionist painting, what does Expressionist cinema have to do with Expressionism in the graphic arts? Taking two extreme examples, Caligari and von Morgen bis Mitternacht, you have worlds that are flattened, ill-sketched, and only nominally representational. As identifiable social realities, these worlds barely exist. Instead, they're there more as occasions for broad strokes of lighting and shading, as locations that can stretch, bend, and cramp in order to communicate an overwhelming impression of entrapment, despair, emptiness, and even psychosis. They share none of the bursting colour or evident pleasure in the shapes and sensations of the natural world that you find in, say, this painting by August Macke. But they favour a similar distortion of the world based on the artist's emotional palette. They use Expressionist techniques, but towards a more narrow mental and emotional space. They retreat into dreams, into mental fictions or, in something like Schatten, into the artifice of magic and story-telling. In a society post-WWI and post-Freud, there are plenty of reasons to guess why this is. But it's interesting how much narrower was Expressionism in cinema than its cousins in the graphic arts. The emotional range being expressed doesn't have much variation across the films. Hence so many of them are horror films. There are some, like Waxworks, that apply the style to exotic fantasy, but even then only for a single segment. But many films labled Expressionist employ distinctly sketched, fully realized physical worlds. Films like Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, and The Hands of Orlac emphasize locations and physical objects to build their atmosphere. The artificiality is present mainly in the acting, lighting, and compositions/camera movements, but otherwise you get recognizable social realities whose distortions reflect, say, the main character's internal world, but don't tend to abstraction.

Expressionist film is really interesting compared to the same movement in the graphic arts. It's a narrower art (and this of something that was already pretty narrow!), one more urban, nightmarish, and negative than you see in the paintings. It's also not as consistently abstract. Outside of the extreme examples, Expressionist films are often rooted in some physically embodied world or other, even if that world is often distorted by this or that character's heightened emotional register. So filmic Expressionism often pushed its emotional register into the extremes, but rarely used the same extreme abstract techniques as the Expressionist painters. No doubt the nature of photography, narrative, and the filmic marketplace helped determined this. There is some overlap in technique between the filmmakers and painters, but anyone expecting Expressionist painting to be some Francis Bacon-type horror show will be disappointed at how brightly coloured and rural the paintings could be. Tho' maybe not disappointed at how abstract, garish, and borderline cubist they could also be.

[Michael Kerpan]

Expressionism (in art) is one of my very favorite movements (especially on its earlier end -- once things get totally abstract I tend to lose interest). While I love the Blue Reiter folks, I love the Austrians (especially Klimt and Schiele) too. The French Fauvists also created lots of wonderful work (I'm always a sucker for Roualt). I never saw much of a connection between cinematic expressionism and expressionism in the (non-moving) visual arts. I wonder if there really are any films that embody a wider array of painterly expressionist principles/techniques? Maybe in animated stuff?

[Mr Sausage]

Same as you, I'm a big fan of Expressionism in art, and love Klimt and Schiele as well. I also love the New Objectivists, especially Dix, and surrealists like Max Ernst. Whatever the Nazis threw into their degenerative art exhibit, I'm a huge fan of essentially. 1900 - 1933 was a magical time for art in the German-speaking world.

[knives]

I don’t know if you are laser focused on the German part of expressionism, but there’s a rather pleasant documentary hosted by Vincent Price about Marc Chagall that touches on the topic of diversity within expressionism and the use of bright shocking colors.

[Michael Kerpan]

I love the fact that early expressionism involved inter-connection of artists across Europe -- from Russia to France (a big fan of Javlensky, for instance). Also there seems to be a connection to the late "post-expressionists (for instance the Nabis -- like Serusier -- an artist woefully unrepresented in US museums). European art in the 1900-30 is so incredibly rich. I wonder whether Renoir might (at least sometimes) capture some of the spirit of this movement during this era?

[Mr Sausage]

I’m reading the book Wittgenstein’s Vienna and came across this passage:

The values which this society cherished were reason, order and progress, perseverance, self-reliance and disciplined conformity to the standards of good taste and action. The irrational, the passionate and the chaotic were to be avoided at all costs. [italics mine]

One key thing Expressionist film shares with Expressionist painting is an embrace of “the irrational, the passionate and the chaotic” against the reason, order, and tradition of empire (be it Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, or what have you). In film you see this in an embrace of themes like madness, dreams, shadows, magic, and folk- and fairy-tales, told in a style that abandons rationally structured and ordered compositions for ones based on jagged, angular lines that suggest chaos and disorder. They are worlds that are irrational, founded not on tradition but passionate, even crazed emotion.

You see something of the same in the paintings. They’re not so jagged and psychotic, but they embrace passion and non-rational emotion to such an extent that the landscapes and objects nominally represented almost fade into unreality beside the force of the artist’s emotional expressiveness. Calm, rationally ordered compositions give way to flattened compositions full of inexplicable angles. Passion and emotion generate unnatural colour schemes of such wildness that contemporary bourgeois viewers thought they were seeing the outpourings of a disordered mind. The personal and the transformative was prioritized, while conformity and tradition disappear.

There is an embrace of disorder and even primitivism in the Expressionists of either medium. They are artworks against, or if not against then indifferent to, the order and conventions of traditional civilization. Tho’ now very much important parts of western art traditions, I wonder what our current mavens of order and civilization would make of them. I’d like to think these reactionaries would reject them as bitterly as did the reactionaries of the time. I guess I’d like to think these paintings and films still have the capacity to disrupt and provoke. One of my rare optimisms. But this art seems to me as important as ever, a reminder that these artists, too, were accused of portending the end of western civilization, often by those who’d go on to try to realize that very end themselves.

[Michael Kerpan]

I feel like expressionist art is very much aligned (in many respects) with (at least some) surrealist cinema (as much as it is aligned with expressionist cinema) and also with magical realist literature. All of this is pretty indispensable (in MY opinion).