Light & shadow
Germany in 1919 was a demoralized and traumatised country after five years of war, and the stage was set for the coming struggle between Communists and the prototype of the Nazi party.
Out of this disturbed atmosphere there grew the extraordinary golden age of German cinema. Throughout the 1920s German films were unmistakably individual with their dark, psychological themes, brooding photography full of shadows and fog, elaborately unrealistic sets and intense acting style. Expressionist cinema was born with “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1919) and its nightmare world of eerie and unhinged characters became symbolic of a Germany in deep trauma. Robert Wiene was the director, and it featured brilliantly subversive designs and sets with a somnambulist murderer under the control of a demonic doctor. Dr Caligari himself could be seen as a proto-Hitler sending citizens out to murder in trance-like obedience.
All through the twenties, Germany produced numerous masterpieces. Amongst the key directors was the Viennese Fritz Lang, who made “Dr Mabuse, the Gambler” (1924), a story of a super-criminal,”The Nibelungen” German myth poetically realised with a remarkable dragon and extraordinary studio-created forests and “Metropolis” (1927) a remarkable,science-fiction fantasy. Paul Leni directed the creepy “Waxworks” (1924).
F.W. Murnan created one of the greatest vampire films of all, “Nosferatu” (1922), “The Last Laugh”, a social document about modern Berlin, and “Faust” (1926) which was a truly memorable interpretation of Goethe. G.W. Pabst made “The Joyless Street” (1926), “Secrets of a Soul”, an early film to show the influence of trend and “Pandora’s box” (1928) which dealt with themes psychological and sexual.
These films brought a new maturity to the cinema and had a later influence on American films, in visual style and subject matter, in the horror and crime genres. The “Films noir” of the 1940s and early 1950s extended the German expressionist themes of alienation and psycho-emotional conflict in a remarkable way.
France developed as a major cinematic force at this time and Carl Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and Abel Gance’s epic “Napoleon” (1927) are, perhaps, the finest example of French film-making from the period. “Napoleon” pioneered a revolutionary three-strip film projection process called “Polyvision” which audiences saw on a giant screen rather like the later American “Cinerama” system. It cost 17 million Francs and was a financial disaster, ruining the great visionary director’s career. Like Griffith, with “Intolerance,” Gance’s ideas and ambitions were too ahead of their time.
Sweden had pioneered films made on actual locations as early as 1917 and Victor Sjostrom’s “The Outlaw and his Wife” and Mauritz Stiller’s “Herr Arne’s Treasure”(1919) showed a remarkable power and almost mystical feeling for nature, all the more noteworthy for being made under difficult conditions.
Soviet Russia, after the revolution of 1917, began using cinema as a powerful propaganda tool (later used similarly by Hitler’s government) and the most important film-makers were Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevelod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko. “EIsenstein’s “Strike” (1924) and “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) became internationally known because of their brilliant filmic techniques (such as montage, the creative cutting and juxtaposition of images) although historical truth was sometimes lost in the fervour to create effective propaganda for the new, revolutionary state. Douzhenko’s “Earth” (1930) was a poetic hymn to Ukranian country life and was one of the last great silent films. He, like many Soviet artists, was severely criticised by the government as “Counter-revolutionary” and, as we shall see, even the great Eisenstein was not safe.
The American studio and star system developed through the twenties. The big stars were Douglas Fairbanks (all charming athleticism and good humour), Mary Pickford (girlish innocence or tomboyishness), John Gilbert(romanticism) and Rudolph Valentino (fantasy eroticism). The popular comics were Charlie Chaplin (sentimental), Buster Keaton (stoical) and Harold Lloyd (innocent).
Imported European talent, both in front of and behind the camera, were significant in Hollywood. The Swedes Greta Garbo and Victor Seastrom (Sjöstrom), whose “The Wind”(1928) is one of the finest late silents, the Austrian-born Erich (von) Stroheim, whose “Greed” (1923), a monument to brilliant but obsessive detail, originally ran for nine and a half hours, and the German actor Emil Jennings and director Leni and Murnau, all enriched American cinema. Murnau went from a brilliant European career to make perhaps the greatest late American silent film, “Sunrise” (1927).
This film cost the Fox company a fortune with its huge, German-designed sets and complex filmic demands. It, too, sadly lost money but it represented an extraordinary wedding of German expressionist themes and style to American technical skill and still has a remarkable power eighty years on.
The same year, the first sound film arrived and cinema would never be the same again. Just as silent film had reached its apogee, it was swept away by new technology, as ever. KR
