Paint, Film & the text of Preterite Pigs (1)

[Terrance Flaherty]

"a German Expressionist pig" GR.568


 
 Some more Notes:
 
 Compiled From Encyclopedia Britannica On-Line and Lewis
 Jacobs' THE RISE OF AMERICAN FILM, A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH
 An ESSAY:  EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA IN AMERICA 1921-1947,
Teachers
 College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University New
 York, 1939, Forth Printing, 1974.


Expressionism in literature arose as a reaction against
materialism, complacent bourgeois prosperity, rapid
mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the
family within in pre-World War I European  society. It was
the dominant literary movement in Germany during and
immediately after World War I. In forging a drama of social
protest, Expressionist writers aimed to convey their ideas
through a new style. Their concern was with general truths
rather than with particular situations, hence they explored
in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic
types rather than of fully developed individualized
characters. Emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which
is merely sketched in and barely defined in place or time,
but on the internal, on an individual's mental state; hence
the imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by
the ecstatic evocation of states of mind. The leading
character in an Expressionist play often pours out his woes
in long monologues couched in a concentrated, elliptical,
almost telegrammatic language that explores youth's
spiritual malaise, its revolt against the older generation,
and the various political or revolutionary remedies that
present themselves. The leading character's inner
development is explored through a series of loosely linked
tableaux, or "stations," during which he revolts against
traditional values and seeks a higher spiritual vision of
life. August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind were notable
forerunners of Expressionist drama, but the first
full-fledged Expressionist play was Reinhard Johannes
Sorge's Der Bettler ("The Beggar"), which was written in
1912 but not performed until 1917. The other principal
playwrights of the movement were Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller,
Paul Kornfeld, Fritz von Unruh, Walter Hasenclever, and
Reinhard Goering, all of Germany. Expressionist poetry,
which arose at the same time as its dramatic counterpart,
was similarly nonreferential and sought an ecstatic,
hymnlike lyricism that would have considerable associative
power. This condensed, stripped-down poetry, utilizing
strings of nouns and a few adjectives and infinitive verbs,
eliminated narrative and description to get at the essence
of feeling. The principal Expressionist poets were Georg
Heym, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, Georg
Trakl, and Else Lasker-Schüler of Germany and the Czech poet
Franz Werfel. The dominant theme of Expressionist verse was
horror over urban life and apocalyptic visions of the
collapse of civilization. Some poets were pessimistic and
contented themselves with satirizing bourgeois values, while
others were more concerned with political and social reform
and expressed the hope for a coming revolution. Outside
Germany, playwrights who used Expressionist dramatic
techniques included the American authors Eugene O'Neill and
Elmer Rice. Strongly influenced by Expressionist stagecraft,
the earliest Expressionist films set out to convey through
decor the subjective mental state of the protagonist. The
most famous of these films is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1919), in which a madman relates to a madwoman
his understanding of how he came to be in the asylum. The
misshapen streets and buildings of the set are projections
of his own crazy universe, and the other characters have
been abstracted through makeup and dress into visual
symbols. The film's morbid evocation of horror, menace, and
anxiety and the dramatic, shadowy lighting and bizarre sets
became a stylistic model for Expressionist films by several
major German directors. Paul Wegener's second version of The
Golem (1920), F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz
Lang's Metropolis (1927), among other films, present
pessimistic visions of social collapse or explore the
ominous duality of human nature and its capacity for
monstrous personal evil. While some classify the composer
Arnold Schoenberg as an Expressionist because of his
contribution to the Blaue Reiter almanac, musical
Expressionism seems to have found its most natural outlet in
opera. Among early examples of such Expressionist works are
Paul Hindemith's operatic settings of Kokoschka's
proto-Expressionist drama, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen
(1919), and  August Stramm's Sancta Susanna (1922). Most
outstanding of the  Expressionist operas, however, are two
by Alban Berg: Wozzeck,  performed in 1925, and Lulu, which
was not performed in its entirety until 1979. The decline of
Expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longing
for a better world, by its use of highly poetic language,
and in general the intensely personal and inaccessible
nature of its mode of presentation. The partial
reestablishment of stability in Germany after 1924 and the
growth of more overtly political styles of social realism
hastened the movement's decline in the late 1920s.
Expressionism was definitively killed by the advent of the
Nazis to power in 1933. They branded the work of almost all
Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit or
publish and eventually even to work. Many Expressionists
went into exile in the United States and other countries. In
addition to winning international prestige for German films,
Expressionism produced two directors who would become major
figures in world cinema, Fritz Lang and F.W. (Friedrich
Wilhelm) Murnau.  Lang had already directed several
successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders,
1919-20), when he collaborated with his future wife, the
scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod ("The
Weary Death"; English title: Destiny, 1921) for
Decla-Bioscop. This episodic Romantic allegory of doomed
lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned
Lang acclaim for his dynamic compositions of architectural
line and space. Lang's use of striking, stylized images is
also demonstrated in the other films of his Expressionist
period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
(Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), the Wagnerian diptych
Siegfried (1922-24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild's
Revenge, 1922-23), and the stunningly futuristic Metropolis
(1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made.
After directing the early sound masterpiece M (1931), based
on child murders in Dusseldorf, Lang became increasingly
estranged from German political life. He emigrated in 1933
to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the
Hollywood studios the following year.  Murnau made several
minor Expressionist films before directing one of the
movement's classics, an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram
Stoker's novel Dracula entitled Nosferatu--eine Symphonie
des Grauens ("Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror," 1922), but
it was Der letzte Mann ("The Last Man"; English title: The
Last Laugh, 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel
("intimate theatre"), that made him world famous. Scripted
by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der
letzte Mann told the story of a hotel doorman who is
humiliated by the loss of his job and-more important,
apparently, in postwar German society--of his splendid
paramilitary uniform.
Murnau and Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a
complex narrative structure through their innovative use of
camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one
famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his
chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom to
record the inebriated porter's point of view. In the absence
of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the
filming Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving
bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order
to achieve smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was
a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense
identification with the narrative. Der letzte Mann was
universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more
influence on Hollywood style than any other single foreign
film in history. Its "unchained camera" technique (Mayer's
phrase) spawned many imitations in Germany and elsewhere,
the most  insignificant being E.A. (Ewald André) Dupont's
circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also brought
Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to
fulfill in 1927 after completing two last super-productions,
Tartüff (1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA. Ufa was
established in 1917 when the German government consolidated
most of the nation's leading studios. In the post-World War
I era, Ufa's films of the macabre--e.g., The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1919) by Robert Wiene and Metropolis (1927) by
Fritz Lang; its realistic films based on the life of the
common man--e.g., The Last Laugh (1924) by F.W. Murnau; and
its dramas based on traditional German legends were
especially popular. From 1925 to 1930 many German directors
and actors went to the United States to work in Hollywood,
and, despite loans and cooperation from American companies,
the studio's financial stability weakened. In 1927
controlling stock was purchased by Alfred Hugenberg, a
conservative newspaper owner and future supporter of the
dictator Adolf Hitler. By 1938 the Nazi government had
complete control of the German film industry, and it used
Ufa as a propaganda tool until the end of World War II, when
the  government fell and the company ceased to exist. The
studio itself, however, located in Berlin, remains a
production centre to this day. In 1924 the German mark was
stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which  financed the
long-term payment of Germany's war reparations debt and
curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity
in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock
market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film
industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign
markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple
its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with
American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As
a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement,
UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It
was saved by a $4,000,000 loan offered by two major American
studios, Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to
UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This
arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet
(Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and
the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and
technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of
studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many
of the filmmakers returned to UFA  disgusted at the
assembly-line character of the American studio system, but
many--such as Lubitsch, Freund, Murnau, and Kertész--stayed
on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more
would come back during the 1930s to escape Adolf Hitler. In
the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German
intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological
themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of "life as it
is lived." Called die neue Sachlichkeit ("the new
objectivity"), this spirit stemmed from the economic
dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the
war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes
through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit
translated into the grim social realism of the "street"
films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst's Die
freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rhan's
Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May's
Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi's Berlin-Alexanderplatz
(1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune's Die Strasse
(The Street, 1923), these films focused on the
disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of
ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the
postwar inflation.