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

[Terrance Flaherty]

"It's a movie set. GR.393

Some 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.  


Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic painter. His
vast, mysterious landscapes and seascapes proclaimed man's
helplessness against the forces of nature and did much to
establish the idea of the sublime as a central concern of
the Romantic Movement. Friedrich was a member of an artistic
and literary circle that included the painter Philipp Otto
Runge. His drawings in sepia, executed in his neat early
style, won the poet J.W. von Goethe's approval and a prize
from the Weimar Art Society in 1805. His first important oil
painting, "The Cross in the Mountains" (c. 1807),
established his mature style, characterized by an
overwhelming sense of isolation, and was an attempt to
replace the traditional symbology of religious painting with
one drawn from nature. Other symbolic landscapes, such as
"Shipwreck in the Ice" (1822), reveal his fatalism and
obsession with death. Though based on close observation of
nature, his works were colored by his imaginative response
to the atmosphere of the Baltic coast and the Harz
Mountains, which he found both awesome and ominous. His
works were studied with renewed interest when the 20th
century recognized its own existential isolation in his
work. And early in the 20th century, amid the political and
economic turmoil, Germany's cultural and intellectual life
was flowering. The so-called Weimar Renaissance brought to
Germany the fulfillment of the Modernist revolution, which
in the late 19th century had begun to transform the European
aesthetic sensibility. The Modernist rejection of tradition
seemed to suit perfectly the need of many Germans for new
meanings and values to replace those destroyed by the war.
"A world has been destroyed; we must seek a radical
solution," said the young architect Walter Gropius upon his
return from the front in late 1918. In 1919 Gropius became
the founder and first director of the Bauhaus school of
design in Weimar, the most important institution in Germany
for the expression of Modernism's aesthetic and cultural
vision. Bauhaus artists believed themselves to be creating a
New World through their painting, poetry, musical
compositions, theatrical productions, and architectural
constructions. The legacy of German Modernism in general,
and of the Bauhaus in particular, is most immediately
evident in the stark steel-and-glass high-rise buildings
whose clear and clean lines have come to dominate the
skylines of the world's cities. Moreover, the paintings and
the sculptures decorating them, as well as the design of the
furniture and the lighting fixtures, are heavily influenced
by the aesthetic principles articulated in Weimar during the
1920s.  Beyond the Bauhaus, painters like George Grosz, Max
Beckmann, and Otto Dix pursued an artistic objective
described as Expressionism; i.e., they were interested in
depicting their emotional responses to reality rather than
reality itself. In music, the rejection of tonality by
composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and
Alban Berg broke a centuries-old tradition in music. At the
juncture between popular and serious music, the composer
Kurt Weill collaborated with the poet Bertolt Brecht to
create in 1928 The Threepenny Opera, a bitterly satiric
musical play in which the world of modern capitalism was
equated with that of underworld gangsterism. In films such
as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, distorted sets and unusual
camera angles probed for disturbing truths behind the
surface appearances of reality. Not everyone was pleased by
the Modernist attack on tradition. Opera performances and
theatrical productions were often interrupted by angry
audiences. Siegfried Wagner, the son of the composer Richard
Wagner, deplored a Modernist version of his father's The
Flying Dutchman, calling the production an example of
"cultural bolshevism." 

After the First War the German government "subsidized", or
should we say, supported the film industry--a little
good-will advertising. German film, the craftsmen, the
makers of movies, very sophisticated, revolutionary, came to
America. An important film at that time, "The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari" (Produced 1919, U.S. 1921) was actually conceived
by painters Robert Wiene, Walter Reimann, Herman Warm, and
architect Walther Rohrig, who were more interested in
expressionism and dadaism than film itself. As
"expressionism," the film showed the mad adventures through
the eyes of a madman. The film represented "dadaism" in that
sanity and madness were represented as purely relative
states. The film featured distorted settings and lighting to
"suggest that film instead of being a reality might be a
possible reality." With fantastic images infused with
psychological implications the film brought to American
audiences, an experience, "as good as a week in the
mountains for any movie fan tired of the conventional
pictures," and to the industry, an entirely new and
sophisticated art form. On the top of the tide of the German
wave road Ernst Lubitsch, who was christened "the greatest
living director," the great humanizer of history," "Griffith
of Europe," as he disclosed a magic hitherto unsuspected in
the movie medium. Expressionism in German film, combined
elements of Max Reinhardt's theatre, a Wagnerian philosophy
of doom, and Expressionist painting and graphics. The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Golem (1920), Nosferatu
(1922), and Metropolis (1926) created a world of fantasy and
horror peopled with menacing, shadowy figures. The influence
of Expressionism can be seen in later cinema in the work of
the directors Orson Welles and Carl Dreyer, and in many
gangster movies. Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, 1919) brought the industry its first great
artistic acclaim. Based on a scenario by the Czech poet Hans
Janowitz and the Austrian writer Carl Mayer, the film
recounts a series of brutal murders that are committed in
the north German town of Holstenwall by a somnambulist at
the bidding of a demented mountebank, who believes himself
to be the incarnation of a homicidal 18th-century hypnotist
named Dr. Caligari. Erich Pommer, Caligari's producer at
Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to
merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original
scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a
madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is
director and head psychiatrist. To represent the narrator's
tortured mental state, the director, Robert Wiene,
collaborated with three prominent Expressionist
artists--Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann--to
design sets that depicted exaggerated dimensions and
deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this
architectural stylization (and also to economize on electric
power, which was rationed in postwar Germany), bizarre
patterns of light and shadow were painted directly onto the
scenery and even onto the characters' makeup. Subject matter
and how it is treated is reflected in all the elements of
design in a motion picture. In the hectic atmosphere of a
horror movie or a thriller, a studio set may pass unnoticed,
even though it would seem disconcertingly artificial in
another film. In a musical everything may look artificial: a
chambermaid's bedroom may be a model of daintiness and
taste.  In its effort to embody disturbed psychological
states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA
films that followed it and gave rise to the movement known
as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were
completely studio-made and often used distorted sets and
lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They
were primarily films of fantasy and terror that employed
horrific plots to express the theme of the soul in search of
itself. Most were photographed by one of the two great
cinematographers of the Weimar period, Karl Freund and Fritz
Arno Wagner. Representative works include F.W. Murnau's Der
Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920), adapted from Robert Louis
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Paul Wegener and Carl
Boese's Der Golem (The Golem, 1920), adapted from a Jewish
legend in which a gigantic clay statue becomes a raging
monster; Arthur Robison's Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1922);
Wiene's Raskolnikow (1923), based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and
Punishment; Paul Leni's Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks,
1924); and Henrik Galeen's Der Student von Prag (The Student
of Prague, 1926), which combines the Faust legend with a
doppelgänger, or double, motif.