Paint, Film & the text of Preterite pigs (2)

[Lyle Bland]

"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.