Theme: German Expressionism

German Expressionism is a term given to the unique body of a series of films made in Germany during the era of Silent Films. The fad was created by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), a work that takes place in a maze of distorted and angular sets filled with black-and-white lighting schemes and exaggerated shadows. The end reveals that the film takes place inside the mind of a madman and the sets thus represent a disturbed state of mind.

There were not many films that directly borrowed Caligari’s sense of a distorted inner world but many films since have borrowed from its design schemes – it even quoted in modern music videos.

More to the point, many of the films that followed took from Caligari the idea of creating an external world that an exaggerated echo of an inner state of mind. The films of in particular Fritz Lang created massive works of architectural fantasy.

These films also seemed caught between a world that was Gothic – all fearful and surrounded by shadows – and struggling towards modernism – sometimes both as in the classic Metropolis (1927). Other works of the era draw from Teutonic and European myth and legend.