personal freedom and alternative thinking -- these were the conditions in Weimar Republic Germany during the heyday of the Expressionist movement in film. Spanning the years 1909-1924, theirs was a time of revolution (in Russia and Germany), war (World War I), and reaction (the rise of National Socialism in Anxious about the disintegration of their culture, filmmakers such as F.W.Murnau, Robert Wiene, and Ernst Lubitsch used cinema to create new forms ofvisual representation, exploring the possibility of reversing power relations throughthe look. The cinematic Expressionist movement in Germany is generally consideredto be the classic period of German cinema; many Expressionist works are includedin the canon of the worlds greatest films. From Lubitschs masterpieces Passion(1919) and Deception (1920), through Wienes famous The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (1919), to Murnaus brilliant The Last Laugh (1924) and Nosferatu(1922), there has rarely been a movement of such consistent inspiration andachievement. Expressionism in cinema, as in the other arts, attempts to reappropriate analienated universe by transforming it into a private, personal vision. With that inmind, Expressionist cinema tried to deepen the audiences interaction with the film,combining technology and imaginative filming techniques in order to intensify theillusion of reality. The Expressionists practically reinvented the look of film withinnovative and unusual editing rhythms, perspectivally distorted sets, exaggeratedgestures, and the famous camera unchained -- a new technique that allowed thecamera to move within the scene, vastly increasing the accessibility of thecharacters subjective point of view. The Expressionists developed new habits ofseeing, new ways to interpret the way people relate to social living andself-identification. The Expressionists supplanted reality with myth and fantasy inorder to liberate visual perception from the other senses. Their goal: to liberate...
