Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

trampled under by war and revolution, takes its revenge for years of suffering and
misery by eating its lusts and pursuing pleasure. 25
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is an invigorating modernist nightmare, almost an
allegory as the quote suggests, reminding us of Bertolt Brecht’s distressing plays, but also
working as a reminder of Lang’s position in regards to how much Expressionism had
influenced his work stylistically. Among other authors, Lotte Eisner confirmed the
Expressionistic mood existing in the film, from the lighting effects, to the “Expressionistic
gestures,” “Expressionistic flavors”, even to the “realist Expressionism” of Fritz Lang.
Sudendorf maintains that “Lang adopted all the elements of Expressionism he could use in
the visualization of his ideas” (Sudendorf 1993:96). Apart from these stylistic elements,
there is also in the film a judicious conversation between Count Told and Dr. Mabuse
which to a great degree displays Lang’s indebtedness to the Expressionist art movement:
“What do you think of expressionism, Doctor?,” to which Mabuse responds:
“Expressionism is just a game (…). But why ever not? – Everything is just a game today !”
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is one of the films that best captures the protean
decadence of Weimar cinema in a nation gripped essentially by a terrible doubt about how
it could possibly reassert itself after the destruction of war and the failures of its
authoritarian past. One has to go back to the earlier years of the Weimar cinema (1919-
1933) to understand some of the struggles and arguments advanced in order to make
cinema respectable, but also to make it competitive in the battles for national and
international audiences and markets. As Elsaesser notes, “the films of the German fantastic
cinema thus seem to encode in their encounter with the social reality of the Weimar
Republic (...)” (Elsaesser 2003:67), and not just from a historical perspective. It has also to
be seen as a whole and as a distinct style of artistic production not only in film, but also in
other arts, since Expressionism as a cross-cultural movement embraces all sorts of arts,
from music and painting to sculpture, architecture and design to literature and theatre.
The objective of this chapter is neither to solve the problematic stated above, that is,
the attempt to place the films in the context of the Expressionistic art movement, nor to
resolve the “great confusion” that has befallen “the definition of Expressionist cinema”. 26
25 In http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns00n9.html
26 In his article on “Expressionism and Film”, Werner Sudendorf refers to two studies (one by Rudolf Kurtz,
called Expressionismus und Film (“Expressionism and Film”, 1926) and another more recent one, titled
Expressionismus als Filmgattung (“Expressionism as a Film Genre” (1992) by Leonardo Quaresima), both of
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