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

Rather, I propose to analyse how these films lay claim to the title of Expressionist cinema,
how they entered the public sphere of the early twenties as a form of social relation where
narratives and images helped to displace the traumas brought about by inflation,
unemployment and political turbulence. Ultimately, it is this growing social reality of
Weimar culture, the way the films were produced as society recovered from crisis that I
want to discuss now, bearing in mind that Germany’s Golden Twenties became part of and
launched a new culture of consumption, which, among other things, changed the
expectations that the female public had of these films, as Thomas Elsaesser notes:
Social rise continued to be a film subject – if anything, more than ever – but in
comedies, musicals and revue films. Mobility no longer needed the fantastic to hide
from itself its bad conscience, nor the anxious male and his dummy-double to warn
about the sorcerer’s apprentice playing with fire as he tried to be the alchemist of
class and status. Now it was enough that the movie stars modelled their erotic
mores, along with the clothes – and that the man of her dreams was up on the
screen to fan the flames of passion. After all, Weimar cinema knew all about
mobility: not least thanks to inflation, it had itself made the steepest social rise of
all. (Elsaesser 2000:68)
Towards the end of WWI and in the period immediately following it, the German
government set up, funded and restricted to within Germany itself all film production. By
having all the entertainment internally produced, it was hoped that this would revitalise its
ailing film industry, and movies soon began to reflect a desire to escape, even into horror,
from the dreadful effects of the economic crisis. Expressionist films relied heavily on
symbolism and artistic distortion rather than stark realism to tell their stories. I will next
focus on the aesthetic aspects of these films, pursuing in particular the development of the
precise expressionist features of films of the twenties.
Barry Salt, a film historian and author of Moving into Pictures, tries to “salvage the
concept of Expressionism” as a distinct style of artistic production in various other arts as
well as in film. He confines the number of films that could lay claim to the title of
Expressionist cinema to six films made between 1919 and 1924, which is roughly the date,
which in his view led to the “great confusion” regarding “the definition of Expressionist cinema”, conferring
most of the blame on Lotte Eisner’s book The Haunted Screen. In Expressionism and Film: The Testament of
Dr Caligari, he wrote: “[The confusion] was probably initiated by the subtitle of Lotte H. Eisner’s history of
cinema, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt,
which first appeared in French in 1952. Suddenly, all the classic German films made during the Weimar
Republic were termed ‘Expressionist’” (in Behr 1993:91). As said, for the purpose of this dissertation, this
issue will not be further discussed here.
98