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

Figure 19. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The film concludes with its narrator, Francis (Friedrich Feher), lit in chiaroscuro
mode so as to subjectively resemble a deranged character being sent to the asylum and
discredited as a lunatic. The distorted lines and perverted forms that are found in this type
of film were thus a way for the Expressionist artist to put across violently mental states,
representing alienation and despair, fragmentation and dislocation; in short, the
“irrationality” of modern Germany. In the other arts, especially in painting, the
Expressionist artist showed his rage, transforming inner demons into images of tumult and
austerity to convey the same idea. In fact, the work of Expressionist artists - from poets,
dramatists, and painters to filmmakers – contained not just similar features but also similar
intentions, those of showing disdain for oppressive bourgeois society and industrial
capitalism. Sheppard mentions that the Expressionist artist:
(...) inclined to see himself as a prophetic visionary who was called to explode
conventional reality, to break through the crust that had formed around men’s
psyches in order to give uninhibited expression to the energies there imprisoned.
Unable to represent, describe or imitate the ‘fallen’ conventional world, the visionary
artist of Expressionism aimed to abstract the objects of the everyday from their
normal context, and recombine them into radiant beacons of a lost inner Geist.
(Sheppard 1976:277)
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