German Expressionism

1920 · Robert Wiene

Start here because the argument starts here: a town painted crooked, and a frame story that asks whether the crookedness belongs to the world or to the man telling you about it. Everything else in this collection is a reply.

1920 · Paul Wegener, Carl Boese

Poelzig's ghetto is the counter-proposal to Caligari: not painted angles but walls that bulge and lean as if they breathe. The ending is a child, an apple, and a word pulled out of a chest at the gate.

1920 · Karlheinz Martin

The limit case. Kaiser's play shot as chalk lines on black, with the actors painted to match the sets, and no German distributor willing to touch it. Watch for the death's head that keeps surfacing in other people's faces.

1921 · Fritz Lang

Lang's first monument: a wall with no door, and a woman who has to argue her way through it three times. The flying carpet in the Chinese episode is the one Douglas Fairbanks bought the American rights to sit on until his own Thief of Bagdad was out.

1922 · F. W. Murnau

The one film here that goes outdoors, and the outdoors is worse. Orlok's shadow climbing the stairs is the image. The rats coming off the ship are the argument.

1922 · Fritz Lang

Expressionism without a painted set: the distortion is in the economy. Four and a half hours, and the shot of Mabuse's face floating over the emptied trading floor is the thesis in one frame.

1923 · Arthur Robison

A film about watching, made without story titles. The moment the shadow-player draws the guests' shadows off their bodies and onto the wall is the movement saying out loud what it thinks cinema is.

1923 · Karl Grune

The clerk at the window, the shadows of the crowd moving across his ceiling, the hat: that first scene is the street film being born. Grune lets the city seduce, then presents the bill.

1924 · Paul Leni, Leo Birinski

Three figures, three scales: a joke, a torture chamber, a chase. The Jack the Ripper section, a few minutes of double exposures and streets that will not hold still, is Leni's audition for Hollywood, and it worked.

1924 · Robert Wiene

Wiene keeps the rooms almost real and moves the distortion into Veidt's hands. Watch him hold them away from his own body like something he has been handed and cannot put down.

1924 · Fritz Lang

The forest is a set with trees like columns and light that arrives as if it has been measured. The dragon is a full-size machine. Neither is here to be believed. Both are here to be looked at.

1924 · Fritz Lang

The same architecture, now used as a cage. The burning hall at the end is the collection's argument in one set piece: geometry stops being beautiful and becomes a place people cannot get out of.

1924 · F. W. Murnau

Almost no titles, one uniform, and a camera Freund carried down a staircase and through a revolving door. The drunken dream after the wedding, shot on a camera that will not stand still, is where the unchained camera pays for itself.

1925 · E.A. Dupont

The trapeze shots put the camera where the acrobat's eyes are, and the crowd becomes a smear of faces looking up. The plot is a triangle. Nobody remembers the plot.

1926 · F. W. Murnau

Mephisto's cloak coming down over the town is the most reproduced image in this collection, and it is a model, a fan, and a great deal of smoke. Then the flight over the model landscape. Then Gretchen in the snow, which is the part that costs something.

1927 · Fritz Lang

The Maschinenmensch's transformation is the trick. The shift change, workers moving in step down into the machine, is the film. Watch the second, not the first.

1929 · Joe May

The late version: painted dread gone, replaced by wet asphalt and a bracelet. The opening montage of Berlin traffic tells you the movement has left the studio for the city it was always about.

1929 · G.W. Pabst

Pabst's distortion is institutional. The reformatory dinner, girls spooning soup in time to a gong, does what a painted corridor did in 1920 with nothing but rhythm and faces.

1931 · Fritz Lang

The end of the line: real streets, a real Berlin, and the murderer's shadow falling across his own wanted poster before you see his face. The kangaroo court turns the audience into the jury. That is the movement's last trick, and its best.