German Expressionist Cinema
German · German Expressionism 1920–1927
They painted the shadows onto the set. Faced with a shortage of electrical power and an artistic programme that had no interest in realism anyway, German studios in the early 1920s made light a construction rather than a condition.
Origin
Post-war Germany was economically ruined, imports of foreign films were banned until 1921, and the domestic industry at Ufa in Babelsberg had both a captive market and severe material constraints. The movement drew directly on Expressionist painting and theatre, and the key films — The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1920, Nosferatu in 1922, Metropolis in 1927 — established a visual language that was exported wholesale when its practitioners emigrated.
Technique
Everything is built and controlled. Caligari's shadows are literally painted on the flats in black paint, because the production could not light them convincingly; the sets are constructed at impossible angles, with distorted architecture, sloping floors and windows that are not rectangles. Later films used actual lighting to the same end: hard single sources, extreme low and high angles, figures lit from beneath, and the chiaroscuro of a face half in darkness. Camera movement was developed aggressively — Murnau's unchained camera in The Last Laugh mounted the operator on a bicycle, a trolley and a crane.
The palette
Monochrome pushed to its extremes, with tinting used to reinforce it. The images work in blacks, whites and a compressed range of greys, with mid-tones deliberately eliminated so that the frame reads as pattern rather than as space. Prints were commonly tinted — blue for night sequences, amber for interiors, green for exteriors in Nosferatu — so the original release experience combined extreme tonal contrast with a flat colour wash over the whole image.
Legacy
When the directors and cinematographers left Germany in the 1930s — Lang, Wilder, Siodmak, Karl Freund, Ulmer — they took the lighting vocabulary to Hollywood, where it became film noir and the Universal horror cycle. The through-line from Caligari to The Third Man to Blade Runner is direct, and it is the most consequential export of a national cinema in the medium's history.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Silver