Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919/20), designed in an Expressionist style, became a critical and commercial success particularly in the U.S. and in France, where “Caligarisme” became synonymous with Expressionist cinema. Expressionism was an avant-garde movement which had begun in painting (about 1905); it was then taken up in theater, literature, architecture, and finally in film.

This web page explores the basic elements of a film: script, direction, camera, acting, music/sound, editing, lighting, costumes and make-up for German expressionist films and film noir.

German expressionist films were prevalent in the 1920s. Amongst the most well remembered are films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Weiner, 1920), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927). These films were united by highly stylized visuals, strange asymmetrical camera angles, atmospheric lighting and harsh contrasts between dark and light. Shadows and silhouettes were an important feature of expressionism, to the extent that they were actually painted on to the sets in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

This article discusses The Golem from several aspects, each of which relates in different degrees to the work Hans Poelzig did in designing the sets for the film. In order to understand the importance of the production, the history of its conception and execution has to be examined. Then too, Poelzig's training and sources are vital to this discussion and to an analysis of the sets the The Golem in view of Poelzig's style.

This course examines the influence on the American cinema of the German expatriates who settled in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s after the flowering of the German silent film industry. Taught as an elective course for undergraduates, it bedevils most students' easy assumptions that American filmmakers invented the cinema, first by examining the accomplishments of the Weimar studio system itself a fascinating site-and then by exploring the links between Germany and the United States at the beginning of the sound era.

When Paul Leni's first American film The Cat and the Canary opened in May 1927, it was a revelation for many of Hollywood's filmmakers. Leni had taken a tired old warhorse, based on John Willard's wildly successful 1922 Broadway play, and turned it into a breath-taking exercise in visual style that one-upped and of Hollywood's technical tricks.

I propose that raising the issue of Germanness in the cinema may dislodge some of the cliches and truisms about national cinema history. Culture has traditionally been seen as an important, if not primary domain for the constitution of national identity and in so far as the development of the modern nation-state can be regarded as a crucial component of modernity and modernising tendencies (i.e. emerging with the nation of the citizen in the French Revolution), culture is closes tied to the factors defining a nation.

Expressionist cinema is an impossibility. Like all art forms which believe that only the subjective, the interior life, is real, it can ultimately never avoid the paradox that for creation to take place, the inner experience must be externalized, and therefore partake of the world of objective reality.