Thomas Curreri

GER 250: Berlin in Film—Wiene and Lang, and the Uses of the Expressionist Style
5/12/08

Expressionist film had its start in 1919 in the Austrian filmmaker Robert Wiene’s first

international success, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and was followed by filmmakers like Murnau

and Lang, lasting until the mid-1920s. Expressionism was and to this day is still sometimes

evoked when the director wishes to engage the audience in the emotions of the character or

characters onscreen beyond mere acting. Expressionism is a visual style characterized by

“oblique camera angles, distorted bodies and shapes, bizarre and incongruous settings that are

almost gothic in their look and framing”, and use of stripes and shadows to expand or shrink

images on screen, adding to their psychological effect (Hayward 176).

Expressionism of course was used in varying degrees and for various purposes by

different directors; Caligari sought to debase the sanity of the viewer as much as its characters

through its thoroughly persistent use of the style, whereas Lang’s films M and Der müde Tod

used the style sparingly to show the madness of a certain character at a certain time. This

variance in prevalence and the message of each film also exposes the directors’ own feelings,

ironic in the context of expressionist film. While Lang tells moralistic fairytales in fantastic but

relatively every-day and realistic settings, even reaching into the past in Der müde Tod to lend an

extra level of comfort and familiarity, Wiene presents a world in Caligari that is much like the

emerging modern industrialized world at that time: foreign, claustrophobic, and frightening. His

film leaves the viewer feeling as insecure as post-war Germans must have felt. Lang, however,

leaves the viewer thinking there is in fact right and justice in the world.

Expressionism has its roots in artistic practices of the early 20 th century inspired by

Edward Monch’s painting “The Scream”, filmic practices that focused on the fantastic and
 2

mythological, and in “post-World War One Germany, …a period of terrible poverty and constant

insecurity” (Hayward 173). Between the loss of the war and the onset of modern life, it is little

wonder that dread of the future, displacement, and discomfort in German society led to

expressionism as a means of expressing horror, death, and insanity. Caligari and M in particular

exhibit “a cluster of formal characteristics and narrative elements, a particular atmosphere, a

mood, that points to a profound crisis of identity in modern mass society” (Hake 31). Der müde

Tod fits in more with the fantastic films of the pre-war period that, “with their affinity for pre-

industrial society, traditional folk culture, and small-town living, …provided audiences with an

imaginary space for expressing their ambivalence towards modern life” (Hake 22).

Post-war Berlin was both the “cultural centre of Europe” and “a city of crashed markets

and rampant poverty” (Hayward 174). At the time Caligari was made, censorship had been

banned between 1918 and 1920 and “sexualities of all types had emerged onto the civic scene”

(ibid.). It was unquestionably this atmosphere that contributed to the non-fantastic film-derived

themes of “revolt, self-analysis, madness, and primitive, sexual savagery” (Hayward 172). The

themes of murder, insanity, and aggressive male sexuality are particularly strong in Caligari and

M, but Caligari truly takes expressionism to its upper limit visually.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari tells a twisted story of a young man, Francis, his fiancée

Jane, and his friend Allan being terrorized by a deranged doctor, Caligari, who is “master” of a

somnambulist called Cesare. The small town searches for a murderer after Allan is found dead,

and later officers chase Cesare after he abducts, or “seizes”, Jane. At this point, Francis

convinces the mental hospital to investigate their director, who they discover to be reenacting a

criminal from the 1700s who called himself Dr. Caligari in order to understand his psychology.

In the end, however, it turns out that Francis and Jane are both inmates at the insane asylum and
 3

the director is not a criminal at all, but a regular person about whom Francis has invented this

entire story.

From the very beginning, Caligari throws the audience out of its comfort zone. The

music is eerie and winding, like a record played at the wrong speed, and the credits and captions

are written in a handwriting that can only be described as deranged. At first, one is made to think

that the film is a ghost story, as Francis begins his tale saying, “There are spirits everywhere…”

followed by a yet unknown figure in a flowing white dress with a spooked look in her eyes

walking slowly through the scene. There is no distinct moment when this illusion breaks, and the

audiences realizes that this is not the story of how Jane became a ghost, but this notion in an

unsuspecting audience only aids the progression and discomfiture of this nonetheless strange and

unsettling tale.

The film continues, its music still slow and winding like breath drawn with difficulty, and

we see that the town in which Francis grew up is a strange painting of crooked houses crawling

up a hill, and we must believe it, for the film does not stop to comment. Windows throughout the

film take the form of stretched-out quadrangles with painted star-bursts around them representing

light coming through; at times it is difficult to tell where the wall of a room ends and the floor

begins; and a river apparently runs through the small town—in the sky, between two buildings.

The backgrounds and art direction in the film were actually linked with the expressionist art

movement itself: “the sets were painted and designed by the expressionist artists Hermann

Warm, Walter Reiman, and Walter Röhrig” (Hayward 177). The pervasiveness of expressionism

in the film quickly becomes apparent, after the deceivingly simple opening scene with Francis

and Jane. Jaggedness, claustrophobia, haunting music, odd proportions and angles dominate
 4

every scene, for the most part regardless of who is present in the scene or what is happening. It is

the entire world that is in the throes of agony that expressionism attempts to give visual life to.

In M, on the other hand, the visual use of expressionism is more tempered and

conditioned, though the themes of the film style are present throughout, in addition to Lang’s

affinity for the fairytale motifs of the fantastic films that came before. M follows the story of a

town’s search for a child abductor, murderer, and pedophile. After the police fail to locate the

criminal, the organized crime and outcasts of the town—beggars, thieves, pimps, even some

murderers—decide they must organize their own search, because the constant vigilance of the

police is making it impossible for them to do their work properly, and they also want the world

to know that they do not condone this child murderer’s crime. Using panhandlers to monitor the

streets, the crime organization eventually finds the criminal and traps him in a building. All but

one of the criminals, Franz the burglar, escape the police with the murderer, Hans Beckert. Franz

rats to the police where the criminals are holding trial for Hans. The police find the hideout and

Hans is taken into custody of the law, saved from being murdered himself by the crime

organization.

Lang sets the scene in M from the beginning with a morbid children’s song about a man

in black and decapitation, followed by a little girl, Elsie, almost getting killed crossing the street.

Shortly afterwards, still in the first few minutes of the film, we see a large shadow looming over

Elsie, asking her if she wants some candy, and with that the film begins. When Elsie’s mother,

Frau Beckmann, begins to miss Elsie, she first looks out the window, then asks the postman if he

has seen her. With no sight of her, she looks down the stairwell to see if Elsie is on her way up.

This shot of the staircase is absolutely dizzying; Frau Beckmann seems to be on the very top

floor, and the stairs wind downward in such a way as to make each successive lower floor visible
 5

beneath the one above it, creating a maze-like, vertigo effect. The angst created by this shot,

shown twice, each time separated by about a minute, reflects the fear the mother has about the

absence of her daughter. It also symbolizes the downward spiral that is to come—Elsie will

continue to be lost, her body undiscovered, after probably being raped in addition to murdered.

These realizations clash quickly in the mind of the viewer and the shot appears again to allow the

audience to really see what they feel; and yet, we are only experiencing the fear of the mother in

particular. The effect this incident has on the rest of the people in the town is not expressed

expressionistically; we step momentarily into the fearful world of the mother of a dead child.

Lang prefers to use the existing city environment in M to create expressionistic moments

rather than creating contrivedly expressionistic sets as Wiene did in Caligari. This creates a

much more subtle effect that nonetheless jumps out at the viewer as more peculiar compared to

the mise-en-scene in surrounding scenes. As the police crash in on what is presumably an

underground brothel, for example, the camera is packed into a narrow, low, winding stone tunnel

with a whole squad of policemen and a throng of law-breakers anxious to get out. The tension,

close quarters (and close call), and confusion portrayed in this scene is captured in this simple,

plausible shot. This could arguably expand to sequences such as the one in which Hans sees the

reflection of another little girl in the mirror, followed by a shot of a spinning hypnosis disk and a

striped, bouncing arrow. These two peculiar objects represent the conflicting thoughts in Hans’

head—“Here she is! Get her!” and the dizzying, spinning, aggravating, and ultimately

unsuccessful urge to resist. Thus it can be said that while Lang resists the urge to accuse the

industrialized world of being inherently maddening, as Wiene in Caligari does, the seeds of

madness do exist therein.

 6

Lang decides to end his film with the long arm of the law saving the child killer from

mob murder at the hands of other criminals. In Der müde Tod the man that Death took and his

Frau are reunited for eternity, through her loving tenacity. Lang seems to encourage the moral

that good and justice win out in the end, even if life in between is racked with all the terrors that

can only properly be exorcised through expressionism. There is, however, no fairness or justice

in Caligari. Everything that could go wrong, does, and we are hurt over and over again by the

terrible unfolding of events in the film, driven on by cruelly disconcerting music at all the right

moments. First we watch as the town lets its guard down once they think they have found the

murderer, and everyone buys the extra proclaiming so. Next we learn that the director of the

insane asylum has himself gone insane, and what is more, he was attempting to better understand

psychopathy to be better at his job. And in the end, everything falls apart as we learn that our

hero, Francis, and his bride to-be, Jane—the beautiful, the pure, the only character in the film for

whom Wiene provides a different, soft-edged mise-en-scene—are both actually deranged.

Caligari is the worst of all worlds; M and Der müde Tod are worlds where terror exists, but can

be rectified. Thus expressionism properly fills its shoes as an artistic, filmic tool, that allows for

a wide range of application by filmmakers depending on their take of the situations at hand, and

does not limit itself to one single interpretation of the wicked ways of the world.
 7

Works Cited

Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. 22-35.

Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: the Key Concepts. London; New York: Routledge, 2000.
NetLibrary. May 2008 <http://www.netlibrary.com>.