This describes the way that the world of the film might disclose a character’s inner state, a stylistic choice that starts to make sense as it is revealed that the central character lives in a psychiatric institution and that the film’s whole narrative could be a mere delusion or hallucination. The establishing shot of the film, for example, shows a highly stylized town, where the roofs lean dramatically to form what looks like a mound of spikes. Rather than capturing a real location on film, German Expressionism used artistic sets to emphasize the subjectivity of this type of storytelling; the world we see is the reality of a man with a fragmented and abstract grasp of reality.
Apart from giving the viewers a visual sense of emotional subjectivity, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari also serves as an allegory of post-war Germany. The character of Dr. Caligari himself controls the movements of a sleepwalking Cesare, symbolizing the steady rise of authoritarianism at the time. Kracauer describes the film as a “revolutionary story”, explaining how it “stigmatized the omnipotence of a state authority manifesting itself in universal conscription and declarations of war” (2019). The character of Cesar, asserts Kracauer, had been created “with the dim design of portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compulsory military service, is drilled to kill and to be killed” (2019). So not only was German Expressionist cinema highly subjective, using external renderings to elucidate internal states, but it captured something of the postwar German zeitgeist.
The influence of German Expressionism
Despite being developed across the Atlantic, German Expressionism had a profound effect on the development of Hollywood cinema. During the rise of the Nazis, many German filmmakers escaped to the US, bringing their dark and exaggerated aesthetic and introspective subject matter to the American film industry. The 1940s Hollywood genre of film noir is an example of this. Film noir is characterized by a world of shadows, where the settings and lighting reveal the duplicitous nature of the characters and stories that took place there. The way that this mise-en-scène indicates the moody, dark, and uncertain mental state of the characters is often attributed to the influence of German Expressionism. Not only are there obvious aesthetic parallels between the two genres, but German Expressionist plot characteristics — like flashbacks and suspense — are also observable as crucial narrative devices in film noir. As Andrew Spicer confirms in Film Noir, “German Expressionism is always cited as the major influence on film noir’s arresting visual style and also its pessimistic mood” (2018). Film noir, in turn, has a recognized legacy of its own, with films like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) being associated with various iterations of neo-noir cinema. In tracing the influences that shaped these iconic pieces of cinema, German Expressionism emerges as a key development in the history of film.
Another genre which has its roots in German Expressionism is horror. German Expressionist films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, are often heralded as the earliest form of the horror genre we know today. The way German Expressionism creates suspense, dread, and terror through devices like dark and dynamic shadows, unnatural camera angles and scenery, deeper depths of field, and drawing on dark mythologies and superstitions, are all characteristics found in horror films and horror subgenres. Even the rise in popularity of the vampire film can be attributed to German Expressionist cinema. Films like Interview with a Vampire (Jordan, 1994), Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008) and Dark Shadows (Burton, 2012) follow in the tradition of German Expressionist films like Robert Wiene’s Genuine: The Tragedy of a Vampire (1920) and the iconic Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922). These films combined an eerie world of shadows with an emotional, mythological story to create a sense of twisted and complex subjectivity. In Expressionism and Film, Rudolf Kurtz described the explicit feeling that German Expressionism, and its successor genres, create, writing,