German films
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Mention the name Ernst Lubitsch and most people immediately bring to mind the director’s energetic, highly entertaining romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. But there is another Lubitsch who, early in his career, made several big budget silent epics, of which Madame Du Barry is one of the most memorable. The film stars two of Europe’s leading actors at the time...
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It would be an understatement to describe The Cabinet of Dr Caligari as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema. Whilst that epithet is undoubtedly true it does not do justice to the film’s historical importance nor to its great artistic value and originality. It was the first significant film to have appropriated the German expressionist style...
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Das Wandernde Bild marked the beginning of the fruitful collaboration of director Fritz Lang with writer Thea von Harbou. They married in 1922 and the couple would become the creative force behind some of the greatest German films of the pre-WWII era, works such as Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Metropolis (1927) and M...
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One of the earliest and most influential horror films in cinema history, The Golem is a bewildering mix of Jewish mysticism, European romanticism and German expressionism. It contains all the ingredients of the classic horror film, with a few very peculiar comic asides. The film was directed by Paul Wegener, a stage actor of some repute who became fascinated by the art of filmmaking in the...
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The film that established Fritz Lang as the greatest German director of his time is this monumental thriller based on a popular crime novel by Norbert Jacques. Although it is an amazing thriller in its own right – in fact, one of the best in the history of cinema – it is far more than that. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler is also an important piece of social commentary...
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The original, and by far the best, vampire film is Murnau's Nosferatu , a Symphony of Horror, a film that was born out of the unholy marriage of German romanticism and the expressionist movement of the 1920s. Whereas directors of subsequent horror films were content to simply frighten their audiences with blatant images of visceral horror...
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The great German cineaste F.W. Murnau followed his landmark expressionist horror film Nosferatu (1922) with this inspired adaptation of a novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Gerhart Hauptmann. The film’s production was beset by all manner of problems - Murnau fell ill during the shoot and financing was a nightmare thanks to rampant hyper-inflation...
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Murnau’s touching parable of decline and fall, an obvious metaphor for German society after World War I, is widely regarded as a masterpiece of German expressionism. Emil Janning’s larger-than-life portrayal of a man whose dreams are brought crashing down is hugely poignant, one of the highpoints in the career of one of Germany’s greatest acting talents...
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One of F.W. Murnau’s lesser works, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is one of the director’s rare attempts at a satirical comedy. Murnau scripted the film with Thea von Harbou, a popular German writer who is perhaps best known for her collaborations with Fritz Lang (to whom she would be married for a time). Although the film is short on laughs and suffers from an overly convoluted plot...
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Kriemhilds Rache is the dramatic conclusion to Fritz Lang’s epic two-part film Die Nibelungen, based on a famous Germanic poem from Medieval times. In the first part, Siegried, we saw how Queen Kriemhild was tricked into betraying her husband Siegfried, allowing her evil sister-in-law Brunhild to have him killed...
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Arguably the artistic pinnacle of Fritz Lang’s filmmaking career is his ambitious adaptation of Das Nibelungenlied, an epic thirteenth Century Germanic poem of heroism, betrayal and revenge. The poem, whose author is unknown, was first performed in Austria in around 1200 AD, and is derived from folk legends stretching back to the 6th Century...
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The Pleasure Garden is the first full-length film which Alfred Hitchcock was able to complete. He had cut his directorial teeth on the appropriately named Number 13 (1922), a film that was abandoned partway through production, and then on the short Always Tell Your Wife (1923). Although Hitchcock’s filmmaking career didn’t take off until The Lodger (1927)...
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Der Heilige Berg is one of the most visually alluring films made in Germany in the 1920s. It was directed by Arnold Fanck, a significant creative force in the film industry at the time, responsible for some of Germany’s most memorable cinematic achievements. Like most German filmmakers of the period, Fanck was influenced by expressionism...
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With this 1926 adaptation of the Faust legend, that master of German expressionism, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, created a timeless visual masterpiece, a film which vigorously challenges any pre-conceived notions of silent cinema. Murnau’s last film before he moved to Hollywood, the film represents both a transition of cinematic styles for its director and also a culmination of his expressionist...
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There is clearly a natural relationship between German expressionist art of the 1920s and the revolutionary theories in psychology which were being expounded by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries in the preceding years. Expressionism is inherently a dreamlike re-interpretation of the real world and Freud saw dreams as the key to unlocking the secrets to the human subconscious...
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Admittedly a modest work when set aside Murnau's grand masterpieces of the time – such as Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926) – Herr Tartüff nonetheless stands as a beautifully composed example of German expressionism, and is certainly one of the director's lighter and more humanist works. Emil Jannings is perfect as the Nosferatu-like villain Tartuffe...
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Although it is now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made, a silent masterpiece and possibly the pinnacle of German expressionism, Fritz Lang's Metropolis has enjoyed something of a chequered history. Indeed, there is no single definitive version of the film. The original 1926 version was destroyed and the film now exists in around half a dozen various...
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This film, in which Brigitte Helm gives a daringly realistic portrayal of a sexually frustrated bourgeois wife, evoked great controversy when it was released in 1928. It is unusual in at least two respects. Firstly, it explores the feelings of its central characters with unprecedented psychological depth, effectively contrasting their intense inner moods with the superficial world in which...
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After the embarrassing commercial failure of Metropolis (1927), director Fritz Lang was more or less driven to make a film with greater popular appeal (particularly as this was to be the first film for his own newly formed production company). He hoped to repeat the success of his earlier thriller Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)...
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Legendary Austrian cineaste Fritz Lang is probably best known today for his silent masterpiece Metropolis (1927), one of the most iconic fantasy films of all time (in spite of the fact that no complete print of the film exists). He is less well known for another fantasy film, Frau im Mond (a.k.a. Woman in the Moon), which he made two years later and which is regarded by many as the first...
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