Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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fields” as being “one of the remarkable things about the German Expressionist
movement”. 156 What Expressionist cinema shared with Expressionism as a broader art
movement was “the initial impulse of expressionist protest: visionary, ecstatic, and
apocalyptic images, an emphasis on the irrational, self-conscious distortion as a formal
property, and a consistently antibourgeois critique”. 157
It is commonly believed that Expressionist cinema began in Germany with the
production of Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (Wiene, 1919), but there were a number of
precursors, some of them not in Germany but in other European countries, in particular
Denmark. Barry Salt in Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis discusses the
influence of Danish film on Expressionist cinema with particular reference to lighting in
the films of directors such as Victor Sjöström, Benjamin Christensen and Dr Gar-El-
Hama I, who were producing films in Denmark, just prior to World War One. 158 Paul
Leutrat adds that German Expressionist cinema owes much to the Danish director
Maurtiz Stiller, as well as to the work of Sjöström and Christensen. Moreover, he cites
the work of Soviet directors Kozintze, Trauberg and Youtkevitch and the influence of
Soviet theatre on Soviet films, which created a Russian brand of Expressionist
cinema. 159
At the same time as these developments were taking place in Danish and Soviet cinema,
thematic and stylistic precursors of Expressionist cinema were appearing in Germany.
According to George Huaco, these consisted of “four earlier minor films […],
thematically, Stellan Rye’s The Student from Prague (1913), and Paul Wegener’s The
Golem (1914); stylistically, Rye’s House Without Doors or Windows (1914), and Otto
Ripert’s six-part thriller Homunculus (1916)”. 160 Both The Student from Prague, and
The Golem were later remade, the former by Henrik Galeen in 1926, and the latter by
Paul Wegener in 1920, and these later versions are usually classified as Expressionist
films. If we combine these precursors and sequels with classics such as Dr Caligari,
then Expressionist cinema adds up to a sizeable body of work.
156 Willett, Expressionism 11.
157 Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context 19.
158 Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd ed. (London: Starword, 1992) 71.
159 Leutrat, "Actualité De L'expressionnisme."
160 George Huaco, The Sociology of Film Art (New York; London: Basic Books Inc, 1965) 35.