Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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sense of Malfred’s increasing unease. Vigil also uses lighting, as well as colour, in an
expressive way. Much of the lighting in the film is low-key, helping to create an often
grim atmosphere. In the post-production process, the primary colours were deliberately
filtered out to give intensity to the grey/green images.
In Dr Caligari, the lighting often “intensifies the uneasiness conveyed by the spatial
distortions of the set”. 170 This atmosphere of uneasiness is also created by the use of
diagonals and zigzags, which characterize most scenes. Mike Budd describes the
settings of the film as “excessive and transgressive; they are perhaps the first and most
important way in which the film deviates from the realist norms of classical narrative
cinema. They seem insistently to force their attention on us, to refuse the subordination
of ‘background’ to narrative action and character demanded by classical cinema”. 171
Objects in Dr Caligari also seem to have a malevolent character of their own – the
streetlights are misshapen, the trees look as if they have tentacles, walls of corridors
seem to lean toward each other. “The real and functional aspects of these objects,
buildings and walls have been suppressed to allow Francis to invest them with his own
peculiar hostile vitality. This ‘spiritual unrest’ and ‘animation of the inorganic’, to use
two of Wilhelm Worringer’s phrases, are typical of Expressionism”, according to
Barlow. 172 His explanation of this phenomenon is that:
To the expressionists, this stage of alienation, where physical things seem
threatening and even aggressive, was a necessary stage in the process of
perceiving the true nature of the world. One went from a mindless state of
middle-class respectability, in which one’s physical environment was taken for
granted and things were veiled in a socially acceptable way of reflex seeing, to
the horrifying realization that things are not what they seem, that they are
threatening and demonic, to end with an ecstatic and explosive breakthrough to
their ultimate essence. 173
In Ward’s films, particularly in Vigil and A State of Siege, inanimate objects, such as the
tractor in Vigil often seem to have a life of their own. The use of inanimate objects in
170
Barlow, German Expressionist Film 38.
171
Mike Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (New Brunswick, USA:
Rutgers University Press, 1990) 12.
172
Barlow, German Expressionist Film 36.
173
Barlow, German Expressionist Film 136.