Citizen Kane Expressionism

Expressionism and Realism Mixture in The Last Laugh and Citizen Kane One of the greatest expressionism and realism film- The Last Laugh- directed by German Director F.W Murnau, was released in December 1924. The exaggerated camera shots in this film give the audience a strong sense of anger, disappointment, and compassion of the Hotelportier. Facial expression and characters’ action stick out from the film. Selection of the camera settings are mostly set on the street or the apartment which intimated our society: a piece of our real life circumstances. His film characters establishment seems like there are somewhat similar people that live in our society, but the exaggeration of the characters’ expression rejects the possibility of an actual person living in the world. However, because of the obvious character expression, the probability of the truth of the story is even more outstanding. Another remarkable film that combines expressionism and realism, director Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, was published in 1941. As the same subject matter using expressionism, Welles relatively puts more efforts on extreme camera angles. Moreover, comparison to Murnau’s realism style, Citizen Kane is more like telling a historical incident, which an
Other like the intense lightings, the character whose back faces the front is normally dark, we can only see light shines on a person face that sits across. Moreover, the camera angle metaphors a lot of characters instant emotion and temperament. Such as in the place which Kane imprison Susan, low angle camera shot of the characters make the domination of Kane. To summarize this, Welles in expressionism pays more attention to camera angle, lightings, and metaphors. In contrast, Murnau makes effort on character