German Expressionism In Film

German Expressionism was a movement that started at around the beginning of the 20th century. It has many traits but the main ones being, trying to present the world from a single subjective perspective. Sometimes distorting it to evoke emotion, moods and ideas. Expressionism was mainly an artistic outlet before taking its place in film. It was used as a method of disposing with aesthetically pleasing works and focusing more on the abstract. The artist would often use bright, clashing colors, messy and jagged lines, and flat shapes. This could easily be translated to film to evoke a sense uneasiness, anxiety and fear. A great example of this would be The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it used expressionism as a way to experiment with perception. The sets were made with very jagged angles and lines and incongruous patterns. There are
Montage Theory states that putting a series of connected images together allows for ideas to be shed about what is happening in the images but when they are strung together, it allows the film to truly express its intellectual or ideological properties. So the editing of a series of shots, rather than the images themselves, constitutes the effect of the film. This style of filmmaking shows reality without adding anything to it, the artistic standards are in the shots themselves. To evoke emotion in Montage, they would often spend a minute or two filming shots that would relate to that emotion. Some great uses of this came from Battleship Potemkin where Sergei Eisenstien used montage to create concepts. He used tonal and over-tonal montage and editing. Tonal Montage is used to explain the meaning of each shot and to elicit more emotion than other forms of montage such as metric or rhythmic. Soviet Montage Theory did not try to escape reality, but instead to capture it, showing every variable and viewpoint to elicit true and real