Germany

Before World War I, the German motion-picture audience drew broadly from different social classes, and the country was among the leaders in the construction of film theaters. But German film production lagged behind that of several other European countries, and Denmark’s film industry in particular played a more prominent role in German film exhibition than did many domestic companies. This dependence on imported films became a matter of concern among military leaders during the war, when a flood of effective anti-German propaganda films began to pour into Germany from the Allied countries. Therefore, on December 18, 1917, the German general Erich Ludendorff ordered the merger of the main German production, distribution, and exhibition companies into the government-subsidized conglomerate Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). UFA’s mission was to upgrade the quality of German films. The organization proved to be highly effective, and, when the war ended in Germany’s defeat in November 1918, the German film industry was prepared for the first time to compete in the international marketplace. Transferred to private control, UFA became the single largest studio in Europe and produced most of the films associated with the “golden age” of German cinema during the Weimar Republic (1919–33).

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UFA’s first peacetime productions were elaborate costume dramas (Kostümfilme) in the vein of the prewar Italian superspectacles, and the master of this form was Ernst Lubitsch, who directed such lavish and successful historical pageants as Madame Du Barry (released in the United States as Passion, 1919), Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920), and Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1921) before immigrating to the United States in 1922. These films earned the German cinema a foothold in the world market, but it was an Expressionist work, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), that brought the industry its first great artistic acclaim. Based on a scenario by the Czech poet Hans Janowitz and the Austrian writer Carl Mayer, the film recounts a series of brutal murders that are committed in the north German town of Holstenwall by a somnambulist at the bidding of a demented mountebank, who believes himself to be the incarnation of a homicidal 18th-century hypnotist named Dr. Caligari. Erich Pommer, Caligari’s producer at Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is director and head psychiatrist. To represent the narrator’s tortured mental state, the director, Robert Wiene, hired three prominent Expressionist artists—Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann—to design sets that depicted exaggerated dimensions and deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this architectural stylization (and also to economize on electric power, which was rationed in postwar Germany), bizarre patterns of light and shadow were painted directly onto the scenery and even onto the characters’ makeup.

In its effort to embody disturbed psychological states through decor, Caligari influenced enormously the UFA films that followed it and gave rise to the movement known as German Expressionism. The films of this movement were completely studio-made and often used distorted sets and lighting effects to create a highly subjective mood. They were primarily films of fantasy and terror that employed horrific plots to express the theme of the soul in search of itself. Most were photographed by one of the two great cinematographers of the Weimar period, Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner. Representative works included F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920), adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s Der Golem (The Golem, 1920), adapted from a Jewish legend in which a gigantic clay statue becomes a raging monster; Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1922); Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923), based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924); and Henrik Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1926), which combines the Faust legend with a doppelgänger, or double, motif. In addition to winning international prestige for German films, Expressionism produced two directors who would become major figures in world cinema, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau.

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Lang had already directed several successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919–20), when he collaborated with his future wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) for Decla-Bioskop. This episodic Romantic allegory of doomed lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned Lang acclaim for his dynamic compositions of architectural line and space. Lang’s use of striking, stylized images is also demonstrated in the other films of his Expressionist period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), the Wagnerian diptych Siegfried (1922–24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1922–23), and the stunningly futuristic Metropolis (1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made. After directing the early sound masterpiece M (1931), based on child murders in Düsseldorf, Lang became increasingly estranged from German political life. He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.

Murnau made several minor Expressionist films before directing one of the movement’s classics, an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula titled Nosferatu—eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror,” 1922), but it was Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel (“intimate theater”), that made him world-famous. Scripted by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der letzte Mann told the story of a hotel doorman who is humiliated by the loss of his job and—more important, apparently, in postwar German society—of his splendid paramilitary uniform. Murnau and Karl Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a complex narrative structure through their innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom to record the inebriated porter’s point of view. In the absence of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the filming Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order to achieve smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense identification with the narrative. Even more remarkably, the film conveyed its meaning without using any printed intertitles for dialogue or explanation.

Der letzte Mann was universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more influence on Hollywood style than any other single foreign film in history. Its “unchained camera” technique (Mayer’s phrase) spawned many imitations in Germany and elsewhere, the most significant being E.A. Dupont’s circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to fulfill in 1927 after completing two last “superproductions,” Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA.

In 1924 the German mark was stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which financed the long-term payment of Germany’s war-reparations debt and curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with American films and buying its independent theater chains. As a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement, UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It was saved by a $4 million loan offered by two major American studios, Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to UFA studios, theaters, and creative personnel. This arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet (Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many of the filmmakers went back to UFA disgusted at the assembly-line character of the American studio system, but many—such as Lubitsch, Freund, and Murnau—stayed on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more would return during the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime.

In the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of “life as it is lived.” Called die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”), this spirit stemmed from the economic dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit translated into the grim social realism of the “street” films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), these films focused on the disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the postwar inflation.

The master of the form was G.W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that would become essential to the sound film. In such important realist films as Die freudlose Gasse, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), Pabst created complex continuity sequences, using techniques that became key features of Hollywood’s “invisible” editing style, such as cutting on action, cutting from a shot of a character’s glance to one of what the character sees (motivated point-of-view shots), and cutting to a reverse angle shot (one in which the camera angle has changed 180 degrees; e.g., in a scene in which a man and a woman face one another in conversation, the man is seen from the woman’s point of view, and then the woman is shown from the man’s point of view). Pabst later became an important figure of the early sound period, contributing two significant works in his pacifist films Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (“Comradeship,” 1931). Emigrating from Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Pabst worked in France and briefly in Hollywood. He returned to Germany in 1941 and made several films for the Nazi-controlled film industry during World War II.

By March 1927, UFA was once again facing financial collapse, and it turned this time to the Prussian financier Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the powerful Krupp industrial empire and a leader of the right-wing German National Party who was sympathetic to the Nazis. Hugenberg bought out the American interests in UFA, acquiring a majority of the company’s stock and directing the remainder into the hands of his political allies. As chairman of the UFA board, he quietly instituted a nationalistic production policy that gave increasing prominence to those allies and their cause and that enabled the Nazis to subvert the German film industry when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. German cinema then fell under the authority of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. For the next 12 years every film made in the Third Reich had to be personally approved for release by Goebbels. Jews were officially banned from the industry, which caused a vast wave of German film artists to leave for Hollywood. Los Angeles became known as “the new Weimar,” and the German cinema was emptied of the talent and brilliance that had created its golden age.