Conrad Veidt as Cesare the somnambulist, holding Jane over the city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

About three months ago, I picked up John D. Barlow’s book “German Expressionist Film,” and have been maneuvering the library’s checkout policy ever since! It lovingly but critically covers the movement of the same name at the start of the 20th century.

If you are familiar with Expressionism then you probably don’t like it, either because you don’t like silent film or because the melodramatic acting, face paint, and stories are serious to the point of comedy. I understand your position, but evading silent film is not cool, and I have grown to love the contemporary farce that is passé expressionism.

But, in a way, Expressionism’s outlandishness is its honesty.

The Style

Expressionism is a “Post-World War I artistic movement…that distorted appearances to communicate inner emotional states.” (let.rug.nl)

It is a perspective overtly distorted by the artist, expressing its subjects’ qualities through every part of the production – using the sets and props, the actors’ movement, the costumes, and the story itself.

It shows the “inside” of its reality on the “outside.” Architecture is often skewed in expressionist films, like in the city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (pictured above), to show the base nature of the city. “Even the walls are crooked!”

The stories in the expressionist movement are very dark. They end sadly, and usually involve inhuman enemies and grotesque, bitter endings on par with Edgar Allan Poe from a century earlier. The movement invented vampires in Nosferatu, and the crazy scientist is personified in multiple films. Like socialist and communist movements around it, people are often only referred to by their position in society: mother, butcher, chef, pianist, etc.

1905 – 1925 (R.I.P.)

As Barlow points out, German expressionism did not last very long, and is best known for its influence on later films. Some consider Citizen Kane German expressionism. It comes out in Welles’ use of shots from the ground-up on Charles Kane and shots from the ceiling-down on his wife, showing his will over her. When Kane grows old and fat, it is not just a picture of the reality that people do grow old and fat, but that Kane’s mind, purpose, and lifestyle – his pursuit of an empire – is old and fat.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Dr. Mabuse in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922)

The Penguin of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns has its roots in expressionism, as well as everything else by Burton. Any time a person cackles and contorts their body, it’s because of expressionism. The man’s face morphs and his back arcs to show his inner character. He is not just superficially ugly, which would be trivial. He is warped and gnarled – warts, long nose, and all. Inside and out.

On Realism vs. Truth: The Merit of Expressionism

Allow me to go off on a tangent.

Realism is not honest. It is bound by the constraints and bias of a camera lens, just like anything else. It seems like a disownment of the very nature of your art; you can’t believe that you can take away the reality of the medium.

Journalism studies points out that objectivity (i.e., realism) is not truly attainable. This is fine, if your audience is aware of it. Realism is deceitful by not giving its audience the chance to consider whether it is a truthful style or not, while other styles are overtly “deceitful;” they are self-aware that they do not represent reality, and furthermore depicting reality is not their intention.

The illustrious book “Amusing Ourselves To Death” (Postman 1985) explains some differences between forms of communication. Text – with its rules of grammar, of sentence structure, verbs for actions and nouns for givers and receivers – has an inherent logic. But film does not always have an equivalent logic to it. It can follow the structure of text, but it is unwieldy when it does. Has anyone critiqued a film for you and called it “bookish?” I think I’ve said that before.

Alfred Hitchcock made an infamous experiment to explain “montage” using clips of himself smiling, sneering, and frowning, each followed by an image of a woman sunbathing. Montage made sense of images in context, but you can use images one after another and make no sense at all! For example, without more context, it makes no sense to show a toy duck and then a hamburger and then a person in space. But the audience does not need – and may not have the opportunity – to refute the connections being made between images.

Frankie Muniz as Malcolm in Malcolm in the Middle

One of my favorite examples of a highly stylized TV show is “Malcolm in the Middle.” It’s very skewed by Malcolm’s childish perspective, but we understand him very quickly because of it. His mother towers over him, exploding with anger; his father is unbelievably timid and soft-hearted; and at times, Malolm’s own social ineptitude is washed away by his inherited strength, and he demands for reality to bend to his will. This open display of bias and emotion is why I love Expressionism, too.

Germany’s Need to Express Truth in the Early 1900s

It is interesting to note the relationship between Expressionism and World Wars I and II.

1905……..Expressionism becomes popular
1914-18…The War to End All Wars (WWI)
1925……..Expressionism goes out of style
1933……..Adolf Schickelgruber Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany
1941……..(‘39, as my Swedish friend says) World War II

It has been said that the expressionist movement was constantly pointing to the “inevitable” Nazi reign, though it was perhaps as much pushing the Nazi agenda and preparing Germans for the Third Reich as it was warning against it.

In 2008, Yukihiko Yoshida did a study called “Leni Riefenstahl and German expressionism: research in Visual Cultural Studies using the trans-disciplinary semantic spaces of specialized dictionaries.” The study took databases of images tagged with connotative and denotative keywords (a search engine) and found Riefenstahl’s imagery had the same qualities as imagery tagged “degenerate” – the term Nazis used for German expressionism. Riefenstahl was a famous propaganda film director, but expressionists in general were persecuted and their work “publicly disclaimed” during World War II.

Lang & Hitler, Nibelungen & Metropolis

Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen in Metropolis (1927)

According to Hitler, when he wanted to go into painting the art schools told him he was too interested in architecture – his eyes were always distracted by the tall buildings around him. But he didn’t have the academic background to go into that field. Fritz Lang was born only a year before Hitler in Austria-Hungary, and studied architecture in Vienna and then painting in Paris, so there was potential for them to get along. Lang’s older brother even had the then-common name of “Adolf.”

In 1924, as expressionism began to fade, Lang made a two-film series, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge. They were based on German and Norse mythology, co-written by Thea von Harbou, who he married that same year (she wrote a number of screenplays with him). He made the films to lift the spirits of the German people. The country was devastated by World War I, and they felt unfairly forced to repair other countries at the same time as their own. The Die Nibelungen films were about the inherent good of the people. Lang wanted Germany to realize its worth – pick itself up and rebuild the country.

Hitler loved them, agreeing with Lang’s vision of the German people as inherently better than everyone else – What terrible irony! (Feder Files).

In a 1967 interview with the BBC, he said he made a third Die Nibelungen in 1932, called The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, with Nazi slogans “[in] the mouth of the criminal,” but Nazis detained it and told him to see the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. This from Lang’s interview:

Goebbels was a very clever man, he was indescribably charming when I entered the room…He told me a lot of things, among other things that the ‘Fuhrer’ had seen Metropolis and another film that I had made – Die Niebelungen – and the ‘Fuhrer’ had said ‘this is the man who will give us THE Nazi film’…and my only thought was ‘how do I get out of here!’ (Euroscreenwriters)

Lang left Germany in 1933, but his wife, Harbou, stayed in Germany and continued to write under the Third Reich. Unsurprisingly, they were divorced by 1934. Fritz Lang’s movies in America are notably different from his work in Germany. Obviously a movie like Some Like it Hot is much more accessible than Between Two Worlds, but I wonder how much his ex-wife’s writing and relationship influenced his work. Of course, the significant changes in his life and the world at the time would be enough to mark such a change in style and subject matter.

Modern Art & The Death of Expressionism

By the 1930s, German Expressionism in its pure form was dead. It was replaced by realism in the USA and surrealism in Europe. They were all influenced by socialism and communism, and Expressionism was chained and locked in the basement, left screaming and banging, unable to prevent that candle from blowing out. And he never saw his love again. But one day, a lonely old man, passing the house by the tollway, heard the boy moaning. He opened the basement door and, always wanting to have a son, he took the boy to his terrarium, where he replaced the boy’s hands with scissors and trained the boy to kill wild animals for food.

But Expressionism lives on, in an undead kind of way – or like a spirit inhabiting another person’s body – in other films. It is no longer palatable to the world alone, but when you see a glimpse of it in a film, think about it, and appreciate the open emotion that it brings to your movies – that perilously open, embarrassingly open emotion.

It was a touch juvenile, but I would love to do more of this sort of thing for the North Park Press in my free time.

Tim posted it to the WBEZ blog.

Background

The mice we have in our building are run-of-the-mill, three inch house mice, mus musculus. This past Friday, our landlord actually sprayed for rodents all through the building, but spraying may more may not have any particularly measurable effect.

I was going to say that I can remember each of the three mice that I have killed in our apartment clearly and distinctly, but I realized that they have blended a bit, and I have to concentrate to figure out how each died and in what order. #1 went by mouse trap. #2 trapped itself in the bathroom with me. I closed the door on its hind legs accidentally, and it ran very slowly after that. I caught it in a bag and squashed it with a big glass jar. #3 caught its tail in a mouse trap trying to run away from me and couldn’t get through its hole in the wall with a trap on its tail. I was oblivious to it except that it squealed and scratched at the wall; I had been watching a movie, and came to the kitchen to posit my popcorn bowl. I caught it in a bag and squashed it with a big glass jar.

Monday morning, 12 October 2009

I stared at the dead mouse under my kitchen table for a minute. I crouched down and peered closely at it. The tail was off to its side, so it did not die in its tracks. Its head was between its front paws. It looked like it had accidentally fallen asleep with its eyes open. The assumption from the beginning was that it had eaten poison from our landlord’s work last week.

It was breathing.

That was my first clue. It didn’t make sense for it to be breathing if it were dead–I was sure of that. It couldn’t be moving its chest that way just from dead mouse nerves firing.

Of course, this changed everything. Well, it changed one thing. It was going to be harder to get rid of. I felt like Rick Blaine drinking, pining, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” Seeing it breathing made me want it to be in good health; not a mouse dying of poison but a clever mouse with a sense of humor! As I drew near, it would jump up and run for its life. I would jump, too, give a war whoop, catch it, and squash it with a big glass jar.

I could tell it was upset that I was very big. I got a bag and picked it up. I could blow on it and it would blink and ruffle its ears. I put it in the trash.

Ethics

Each time I come across a mouse I have to decide how I will kill it. We don’t have many resources in our apartment, and a knife isn’t an option. The best I can do is a quick death. Painless? Arr. In this case, whatever it was dying from was probably the best for it. Poison probably kept it from feeling anything. Squashing it with a big glass jar would likely get nowhere better. We can talk more about the allegory of crushing rodents with a jar of coins.

Where I come from, PETA is the butt end of a joke because they are known to be extremists. My experience suggests it is foolish to join PETA. As a Christian, I respect creation, but there is reasonable justification for the destruction of rodents.

I think the simplest, most relevant criterion for grading operating systems are stability, user friendliness, customization, and software options. By customization I mean how much of the operating system itself you can adjust and tinker with. By software options I mean how much software you have to choose from.

Ranked in my four categories:

Windows is infamously and undeniably worse than OS X in terms of stability and user friendliness, but my experience has more often than not shown trouble with Windows to be a direct trade-off with the benefits Windows has over OS X.

“What benefits?” Well, Windows has the viruses because the software is widespread, not because OS X is impenetrable. That will change with time. Windows systems are known to have trouble with hardware recognition and drivers, but OS X systems in the past have had very few options for hardware at all; with Windows you have a much wider variety of hardware to choose from, some of which won’t work. Common sense dictates:

User friendly = less customizable

Customizable = less stable

Software options = more customizable, less stable

In my experience, PC users are likely to accept an argument of logic like the one above to influence their decision on an operating system, while OS X users are in general oblivious and happy. Linux users are anarchists.

The Future

As time has passed, OS X has become more and more like Windows, and vice versa. This will continue. OS X hardware has already become identical, and soon it will have more viruses and worms targeting it. While Windows will get better at dealing with hardware issues, OS X will get worse.

A Note on Logic

Obviously my silly equations do not take into account the fallibility of the administrations (read:bad judgment) or programmers (read:bugs). That would take a large team of dedicated workers to evaluate. My little exercise here isn’t meant to be all-encompassing. It just outlines a clear judgment on the OS Wars, silencing some common musings I hear around the watering hole.

Also, I’m getting uncomfortable with the “hip” popularity of Macbooks and laptops in general. Those temporal pieces of…

A Note on Linux

I leave Linux out of the equation in general because it doesn’t matter how good it is. It is simply not mainstream enough for people to be able to rely on it. Which is to say, it is better than Windows or OS X. Done.

Last night I took the long trek on public transportation from Albany Park to the Naperville suburbs to volunteer as a peon at a small, new film festival: NIFF. To be specific, I operated part of the Short Film Program in Room A at the Holiday Inn Select. I enjoyed the work, but there were a few bumps along the festival’s primordial road.

My handful of patrons was elderly, and one couple left during the first short, Ink to Paper (trailer), the gentleman notifying me that the bloody masquerade was trash not suitable for him to watch. I agreed, not because I thought it was worthless, but because I think it should have had an “R” rating and should have been made into a comedy, not a horror film. It was badly maneuvered into the Coan Brothers vein of dark comedy, but wasn’t marketed that way. What was most unfortunate about that fourth of the audience leaving was that most of the films shown the rest of the night were harmless non-fiction shot documentary-style. Watching the elderly react to the slasher and mafia film (Parts) gave me a better sense of their perspective. Many of them would visibly and audibly cringe when a knife went into skin, even when it happened off-screen.

Overall, I think the festival, in its second year, has a good future but needs to focus more. It has too many films for its small audience, and a week long is just too much for their market. They need to show fewer films, raising the bar for entrance, and increase the presentation (and complications) of each movie by giving it an introduction and better viewing areas, as well as better programming. While there is a sense at an independent film festival that “anything goes”–you can get all sorts of films right next to each other–I think it was particularly careless of them to place high-flying murder next to subtitled documentary. In fact I think they can go as far as to split nights by genre. The majority who came on my night where there for the biographic, family, and documentary films and were disturbed by the rest.

These were the films I saw with promise:

The Booby Trap

Though decently immature, it is decent, still. I suppose there is probably a huge audience out in the American jungle that thinks breast feeding to the eyes of 12-year-olds is a great subject, but I found it lacking, even if “based on a true story.” What was impressive with this film was the production values, which by far out-skated any other film in Room A on Monday night except Lioness of Lisabi. Its editing was sharp, its cinematography appropriately focused on showing how miserable Doug’s and Luke’s lives became that day.

They had a motion graphics designer for menus, titles, etc. and a soundtrack. In defense of the other films, however, this was a practicum film from Columbia College, not a student or “loser in his parents’ basement” film. In fact, the credits went so long that someone asked about them in the Q&A afterward. This cheapened the film for me, because it was only barely a student production. Many many students were involved, but none acted in it, and faculty were behind it at every step. Not a complaint for the real world, but “if the other film makers had what this one had behind it…”

-full video on Vimeo

The Spam Job

The Spam Job was up my alley. It very attentively dodged around its conclusion and final reveal until the very end, keeping it interesting all the way. I could feel in the back of my mind that it was making a big deal out of something that was not big at all and was probably being embellished, but the story was good whether accurate or not. My mind trailed off a bit when they emphasized how significant Paddy’s can of spam was to his mojo, but the pictures of spam around the world were fantastic, and made what would otherwise only be worthy of a quick StumbleUpon or Digg submission into a fun retelling of high school experiences and friendly revenge.

Lioness of Lisabi

This film was my favorite. It was in a folkloric or parabolic style, which is something of a stereotype of African culture. Still, it was so well-made that it celebrated the stereotype as much as it could have suffered from it. The cinematography was superb; the mise en scène, costuming, and dialog were striking. Its trailer does not do it justice. The plot was straight-forward, which is what good plots tend to be. The end was a little rough, specifically because of the awkward introduction of an American angel (Cherry) from modern times sent to 1946 (when the film is set) to help Funmi. It worked itself out, but I think it would have been better if they had either played-up God’s role in the film earlier or cut the whole angel business.

Interesting to read the bios on the website; they are all from the Chicago theatre scene. The mother character, actress Alana Arenas, is an ensemble player at Steppenwolf.

-http://lionessfilm.com

John Upton, a Columbia College grad working part-time as a production assistant with Judge Mathis, dropped me off at the Metra Station, and I waited for the last train with a young businessman and two folks who only spoke Spanish. When the train came, though, it was on the wrong side of the tracks! We ran to catch it, and from then-on the two Spanish-speakers were all sly glances and smiling eyes. W00t! Overall, a good evening.

The Naper Indie Film Fest ends this Saturday, the 26th, so if you’re in the area or want to spend oodles of time in-transit, make the trip. The volunteers and film makers will be relieved to see you, it’s only $3 every two hours, and half of the movies will be very good. Even the poorly made films will have an interesting perspective or production method. If you see any films, drop by and leave a comment; I’d love to hear what you think.

Click here to view the video.

When Stephanie pulled together this rag-tag team from Albany Park and offered to teach them a thing or two about improv. they never imagined it would go this far. Beginners to comedy improv, most of them, they joined up for summer kicks. When they were approached with the idea of taking on the Gladiators they bravely stepped up to the bat. Jon, Tim, Caroline, Josh, Robert and Anna, together with Stephanie and the most delicious Pizza Party I’ve ever attended. Will that be enough to carry them through four more Friday performances? Will they pull past the other teams to compete in the finals?  Join us next time and see!

My junk mail from Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, respectively: