Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DURING THE ten years between this and the second Mabuse Lang's dramatic construction and visual style underwent radical changes, changes basically of social perspective. Leaving films full of personalities, he began to make long-shot Expressionist dramas without real characters: the two Nibelungen movies and Metropolis. Abandoning these fatalistic myth-abstractions, he returned in M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) to films that treated social reality directly in the actions of a few closely connected characters...
...world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius, it is as an influence on Mabler and certain of the later expressionist composers. But Bruckner can be dismissed as easily, and with as much in telligence, as can Beethoven or Chartres Cathedral. This image of an uninspired symphonic rhetorician of beleaguered loquacity, "tortive and errant" as Shakespeare's Agamemnon, must yield to a clearer portrait of a consummately endowed symphonist firmly...
...BECKMANN: MEMORIES OF A FRIENDSHIP by Stephan Lackner. 126 pages. University of Miami. $7.95. The life of the German Expressionist painter presented in a sometimes dull, always informative reminiscence...
...films of the period, though, don't reflect it. Even Birth of a Nation, which was changing everyone's ideas of what films could be even while Intolerance was in production, dealt with members of two families in a historical context, tracing individuals' emotions through a war. The Expressionist practice of basing films on myths about existence postulates Intolerance by a few years, and Eisenstein's theory that films are the interplay of ideas cannot be found in the period before Intolerance -the period Eisenstein regarded as "prehistory." Finally, the embodiment of abstract themes in specific characters-the narrative feature...
...kill her; her flight is shot in high-angle, expressing the degree of freedom in even Jannings' most desperate action. Indeed, Sternberg cuts away to a doorway rather than showing Jannings being strait-jacketed. Later released, he returns to his old school desk to die the death of all Expressionist heroes. But Sternberg ends the film with shots of Dietrich, the burning Romantic figure and object, so that even in the person of the protagonists Sternberg's system triumphs over the Expressionistic scheme...