What is it about?
Art histories and cultural theory often reflect the movements, which composed German avant-garde in literature, painting and theatre such as expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit and Dada in a manner, which excludes cinema, only allowing sometimes that the artistic movements influenced cinema production of the time. However, the whole picture of the period in German arts would be incomplete without considering the imagery provided by films, which contributed along with radical art, a visibility of »the bad«.
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Why is it important?
Filmmakers at the time of Weimar Republic ascended to an awareness that the reality of an existing world could and must be a result of the mode of seeing it through the lenses of a film camera. . Amazingly, this instrument of depicting the external reality in frames became a material for counter-realistic gestures, which strengthened the repudiation of realism by Expressionism and other similar stances in other avant-garde movements.
Perspectives
The chapter in the book of essays under the title The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later (ed. By Polona Tratnik) is a contribution to a new understanding of the role of cinema in the combined developments of art and mass culture. Especially German expressionist cinema represents an origin of long-term influences in the expansion of cinematic art regarding reflections of the social and political context, inventions of imagery, film directing, special effects and finally: the German expressionist cinema formed several authors, who fled Nazism and became prominent in Hollywood.The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later
Darko Štrajn
Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Expressionism and Weimar Cinema, December 2023, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004685871_010.
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