German Expressionist Film: A Century of Influence

With the release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu at the start of this year, the long shadows left by the German Expressionist film and art movement are visible once again. But the movement, as well as the 1922 film that inspired it, is unfamiliar to most.  

Born out of a nation reeling from the horrors of the First World War, German Expressionism abandoned realist art, prioritising individual interpretation over objectivity. It was a movement which reinvented cinema, introduced to audiences the first horror films, and held a mirror to the public’s thinly veiled fears as Europe lurched into the technological twentieth century.  

World War One gave German filmmakers two building blocks on which Expressionism was founded. Firstly, the German film industry was mobilised during the war to produce propaganda, films that inspired patriotism across the German Empire and rallied support from the home front. As a result, the industry had been continuously funded throughout the war, and it remained largely unscathed as the guns fell silent in late 1918.  

Secondly, the Great War had left deep scars across Europe. These were both mental and physical: grief over the millions lost in battle, memories of industrialised combat, and anger at the government and military leaders who had orchestrated the four-year disaster from cosy war rooms miles from the muddy battlefields. The European artist had seen the world changed in only a four-year period and wanted to share their experience. The combination of these elements culminated in an art movement that transformed cinema into a veritable and respected art form in its own right.  

The advent of the movement is often accredited to Robert Wiene, with the release of his 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Dr Caligari was revolutionary, and Wiene’s film is the quintessential German Expressionist film. Every cliché of expressionism, every marker and theme, can be found in this original piece. The film concerns the titular Dr Caligari, who runs a carnival attraction in the form of Cesare, a somnambulist – or sleepwalker. The themes of control, distrust of authority, and paranoia are ever-present. Cesare, sleeping servant to the insane Caligari, is the World War One soldier: a disposable, mindless tool programmed by his masters. The anxieties of a postwar nation perpetuated in expressionist writing throughout the 1920s. 

Possibly the best-known film of the era, Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis gives prominence to another of the German public’s concerns: the growing socialist movement. Fears surrounding capitalism, industrial and technological advancements, and increased exploitation of an urban working class are visualised in Lang’s construction of the film’s ‘utopia’, reflecting the expansion of socialist politics throughout the Weimar era. 

But what else makes a film ‘expressionist’? What other than the shared themes and anxieties of a postwar society defined the movement? 

German Expressionism existed in the realm of subjectivity. Directors and artists sought to reject realism, preferring to show the world how they saw and experienced it. In The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, sets and backgrounds are not simple streets or parks, but rather distorted paintings which rise into the sky, or enclosed rooms which feel increasingly claustrophobic as the characters are controlled by outside forces. In Murnau’s Nosferatu, the use of innovative lighting techniques, particularly the elongated shadows of the titular vampire, evoke the symphony of horror throughout the film. Expressionism was more emotion than it was reality.  

Expressionist film contributed to the vibrant German culture under the Weimar government, but the Nazi party were quick to decry, denounce, ban, burn and censor what they labelled ‘degenerate art’. The reasoning for their hate was simple: expressionism opposed objectivity, rejected traditional forms and practices, and rebelled against the fascist ideals Nazism sought to instil in the country. As the Nazi Party rose to power in the early 1930s, the German Expressionist movement came to a close. Banned from producing their art, directors and artists left the country, and the German film industry was mobilised for the production of nationalist and racist propaganda, led by Joseph Goebbels.  

Despite the movement’s end at the hands of a fascist regime, the legacy of German Expressionism lasts to the modern day. The German directors, producers, cinematographers and artists were acquired by Hollywood, giving them refuge and work in exchange for low pay and their incorporation into a growing studio system of filmmaking. The assimilation of the German expatriates into American film culture in turn inspired new film movements, namely the postwar influx of Film Noir, which combined German Expressionist techniques with American anxieties in the wake of the Second World War.  

The movement’s legacy can still be seen today. Entire genres, particularly horror, owe their entire existence to German Expressionism and the artists who created it. From Murnau to Eggers, countless have been inspired by and paid tribute to German Expressionism over a long century of influence.  

Bibliography 

Bello, Kat, ‘How Did German Expressionism Change the History of Cinema?’ (2023), The Collector, <https://www.thecollector.com/german-expressionism-changed-history-of-cinema/> [Accessed 10 January 2025] 

Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang (Paramount Pictures, 1927)  

Mühl-Benninghaus, Wolfgang, ‘Film/Cinema (Germany)’ (2014), International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/filmcinema-germany/#toc_german_feature_film_production_during_the_war> [Accessed 12 January 2025] 

Nosferatu, dir. F. W. Murnau (Film Arts Guild, 1922) 

Plasse, Marianne, ‘The Powerful Legacy of German Expressionism’ (2023), The Collector, <https://www.thecollector.com/german-expressionism-legacy/> [Accessed 10 January 2025] 

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene (Goldwyn Pictures, 1920) 

Titford, John, ‘Object-Subject Relationships in German Expressionist Cinema’, Cinema Journal, Vol.13, No.1 (1973), pp.17-24 

Welsch, Tricia, ‘Foreign Exchange: German Expressionism and Its Legacy’, Cinema Journal, 38(4) (1999), pp.98-102