German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (review)

Wallflower Press has become a valuable resource for undergraduate courses in the field of film studies with Short Cuts, its series of introductory texts for students and lecturers. Among other titles on film genres, concepts, technologies, and movements, this book presents expressionism as an iconic movement in German cinema of the 1920s. Six brief chapters sketch a chronological history of the period and profile those directors said to have made the most significant contribution to cinematic Expressionism in Weimar Germany, generally through the case study of a single film. This format usefully combines the structure of a survey with the opportunity for close textual analysis, often illustrated with effective frame enlargements.

Roberts's take on German Expressionist cinema comes down to this: the trademark low-key lighting that produces a vivid chiaroscuro play of light and shadow (a function of at least some scenes in many studio-made films throughout the Weimar period) is identified as the visual expression of a characteristic preoccupation with liminal spaces between reality and fantasy, especially the "oneiric" realm of dreams and visions. The result is a largely undifferentiated view of the period that promotes Expressionism as the dominant, if not only, style of film production in Weimar Germany. In effect this represents a new version of the old meta-narrative advanced by Lotte Eisner that she herself repudiated.

With a notoriously elusive term as its main organizing idea, Roberts's book exhibits the same flaws he has observed in the long-standing debate about Expressionism as a movement across the arts. Indeed his survey of German silent film between 1919 and 1929 adopts an exceptionally "broad, ill-defined" (14) approach that pushes the expansionist trend to new extremes. Here the list of directors "commonly regarded as having made the greatest contribution to German expressionist film" (9) includes an anomaly, a real surprise: along with the usual suspects in art cinema (Wiene, Murnau, Lang, and Pabst) we find the king of blockbuster serials and popular adventure films, Joe May. Turns out, all it takes to qualify is one film with some distinctive chiaroscuro lighting (Asphalt in the case of May). The umbrella here becomes so wide that it covers all genres and styles: even a street film like Asphalt known for documentary realism is said to conceal an Expressionist intent. Thus the argument conflates opposing movements and drains the term Expressionism of coherent meaning.

Roberts overlooks recent efforts to counter such excesses. For example, Expressionist Film edited by Dietrich Scheunemann (2003)—the most important critical anthology on the topic in English, which is missing in the book's bibliography—attempts to reframe the debate by restricting the radius of cinematic Expressionism to a few films in the early years of the Weimar Republic and then activating differences of style and genre both within and between these and other films of the period. If Roberts's position is problematic, in an introductory text it spells confusion.