Now in theaters, Robert Eggers’ vampire film Nosferatu might be the weirdest Christmas release of all time. Behind the high-brow remake and IMAX presentation lies a rich and complicated history that defined the medium of film, and it’s not pretty. Nosferatu marked the rise of the knock-off but, curiously, also announced the arrival of a worthy counterbalance to Hollywood’s dominance of cinema. Self-destructing as quickly as it blossomed, the German Expressionist movement haunts filmmakers to this day. The glory days and demoralizing demise is a horror story all its own.
Torn between making personal art and paying the bills, German directors produced several stunning movies in just a dozen years. As with most great art, the bigger the obstacle, the better the final product. They specialized in macabre stories of madness, venality, and self-indulgence. The societal dysfunction is paralleled by characters afflicted with crippling self-doubt, hinting at an inevitable collapse into social decay and savagery. Supervillains run amok in underground societies, pulling the strings in a cold, mechanized world. The thematic and visual appeal still seen in movies a century later, whether it’s Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Tim Burton, or Ridley Scott. For example, Fritz Lang’s crowing achievement has been reinterpreted in Queen music videos, Superbowl ads, and anime.
One studio, U.F.A., reigned supreme above the others, its heyday and downfall coinciding with the decadent Weimar Republic, the two forever linked. The diaspora was unstoppable, but before Germany’s best and brightest minds got the hell out of Dodge, it had already made quite an impact on the fledging medium in search of an identity. The artistic impact runs so deep, modern viewers who have never seen these silent movies are unaware that every Batman movie borrows a little of the gloom of Nosferatu, every noir echoes the disillusionment and perversity of M, and every dystopian film to this day is still aping Metropolis’ themes and art design.
Britain’s most beloved director, Alfred Hitchcock, was tutored by F.W. Murnau in the 1920s before his career took off, and many of Hollywood’s character actors were once headliners back in Berlin. The movement might have burned out with a fizzle, but it never really ceased, embedded within movie culture.
Germany, the Original Masters of Horror
Robert Wiene’s 1920 surreal horror classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, is usually considered the first landmark film in the German Expressionist phase, the picture that put Germany on the map when it came to films. At the very least, we’re diagnosing this movie as patient zero of the emo outbreak.
Goth fashions aside, this odd, little movie established a familiar tone and political attitude that would permeate German cinema for the next 15 or so years, for better or worse. Filmed almost immediately after the traumatic humiliation that was World War I, the movie was conceived as a bitter, anti-war jeremiad by the writers. In its final form, it was transformed into a dreamlike fantasy tale of a puppet-like man, played by Conrad Veidt, compelled to kill against his will by a hypnotist. As explored in Modernism and Its Media, that subtext was scrapped. To avoid any backlash, historian Siegfried Kracauer claims that Wiene was compelled to mask the inflammatory intent:
According to the pacifist-minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dim design of portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compulsory military service, is drilled to kil and to be killed.
The true message was an urgent warning in 1920 and even more ominous in the coming decades. That said, the vast majority of German movies were never meant for regular Germans but for foreigners, and U.F.A.’s films were ridiculed by German critics. No one in Germany could afford tickets, and inflation made exports far more lucrative. Wiene’s output in the late ’20s never matched his peak. However, others would follow in his footsteps, especially in the horror genre.
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The production value would improve, incorporating special effects and real locations. Wiene’s frequent collaborator Veidt found a niche playing freaks in films such as The Man Who Laughs (1928) and The Hands of Orlac (1924). Of all these masterpieces, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) stands out as the pinnacle, a film that was destroyed for violating the copyright belonging to Bram Stoker’s estate and nearly lost entirely. A Nosferatu remake arrived in 1979, directed by Werner Herzog, followed by a pseudo-meta remake in 2000. Rob Eggers is only the latest in a long line paying their respects to Murnau’s bald vampire.
Why the Greatest German Film Was a Curse
There’s no shortage of brilliant minds to come out of Germany, and you need only look at later movies to find German Expressionism’s DNA. Roger Ebert praised G.W. Pabst as “the master of psycho-sexual melodrama,” foreshadowing bleak romances like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Fatal Attraction. Rising from lowly status in the mid-’30s as “B-movies,” Hollywood monster movies and film noir share a common origin in the Gothic aesthetic.
Bigger-budgeted American films ironically chased the creepy appeal of their German predecessors, which only looked the way they did because of extreme cheapness. Crews disguised their ramshackle sets and poor lighting setups with stylized backdrops and other desperate tricks, painting shadows and light to the wobbly scenery, crafting films that didn’t correspond to anything resembling reality:
As noted by film historian Andrew Spicer, “The most direct influence of German Expressionism was felt on a cycle of horror films produced by Universal in the early 1930s. Universal, led by the German-born Carl Laemmle, had a tradition of hiring Weimar talent.” Thus, Universal’s monster films including Dracula (and the infinite remakes and sequels) owe a small debt to Murnau’s illicit Nosferatu, banned but clearly not forgotten by German expats.
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Of all the fertile minds to emerge from Central Europe in the silent era, the one that casts the longest shadow is Fritz Lang. Crossing genres, his tightly edited spy blockbuster, Spione, aka Spies (1928), laid the foundation for the James Bond novels. Never afraid of exploring new things, he branched out into epic crime sagas like M, starring a then-unknown Peter Lorre and the pulpy Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922).
Metropolis (1927), despite its ever-growing esteem among artists and critics, was the turning point of the entire film movement, and not in the way you think. It’s a cult classic in the truest sense. Metropolis was such an expensive dud that producer and U.F.A. boss Erich Pommer was forced out before the thing even hit theaters for tolerating such irresponsible budgets. New management slashed costs and constantly clashed with their staff, losing talent like Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich.
The Party Comes to an End
The glorious run expired when the Nazis came to power, all films that questioned authority or conventional morality were banned as “degenerate art.” It didn’t help that many of the most crucial filmmakers and actors had Jewish ancestry, were married to Jews, or otherwise loathed Hitler. Within a year’s time, Lang was divorced (his wife/co-writer turned out to be a secret Nazi) and out of the country, continuing where he left off in Los Angeles. Legend goes that the German propaganda minister and his mustachioed boss were so impressed with Lang’s contributions to Germany’s film industry that he offered Lang the job of running the nationalized U.F.A. studios, though historians have debunked Lang’s account. Hitler was way more into Mickey Mouse cartoons. Sadly, Walt Disney was too busy to take the job.
By 1934, the golden era of German filmmaking was definitively over, and those left in charge were intent on ruining other countries’ movies as well, going so far as employing a special representative in Los Angeles to sabotage studios planning any film that denigrated Germany’s standing in the world.
Murnau, Lang, Lorre, and Veidt were all gone, and so was every notable star except Emil Jannings and Pabst, who were two of the very few world-famous celebrities who continued to work in Germany during World War II. Remakes and sequels — sometimes by the same writers and directors who made the originals — did follow but never quite hit the same high notes. What started as the most promising movie hub in the world had devolved into a pathetic shell of itself by the dawn of the “talkie.” German cinema has never fully recovered.
On the bright side, Murnau, Lang, and Wiene are not forgotten in the hearts of movie geeks, as seen in the most recent revival by Eggers. You can view his updated version of Nosferatu in theaters now. Maybe don’t bring the kids, though.
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