German Expressionism
The city in 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' (1920) has no straight lines. Walls lean, windows warp, shadows are painted onto the floor. The usual explanation — that there wasn't enough power to rig proper lighting, so shadows were painted on instead — is one I couldn't find any support for. What's certain is that the painting came first: Die Brücke in 1905, Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, the film in 1920. And the art director, Walter Reimann, belonged to Der Sturm, the gallery and magazine at the center of Expressionism. The movement reached the screen through personal connections. The film carries a seam that's still argued over. The screenwriters, Janowitz and Mayer, wrote the story as a critique of authority. But Fritz Lang, an early candidate to direct, proposed wrapping it in a frame revealing it all as a madman's delusion. The two writers objected strongly, Lang left to direct something else, and the frame stayed in the finished film. Kracauer later wrote, in 'From Caligari to Hitler,' that this frame pulled the story's teeth. A single frame can change what a film means. Politics brought the story to its end. Once the Nazis took power, Jewish filmmakers left the country. Lang told a famous story about himself — that Goebbels offered him the post of leading figure in German cinema, and he left for Paris that same day. But later biographical research places his actual departure months afterward, and even the timing of the meeting doesn't quite line up. An offer was probably made. The 'same day' part seems to have grown more dramatic with each telling. This map has more than one story like that.