German Expressionism (According to the book Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson)

                    German film industry greatly struggled in making its own name during the World War I. The German Expressionist movement was then established due to the isolation of the country during the war. The country imported foreign films, which includes films from France, USA, Italy, and Denmark. It was hard to ban the importation of these international films because they're afraid that those movie houses in Germany would only have little movies to show. But when the German government raised their support to its film industry, acquiring international films was stopped, and local production companies started producing their own films. Germans rose in film making, they even made their stylistic influence abroad.

Alfred Hitchcock

                     The young Alfred Hitchcock was just one of those foreign film makers who got attracted on studios built in Europe by Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). He was an English film producer and director. He founded vast techniques in terms of suspense and thriller films. He was even noted as The Master of Suspense.

                     At the end of the war, German film industry mainly focused on three genres, including the popular adventure serial which features spy rings, clever detectives, and exotic settings; sex exploitation cycle, which dealt educationally with such topics as homosexuality and prostitution; and also the popular Italian historical epics of the prewar period.

Ernst Lubitsch

                Ernst Lubitsch brought the name of Germany in film industry for he was the first German director to be hired by Hollywood. It was mainly because of his extremely popular film Madame Dubarry, a German silent film about the life of Madame Dubarry, the chief mistress of Louis XV of France. This film paved the way for Lubitsch to reach Hollywood.

                

(Official trailer of the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

                   The 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari also served as a stepping stone for other films in Expressionist style to be known. It created sensation first in Berlin, then in different countries like France and United States. Big companies like UFA relied on Expressionist films which could already compete with other countries' films. This was the first film of the movement.

                  German Expressionism greatly depends on mise-en-scene, which includes the shape present in the scene, as well as the actors. All the elements in a scene of German films must deeply interact with each other to create an overall composition. Expressionist films depended heavily as well on their designers. These film designers received relatively high salary and often mentioned on advertisements, that's why expressionist films' budget were climbing.

                When German began to imitate films produced by America, expressionism as a movement had died out. Films produced after this fact diluted the unique qualities of expressionist style. But there were German film makers who came to the United States, having the tendency to make Hollywood films feature the style of expressionist.

               German movement may have lasted for only seven years, but its still alive in some of the films produced today.

- ClarissaAlimot