Most summaries of expressionism will tell you that the movement is characterized by an expression of the artist’s internal, subjective experience rather than the exterior, objective world. But I’ve always thought this was too simple a reduction. Expressionism doesn’t present the world as something that would be fixed were it not filtered through the artist’s subjective frame of mind; it presents the world as something irrevocably experienced in a frame of mind, something that cannot be separated or distilled from that frame of mind. In other words, there is no internal or external world in Expressionism—there is only the world as it is lived. This is in radical opposition to the metaphysics underlying realist art, which tries to construct a representation of the “objective” world and only then submits itself to our “subjective” interpretation. My primary interest in art is as a means of acquiring an understanding of the world, not as a list of facts and figures or exact visual representations, but as a qualitative figuration of that world as I—and perhaps more importantly, others—experience it. As such, my taste in art is skewed dramatically toward the expressionist side of things.
However, after having seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I always feel slightly let down by the later German Expressionist films. Wiene’s film so violently embraces its Expressionist themes that everything following it seems tamed by comparison. From its beginning, the film breaks down the distinction between the physical world and the world of the protagonist: as he begins to narrate his story, we see images of the story intercut with his visceral reaction to them, as if he is experiencing the story as he tells it. And the story we see is an utterly singular one. With exaggerated makeup and wild gesticulations, the villain, the titular doctor, appears as a grand grotesque around which the story swirls. The set design consists of obviously painted backdrops and fabricated buildings’ facades jutting forth into the frame at wild angles, with (painted-on) tilted windows and doors at odds even with those angles, creating a cramped, cacophonous space in which the villain roams. The set design’s mad geometries disrupt our everyday Cartesian space, conveying a sense of pervasive, nightmarish uncertainty. The effect is akin to Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator’s madness renders his descriptions uncertain and bizarre. But the medium of film allows for a slightly different effect: by depicting “real” people (or at least nearly-exact visual representations of people) moving through the mad geometries and gesticulations, it insists that this is not a distorted image of the world. It is precisely the real world—the world as the protagonist experiences it.
And here is a thematically similar painting by the Russian expressionist Soutine, who seriously rocks:
Tags: Expressionism, favorites, movies, phenomenology
