MetropolisScene from Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang.From a private collection
Peter Lorre in M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang.© Paramount Pictures Corporation; photograph, the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York CityLang had already directed several successful serials, including Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919–20), when he collaborated with his future wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, to produce Der müde Tod (“The Weary Death”; English title: Destiny, 1921) for Decla-Bioskop. This episodic Romantic allegory of doomed lovers, set in several different historical periods, earned Lang acclaim for his dynamic compositions of architectural line and space. Lang’s use of striking, stylized images is also demonstrated in the other films of his Expressionist period, notably the crime melodrama Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), the Wagnerian diptych Siegfried (1922–24) and Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1922–23), and the stunningly futuristic Metropolis (1926), perhaps the greatest science-fiction film ever made. After directing the early sound masterpiece M (1931), based on child murders in Düsseldorf, Lang became increasingly estranged from German political life. He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.
Murnau made several minor Expressionist films before directing one of the movement’s classics, an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula entitled Nosferatu—eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror,” 1922), but it was Der letzte Mann (“The Last Man”; English title: The Last Laugh, 1924), a film in the genre of Kammerspiel (“intimate theatre”), that made him world-famous. Scripted by Carl Mayer and produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, Der letzte Mann told the story of a hotel doorman who is humiliated by the loss of his job and—more important, apparently, in postwar German society—of his splendid paramilitary uniform. Murnau and Karl Freund, his cameraman, gave this simple tale a complex narrative structure through their innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots. In one famous example, Freund strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled drunkenly around the set of a bedroom to record the inebriated porter’s point of view. In the absence of modern cranes and dollies, at various points in the filming Murnau and Freund placed the camera on moving bicycles, fire engine ladders, and overhead cables in order to achieve smooth, sustained movement. The total effect was a tapestry of subjectively involving movement and intense identification with the narrative. Even more remarkably, the film conveyed its meaning without using any printed intertitles for dialogue or explanation.
Der letzte Mann was universally hailed as a masterpiece and probably had more influence on Hollywood style than any other single foreign film in history. Its “unchained camera” technique (Mayer’s phrase) spawned many imitations in Germany and elsewhere, the most significant being E.A. Dupont’s circus-tent melodrama Variété (1925). The film also brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he began to fulfill in 1927 after completing two last “superproductions,” Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1925) and Faust (1926), for UFA.
In 1924 the German mark was stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which financed the long-term payment of Germany’s war-reparations debt and curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement, UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It was saved by a $4 million loan offered by two major American studios, Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet (Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many of the filmmakers went back to UFA disgusted at the assembly-line character of the American studio system, but many—such as Lubitsch, Freund, and Murnau—stayed on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more would return during the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime.
In the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of “life as it is lived.” Called die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”), this spirit stemmed from the economic dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit translated into the grim social realism of the “street” films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), these films focused on the disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the postwar inflation.
The master of the form was G.W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that would become essential to the sound film. In such important realist films as Die freudlose Gasse, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), Pabst created complex continuity sequences, using techniques that became key features of Hollywood’s “invisible” editing style, such as cutting on action, cutting from a shot of a character’s glance to one of what the character sees (motivated point-of-view shots), and cutting to a reverse angle shot (one in which the camera angle has changed 180 degrees; e.g., in a scene in which a man and a woman face one another in conversation, the man is seen from the woman’s point of view, and then the woman is shown from the man’s point of view). Pabst later became an important figure of the early sound period, contributing two significant works in his pacifist films Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (“Comradeship,” 1931). Emigrating from Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Pabst worked in France and briefly in Hollywood. He returned to Germany in 1941 and made several films for the Nazi-controlled film industry during World War II.