German Film History (and 2 examples)

I have fulfilled at least one of my resolutions for 2009 - signing up for a film class, at Harvard Extension. "Masterpieces of German Cinema", it's called - which reminds me of an odd fact about my experience with German films. I have seen a pretty strong representation of the masterpieces of German cinema - certainly, most of the (non-Nazi) films featured in this class. But I have seen very little else from German films. Even the auteurs - other than Herzog, maybe Murnau, it's thin going - 8-10 Fassbinders (what's that, a week's production?), half dozen Wenders, only a couple of Lang's German films, and not much else. And not much German film that isn't sort of a "masterpiece" - a handful of films in the last decade or so, though not many even there... Compared to French films, or Japanese, or Chinese - even Italian - it's well behind those countries, not just in how much I've seen, but how widely I've seen them. No German equivalent for any of the genres I've sampled in other countries (Giallo, kung fu films, anime or Samurai pictures, etc.) I haven't really even read about German films that much - less than French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Indian, African, Iranian, Italian, even Spanish I suspect.... So I hope, even if the screenings are standards, the reading, the lectures, the clips and shorts we cover will significantly expand this knowledge.

Anyway: the class got off to a rousing start, with screenings of the 1913 Student of Prague and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The latter of course is one of the founding text of Canonical German Cinema - the former is a clear precursor of expressionism, horror films - a doppelganger story derived from Poe, featuring some neat double exposures to allow Paul Wegener to play himself and his reflection... it's both a Faust story and a doppelganger story - a sorcerer offers Wegener's student (of Prague) 100,000 marks for any one thing in the student's (very studentlike) room - a good deal! the sorcerer takes his reflection from the mirror - who, as in Poe's William Wilson, or Dostoevski's The Double, (not to mention Rob Lowe) starts showing up at inopportune times, doing terrible things that the student probably thought of first... The student pursues a woman, of course, neglecting, of course, the Poor Gypsy Girl who stalks him... all this ends in tears, and - you can read William Wilson if you need the rest... Caligari is famous enough, I'll skip the long recap - we have a mad scientist, a somnambulist, two friends in love with the same girl, a string of murders, an old book of magic and a diary, flashbacks, and a possibly misbegotten frame story - and a revolutionary and still rather radical design sense.



Though one of the things that struck me watching these two films is that Caligari (made in 1920, already showing a fair amount of understanding of classical cinema codes) looked more archaic, "primitive" than the earlier film. Not because of the sets, which are still dazzling, or the design,but because it does seem to be moving toward that classical style, but using archaic means. It has picked up on the ideas of centering and controlling the image, of creating identification with characters and holding it there - it picks out the important elements of the shot, makes most of its meaning from shot to shot, rather than within shots - all classical conventions. But it still has the older tableau style staging - fairly long shot lengths - and it doesn't really use editing to construct the story. It uses lighting - and irises and other masks, where later films would cut (or wipe or what have you.) It looks odd - creating montage like effects without montage....

Student of Prague, on the other hand, looks surprisingly modern. Part of the reason for this is that it's aesthetic has reappeared - mostly in art films, new wave, etc. It's shot mostly in long takes, usually in fairly deep spaces, and uses a lot of the "tableau technique" David Bordwell has discussed. Decentralized framings, multiple planes of action, a certain freedom in the frame - things happen that seem unrelated to the story. In class, this was used to illustrate pre-classical structures - the dispersal of action in the frame, vs. the concentration and control of classical cinema. True enough - but it's also controlled quite well. The filmmakers do a fine job of directing attention - and of shifting attention, or creating multiple points of interest. The opening sequence is a fine example: Balduin, the student, comes to a cafe - but he is broke and bored and sits apart from his friends, though they try to get him to join the party. The dancing girl (who has an eye for him) dances on a table, but he doesn't care. Finally - Scapalini the sorcerer turns up and he and Balduin share a table and a chat. Balduin wants a lottery ticket and a woman - Scapalini says he can do that. They leave together....

All that is one shot. It's a big open space, a cafe - though the cafe is ranged around the back of the shot. There is a table in the foreground... The filmmakers use this space wonderfully. The cafe is full of people - all in the back of the shot though - there is an open space in the left foreground. Three students enter from the bottom left of the screen - focusing our attention on them. But they lead us back into the crowd - except one of them, Balduin, circles through the cafe and comes back into the foreground, in front of the rest of the people, and sits at the table facing us. This creates two levels of space - the bustle in the back (decentered, dispersed, etc.) and Balduin, alone, in the foreground. HIs friends come and talk to him, connecting the two, but he ignores them - they go back and the girl emerges, climbs on a table and dances - intensifying the division of our interest. Balduin ignores her - she dances - a spectacle to us, but she is staring intently at Balduin all the time... And then - a wagon comes through the frame, cutting off the background all at once, as effectively as a curtain falling. Scapalini gets off the wagon and sits beside Balduin. The wagon rolls off - now the cafe behind them is empty, expect for the girl. And the filmmakers continue their use of multiple points of interest - as Balduin and Scapalini talk, the girl creeps up on them, trying to seem or hear - they never notice her, but we are very much aware of her. And finally, when the men leave, she creeps after them, still unnoticed.... It's a fine piece of stagecraft - and filmmaking - using the camera compositions to define the staging - using on and offscreen space, but through stagecraft (like the horse) and camera movements, or just entrances and exits. It carefully modulates our attention from foreground to background, from the crowd to he characters, and between the characters... The rest of the film, though less brilliant, probably, is similarly handled - a consistently fine use of space, staging, the borders of the camera's frame, multiple planes within the shot, use of doors and internal frames to expand and contract the space of the shot, and so on.

It looks modern because much of this has been picked up by art films (primarily) - and it looks less outdated than Caligari because later films tended to pick up these devices fairly straight. Staging and composition is staging and composition, especially within long shots - the means of editing have changed quite a bit since 1920 (let alone 1913) - but a long take of a more or less coherent space is a long take now... It is interesting to see how certain strands of film history get picked up, half a century or so later (and then off and on since then)...