Artists in Exile

Right now we're studying film: mostly Murnau (Faust, The Last Laugh/Der letzte Mann, Nosferatu, Sunrise) and Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis, The Big Heat, The Woman in the Window)

The whole theory is that American film noir is from German expressionism and Bauhaus. Here's some of my last paper arguing in favor of silent film:

The aesthetic superiority of silent cinema is an argument held by Rudolf Arnheim. In his view, the absence of color and the absence of sound dictate the medium of quality filmmaking. Proponents of silent film will probably philosophize that art is a confrontation of creativity and boundary. It is by working within limitations that artistic effect is achieved. In Arnheim’s words, “such indirect representation of an event in a material that is strange to it, or giving not the action itself but only its consequences, is a favorite method in all art” (Arnheim 107). As in film, the parameters of a sonnet exemplify the literary license taken; the ballerina’s dance is dramatic because of the confines of the human body and the demands of the choreography on it. To Arnheim, film is at its artistic best when the director uses its lack of depth, color, and sound to represent the human condition on an even more soulful level.

Arnheim celebrates black-and-white film for putting a greater focus on the effects of light: “The reduction of actual color values to a one-dimensional gray series is a welcome divergence from nature which renders possible the making of significant and decorative pictures by means of light and shade” (Arnheim 66). In Sunrise, there are two very different scenes of the Man with women: first, a memory of good times with his wife and baby; second, a rendezvous with the Woman from the City. In the first scene it is daylight and very bright, all characters look bathed in white. The Man runs over to hug his family. The characters move very quickly. We get a sense of contentedness and innocence. In the second, the Man and the city woman are embracing in the swamp. It is nighttime; they move slowly and seem to flicker in the shadows. Though the passion is tangible, we get a sense of greed and guilt. We only see half of their faces: the city woman’s face is pale, but not bright, and the Man’s face is heavily shadowed. Later, after he is forgiven and shaved, the lighting on the Man’s face makes him radiant. The transformation is obvious and dramatic. It signifies that his burdens are gone. We get to see the transformation again just to be sure, after the Wife is rescued from the water. Light can be used to romanticize facial expression. A little later, when the man asks his wife to go out boating, the camera trains on her as she moves from despair to hope to joy, the shadows literally lifting from her face. The cinematography highlights this gorgeous bit of acting. In color, we might have focused on the flush in her cheeks or the color of her eyes –pretty, but not significant.

Sunrise, 1927 - the same year as The Jazz Singer. Not a talkie but not silent either, soundtrack and some sound effects were added using sound-on-film (Fox Movietone) system.