A Trip Through Early Cinema's Kingdom of Shadows, Part 2
The Cinema And Poetry of German Expressionism—And The Poetry of Its Cinema
Last Thursday (May 2), we began an exploration into early cinema’s darker side with a special focus on the massive role that German Expressionism played in silent-era movies, most notably in the development of horror films. That post hit the character limit for Substack emails, so we’re continuing the discussion here. A caveat: This post goes long, too. We’ll wrap things up in a few days with the next and final part of this series (part 3). There’s a lot to say on this topic.
Although this Substack was mainly founded to engage with and present in English a poem-by-poem translation of the 1919 German Expressionist poetry anthology Twilight of Humanity (“Menschheitsdämmerung”)—the poetic Bible of German Expressionist literature that features most of its leading literary voices—I’ve also mentioned I’d occasionally dip into subject matter adjacent to GE literature in the interest of placing it into its proper cultural context. This includes providing relevant backstory about the German Expressionist movement more broadly; and that includes intermittent deep dives into key areas of German Expressionism like art and cinema. The German Expressionist phenomenon has had a substantial impact on international horror—in literature, yes, but especially in movies—that is hard to overestimate.
In the United States and other English-speaking nations, folks are nowadays most likely to encounter German Expressionist art through its cinema, especially its (rightly) celebrated horror films. And as I’ve noted in earlier posts, one of the single best-known products of German Expressionist filmmaking is F.W. Murnau’s 1922 movie Nosferatu. Murnau subtitled his film “A Symphony of Horror” (“Eine Symphonie des Grauens”), similar to editor Kurt Pinthus subtitling the 1919 Twilight of Humanity Expressionist poetry anthology “Symphony of New Creation.” And the first intertitle greeting the audience in Murnau’s undead “Symphony” of 1922 is indeed darkly poetic:
Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the deathbird calling your name at midnight? Do not utter it, or the images of life into pale shadows and ghostly dreams will rise from your heart and feed on your blood.
I can think of at least two things that prove Nosferatu’s enduring relevance: 1) As I write this, it’s currently being re-made—for at least its second time—by American director Robert Eggers of 2015’s The Witch fame); and, 2) an idea introduced about vampires in Murnau’s Nosferatu has since become canon in most “rules” governing fictional vampires: namely, that sunlight causes them to disintegrate, combust, immolate, or otherwise suffer pain of death. (Sunlight weakened or deterred vampires before Nosferatu—as in Dracula—but exposure to the sun never outright combusted or otherwise exterminated the undead bloodsuckers.) Murnau’s 102-year-old movie continues to enthrall audiences on its own, even without the remakes, however—and this is true even among those who are unaware that the movie barely exists. It survived a lawsuit brought about by the widow of Bram Stoker in which she demanded all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed for infringing upon her late husband’s copyright. (And let’s face it—it did!) Although most copies of Murnau’s film were, in fact, destroyed in the 1920s, a few prints of Nosferatu thankfully survived. (And this is all the more miraculous given that 90% of all silent films, regardless of genre or country of origin, are currently presumed lost.)
After the horror movies produced by German Expressionism, one is most likely to encounter German Expressionist works nowadays through the movement’s striking visual art. And after that, it’s most likely one might come across its important contributions to the stage. And if one counts Kafka among German and/or Austrian Expressionist authors—and many don’t, in fact, count him as a true Expressionist author, for one reason or another—then that would make German Expressionist prose perhaps the movement’s fourth-most-familiar product. And then that leaves us with the poetry of German Expressionism. It comes in dead last. In other words, it’s sadly the case that German Expressionist poetry—as vital, passionate, apocalyptic, unsettling, and as extraordinary as it may be—is nowadays least known from a movement that at some points in the past few decades had been considered among the West’s “most important contributions to the cultural history of the twentieth century.” Like Dadaism and Surrealism after it—and many Expressionists went on into both those movements—German Expressionism was at several points conceived of as a primarily literary movement, especially by many of its early leaders, and when the movement was at its most vigorous. The movement’s horror cinema, however, undoubtedly had the greatest effect in boosting the movement to international notice.
Two primary reasons account for the continuing relative obscurity of German Expressionist poetry: Much of it remains untranslated; and much of it is out of print. Or, as is commonly the case with such things, both are true simultaneously. (And that’s where the Substack you’re reading comes in.) Conversely, a major part of the success of the horror (and sci-fi) movies of German Expressionism rests in the fact that they require little to no translation. Their nightmarish and otherworldly aspects hold a universal appeal. That appeal has held strong for over a century now.
The links between the poetry of German Expressionism and its celebrated filmographic achievements may seem tenuous (or even nonexistent) at first glance, but they are there; and, in fact, the links reveal themselves to be all the more stronger the more one investigates. As Lotte Eisner wrote in The Haunted Screen: German Expressionism in Cinema, Germany in the late 1910s produced an artistic culture that held an “attraction towards all that is obscure and undetermined, towards the kind of brooding speculative reflection called Grübelei, which culminated in the apocalyptic doctrine of Expressionism.” This predilection for the apocalyptic became manifest in both Expressionism’s post-WWI cinematic works (Nerves, Caligari, etc.) and in its poetry—like the poetry collected in this Substack’s namesake, Twilight of Humanity, and in the 1910s Morgue and Flesh poetry collections of Gottfried Benn, for example. The apocalyptic side of Expressionism to which Eisner refers would also include a poem discussed elsewhere in this Substack, Jakob van Hoddis’ “End of the World,” the poem that appears on page 1 of Twilight of Humanity. Poems by Expressionist writers like Georg Trakl and Georg Heym also evince pathological obsessions with death, decay, alienation, destruction, insanity, and the total fracturing of reality. This is reflected, too, in the most extreme examples of German Expressionist cinema.
In a very real sense, Expressionist filmmakers tended to have better outcomes in life than their strictly literary and poetic brethren: Although many of Expressionism’s key film talents would end up in Hollywood by the late 1920s or early 1930s, Expressionist poets like Jakob van Hoddis—and indeed many of the poets in Twilight of Humanity, six of whom were already dead by the time of the volume’s publication in late 1919—did not fare as well. Van Hoddis, for example, found his end in the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp. He was murdered there in 1942, nine years after Hitler’s fascist regime designated Expressionism a form of “degenerate art.”
In 2009, Roger Ebert noted that “a case could be made” that Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is “the first true horror film.” After F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang’s dystopian sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927), Caligari—filmed in 1919 but released in early 1920—may indeed be the best-known product of the Expressionist film movement. But Ebert’s savvy wording about Caligari’s status as first true horror film is no doubt intentional (“a case can be made,” “first true,” etc.)—and with good reason. Ebert knew all too well it wasn’t so simple.
In fact, although France and Germany dominated silent horror cinema overall—especially in the important period that lasted from the Great War until the arrival of talkies—that is, from about 1914 to 1928/29—the Scandinavians and Italians had made several impressive entries into the genre, too. While Frenchman Georges Méliès’ 1896 “House of the Devil” is usually accorded the honor of being called the first horror film, its three-minute length precludes it from being considered horror’s first feature-length movie. And that’s an important distinction. Because when we’re talking about who made the first true feature-length horror film, that honor goes—and with apologies to the late, great, Pulitzer Prize-winning Roger Ebert, with whom I nearly always agree 100%—not to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but to a trio of Italians. (It’s like that US indie record label says—sometimes Italians Do It Better.)
Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro were a group of filmmakers in Italy who produced, way back in 1911, an extraordinary film: Dante’s Inferno (“L’Inferno”). As a marvel of special effects, the film still manages to impress: superimpositions, trick photography, and surprising gore SFX have resulted in certain sequences in the film getting banned to this day. At one point in the movie, for example, the prophet Muhammad is shown in Hell having his chest explode, revealing his entrails. “The scenes from Hell from [“L’Inferno”] were reused in an American 1936 exploitation film, Hell-O-Vision, and the 1944 race film Go Down, Death!" one report states. “Some American state film censor boards required removal of the hell sequences from L'Inferno used in Go Down, Death!, such as one where a woman's bare breast is momentarily seen.” In fact, Italy’s 1911 Inferno movie still remains remarkable on a number of levels. Based on their countryman Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem about a literal descent into Hell, L’Inferno was a watershed moment for horror cinema in several ways. For starters, IMDB notes:
Dante’s Inferno (1911) is the first feature film to be shown in its entirety, in one screening, in the USA. Prior to this it was thought audiences wouldn't be prepared to sit for over an hour to watch a feature. Films such as Les Misérables (1909) and The Life of Moses (1909) were shown in episodic parts over the course of a month or two.
So not only is Inferno, with its one-hour and eleven-minute runtime, the first feature-length horror movie ever made, but IMDB also notes that it is “considered to be the first Italian, and oldest surviving, feature-length film”—of any genre.
It should come as no surprise that the new medium of cinema complemented the horror genre so well. Georges Méliès, for example, intuited immediately the macabre (and, frankly, mischievous) potentialities lying dormant in moving pictures. Motion picture antecedents like magic lantern shows and trick—or spirit-photography predisposed the medium to displays of the uncanny. Méliès knew this on a gut level.
And lest we forget about the source of this essay’s title—with its reference to “The Kingdom of Shadows”—it’s important to note that one of the earliest writers to witness silent film technology in action, the Russian author Maxim Gorky, was so unsettled by what he saw that his resulting essay has become a kind of classic of creative dark nonfiction.
Cinema transported one into the “Kingdom of Shadows,” Maxim Gorky reported in a famous 1896 essay. Gorky wrote during the time—in fact, at nearly the exact moment—of the birth of the new art form. He was lucky enough to have seen an early moving picture exhibition in the 1890s thanks to the Lumière brothers and their Cinématographe machine that was exhibited at the 1896 Nizhni-Novgorod Fair (also referred to as The All-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896). He was promised something that was hard to believe—living pictures.
Through the projections of the Lumière Cinématographe, one was delivered, Gorky would later report, into a mute realm of depthless apparitions, placed into a parallel and uncanny dreamworld populated by bloodless, disquieting beings who were the simulacra of human life. These apparitions spoke in soundless voices while grey foliage noiselessly swayed behind them in their flickering otherworld. Drifting around the shadow-world’s scenery were grey leaves that, like large flakes of ash, were carried aloft by mysterious and silent winds. And the sky—it was always the dead-grey color of lead.
After reading Gorky’s description, it comes as even less of a surprise that the new medium was greeted with such enthusiasm by the German Expressionists or that it was so amenable to horror more generally. It was the norm for Expressionist poets and painters to present images from humanity’s psychic kingdom of shadows, projecting them onto page and canvas by means of pen and paint. In his 1995 book The Phantom Empire, American poet Geoffrey O’Brien wrote that the invention of cinema revealed “a space beyond even the oversight of heaven.” A phantom empire.
It’s worth quoting at some length Maxim Gorky’s original 1896 essay about cinema’s dark shadowlands:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow. It is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Gorky continues:
Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph—moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals. When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, “A Street in Paris”—shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings, and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility.
All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you… All this moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it.
Gorky continues:
And all this in strange silence where no rumble of the wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.
Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.
It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows… Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out!It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice.
But this, too, is but a train of shadows. Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen…
Gorky continues:
This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.
—text originally from Maxim Gorky’s review of the Lumière program at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, written for the July 4, 1896 edition of Nizhegorodski listok. Gorky wrote this piece under the pseudonym “I. M. Pacatus.” The above are excerpts from his article.
In 1907, German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers looked out across the landscape of the new cinematic form and complained, “Where are the poets and painters who will create for movies?” But he needn’t have asked; only a few years later, Ewers was compelled to answer the call himself: He adapted, with Paul Wegener, parts of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” into Germany’s first feature-length horror film, 1913’s The Student of Prague (“Der Student von Prag”). Elements of Goethe’s Faust and Alfred de Musset’s December Night were also thrown into the movie’s storyline. The Student of Prague would only be the first of many Expressionist-tinged horror movies from both Ewers and Wegener throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, when Wegener would help adapt another Poe story into film in Germany. (This would be the 1932 horror anthology film Unheimliche Geschichten, released in the US as The Living Dead, though the German title literally translates to “Uncanny Tales.” The 1932 film is not to be confused with the previous 1919 horror anthology film that is also confusingly titled “Unheimliche Geschichten.” In fact, the 1932 Unheimliche Geschichten was considered a talkie remake of the eponymous 1919 silent movie, though the films vary considerably in content.)
The same year The Student of Prague was released, German Expressionist playwright and poet Walter Hasenclever (whose poems appear in Twilight of Humanity) evinced a more ambivalent attitude toward cinema. This was, after all, a time when doyens of the Continental literary and art salons dismissed the nascent moving picture phenomenon as rubbish; in English, the slang term “flickers” became disparagingly used to refer to film. In all cases, the superiority of the legitimate theatre (that is, the stage) relative to film was adamantly maintained. (It should be noted that this particular contretemps has not entirely abated and that it continues in some quarters to this day, especially among actors.) “Hatred of the movies is a result of a misunderstanding,” Hasenclever wrote. “Movies are not an art form like theatre, they are not sterile intellectualism; movies are in no way an idea…. Movies have something American, something brilliant, something kitschy about them. That’s what makes them popular; that’s what makes them good.”
Paul Wegener, in the meantime, was working on his Golem trilogy of horror films throughout the 1910s. In fact, the second of Wegener’s Golem trilogy, The Golem and the Dancing Girl, probably counts as the first horror spoof. Coming after his success with the first Golem movie of 1914, its plot synopsis strikes one as downright meta: “As a practical joke, an actor impersonates the screen monster [the Golem] he made famous.” Wegener directed and starred in the film with his equally talented wife, Lyda Salmonova.
In the midst of his success with the Golem films, on April 24, 1916, Paul Wegener delivered a highly-publicized and influential lecture on the future of film at the Berliner Singakademie. (This lecture was transcribed under the title “Neue Kinoziele”). Here, Wegener maintained that cinema constituted a new art form that he referred to as “optical poetry”: “With filmmaking, we enter a whole new world of visual fantasy, like a magic forest, and therein we come to a field of pure kinetics, or optical poetry, as I call it. This will become very important in the near future; it will open up new ideas to human consciousness, new conceptions of the sublime. And that, after all, is the end-purpose of all art. This gives cinema an area to exercise its own aesthetics independent from all other forms of art.”
Among the attendees at Wegener’s talk was female moviemaking and animation pioneer Lotte Reininger.
In the first two decades of the 1900s, movies carried the stigma of being seen as little more than cheap novelties that provided low-brow amusement for uneducated proles. The movie houses themselves—a new phenomenon along with the films they showed—were looked down upon as seedy places that attracted transients and other low-lifes, people who might pay admission to use the theater as an ersatz homeless shelter, or as places where darkness provided a convenient cover for illicit dealings. These are things German Expressionist poet Walter Hasenclever alludes to in a stanza from a (sympathetic) poem of his (“The Political Poet”) that appeared in 1919’s Twilight of Humanity:
When, every night, the unfortunate ones shiver in the movie houses,
And the hungry beg, hidden from view by marble walls,
A child, ill and abused, falls into silent death
When the vault of war-fortifications crumble
(“Wenn nächtlich in den Kinos Unglück schauert.
Der Hunger bettelt hinter Marmorhallen,
Misshandelt stirbt ein Kind und zugemauert
In Kasematten grobe Flüche fallen.”)
Hasenclever’s ambivalence about cinema as “true art,” mentioned earlier, was short-lived. He proclaimed, “Of all the art forms of our time, cinema is the strongest, because it’s the most contemporary.” And the Expressionist poet did alright for himself in the film business for a while, too: “Between 1913 and 1939, [Walter Hasenclever] wrote eight screenplays and three screen outlines,” notes Charles Helmetag in The German Quarterly, “negotiated film rights for several of his plays, wrote at least a dozen reviews and articles dealing with film, and appeared in two motion pictures.” He worked as a scriptwriter for MGM during its pre-Code heyday of 1929-1932, spent a few months in Hollywood in 1930, met and conversed with Greta Garbo while there, and returned to Berlin as an employee on MGM’s payroll. His biggest success was securing a 1930 (co-)screenwriting credit for the German version of Anna Christie, which, like its American version, starred Greta Garbo. In 1931, Hasenclever even wrote a brief and pleasant account of his meeting with the reclusive Garbo, “Begegnung mit Greta Garbo” (“Meeting Greta Garbo”).
Hasenclever’s ultimate fate, however, underscores how poorly the writers and poets of German Expressionism fared in comparison to the movement’s filmmakers. Many of the latter—though certainly not all—found refuge in Hollywood. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 and declared Expressionist art—its plays, paintings, prose, and poetry—”degenerate” (entartete kunst), Hasenclever’s life was turned upside down, as were the lives of many of his Expressionist colleagues. His employment with MGM in Germany ended. In a matter of only a few short years, the sensitive poet from western Germany went from having conversations with Greta Garbo at MGM to finding himself an alien and a pariah persecuted by his own country’s government. Like fellow German Expressionist poet Jakob van Hoddis, Walter Hasenclever met his end in a Nazi camp in World War II. A German of Jewish descent, Hasenclever died in Nazi captivity at age 49 in 1940.
This is the end of Part 2 of our exploration of early European horror cinema and its relation to German Expressionism.
In a few days I’ll wrap things up with Part 3.
This is Twilight of Humanity: German Expressionist Poetry in English.