German expressionist cinema

[3] Among the first Expressionist films, The Student of Prague[4] (1913), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), From Morn to Midnight (1920), The Golem: How He Came into the World[4] (1920), Genuine (1920), Destiny (1921), Nosferatu[4] (1922), Phantom (1922), and Schatten (1923) were highly symbolic and stylized.This dark, moody school of filmmaking was brought to the United States when the Nazis gained power and many German film makers emigrated to Hollywood.Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Carol Reed and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1930s and 1940s, expanding Expressionism's influence on modern film making.In his third film, The Lodger, Hitchcock introduced expressionist set designs, lighting techniques, and trick camera work to the British public against the wishes of his studio.[11] Woody Allen's 1991 film Shadows and Fog is an homage to German and Austrian Expressionist filmmakers Fritz Lang, Georg Wilhelm Pabst and F. W.[12] The extreme angles of set decor and associated lighting were parodied by Ken Hughes in his Berlin spy school segment for the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale.Many critics see a direct tie between cinema and architecture of the time, stating that the sets and scene artwork of Expressionist films often reveal buildings of sharp angles, great heights, and crowded environments, such as the frequently shown Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.German Expressionist painters rejected the naturalistic depiction of objective reality, often portraying distorted figures, buildings, and landscapes in a disorienting manner that disregarded the conventions of perspective and proportion.German Expressionist films produced in the Weimar Republic immediately following the First World War not only encapsulate the sociopolitical contexts in which they were created, but also rework the intrinsically modern problems of self-reflexivity, spectacle and identity.The films were shot in studios where they could employ deliberately exaggerated and dramatic lighting and camera angles to emphasize some particular affect – fear, horror, pain.