Harry Griffin
"We're all stories in the end, just make it a good one"
Film Viewings
The 1920 German silent film ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ by Robert Wiene is arguably the first true horror film and for the time set a brilliantly high bar for the genre since it was the first film of its kind is classed as a ‘phantasmagoria’ film. I found the film to be very surrealistic throughout its use of distorted perspective lines in the handmade sets to create a very abstract world; which heavily reflected the German expressionist movement of the time. I found that it was such an incredible piece of film especially for the time.
One of the things I found most interesting was the use of colour in the film. It was given a blue overlay when the scene was set in a dark place or at night, an orange overlay for the scene was in daylight or artificial light, and lastly, a pink overlay was used when we were inside the house of the female lead. The blue overlay was added when the scene was set in the dark or at night, the orange overlay was added when the scene was set in artificial light or in the day, and the pink overlay was added when we were in the house of the female lead.
For anyone who is a big fan of Tim Burton’s work as I am, you can see clear correlations between his and Wiene’s work. Throughout the film I kept picking up on pieces that I could have sworn I'd seen in Burton’s work such as the whole story loosely reminding me of Edward scissors hands and Cesare (Caligari’s creation) reminded me intensely of Edward. Even Caligari himself and how he was dressed had strong implications of Danny Devito’s Penguin in the 1992 film Batman Returns which was produced by none other than Tim Burton; the list can go on and on. This just proves that films that date back as far as this can be such an inspiration to movies made over half a century later and is classed as a must-watch for anyone interested in cinema.
Metropolis is a 1927 silent film by Fritz Lang. The German expressionist science-fiction drama was set over a period of seventeen months and cost more than 5 million Reichsmarks, which is equivalent to 21 million euros; this made it the most expensive film made in the decade. Lang visited Hollywood and realised if they were going to compete with them they would really need to go big or go home. Hitler and Goebbels were actually very interested in this film and interested in Lang. They thought he was an interesting director to use and manipulate to create Nazi propaganda but Lang’s wife was Jewish so they did end up leaving the country quite quickly. This was also the very first film in cinema to convey the concept of a mechanical being/person.
This film was so different for its time presenting such a highly stylised futuristic city (inspired by the Art Deco movement). Creating a nearly three-hour marvel of science fiction cinema, Metropolis contained all the ambition and scope of a modern-day genre classic. This is again one of the most inspiring pieces of cinema ever created. The vast futuristic cityscapes inspired Blade Runner, several Batman films, and even inspired one of the most iconic characters of all time C3PO in the early concepts by Ralph McQuarrie it can be seen that he originally resembled the robot in Metropolis much more.
This film deals with the ideologies of class and race in the 20th century which is brought across to the audience in the most amazing way by having this lovely futuristic ‘utopia’ above the ground and having a slum working-class city below ground and they keep the city above running, working ungodly shifts which can be seen in scenes throughout the film. One particular scene is when Freder goes below to help the poor unfortunates and takes over a shift of what appears to be a clock and you match the two hands wherever the lights are. The city's hierarchy soon crumbles (like the city underground when it becomes flooded, brought on by the robot) when the lower class rebel, showing that the perfect city as it seems can only work properly when the lower class are submissive. At the end of the film, he becomes the mediator between the head (the city above which his father is in charge) and the heart (the people below). Translated into German the word mediator ‘Mittler’ is a word that has a chilling echo with another real-life leader. This is a true masterpiece of cinema.
Un Chien Andalou is an experimental art film directed by Luis Bunuel (and Salvador Dali co-directed). The film was very short, only 20 minutes. And after viewing I was left very confused. It seemed that throughout the film there were multiple men but after some discussion, there was only one. Films did not make people really think until this was released in 1929. People were used to the same basic framework of either a sad ending or a happy ending. Nowadays we are so desensitised to what we see on the television because we are used to that sort of thing, or things even more shocking, but back then when this sort of surrealist film was so new people would have been left shocked and perplexed, especially when it comes to the marvellous special effects that included the eye being cut open with a barber razor. Overall, as confused as I was, I very much enjoyed the short film and would definitely watch it again.
Zero de Conduite was written, directed, and edited by Jean Virgo in 1933; and was only forty minutes long. This film was banned for its lawless attitude (and at the time this was just after Hitler’s rise to power) and wasn’t released until 1945 out of government fear that it would be an incitement for boarding school boys to misbehave. It was revolutionary and anarchistic. The film follows a group of unhappy schoolboys, who are fed up with their over-repressive teachers, at a state boarding school in Paris. A lot of where we are today is because of designers such as Virgo who were very rebellious in how they wanted to show things to an audience. I found the film funny in some sections, and some sections were just rather strange. This was also the first example of slow motion in film which was achieved by pushing the film through twice as fast, and this has become revolutionary with most films nowadays having some form of slow motion capture.
