Object-Subject Relationships in German Expressionist Cinema

Abstract

Expressionist cinema is an impossibility. Like all art forms which believe that only the subjective, the interior life, is real, it can ultimately never avoid the paradox that for creation to take place, the inner experience must be externalized, and thereby partake of the world of objective reality. Cinema is a phenomenal medium. Expressionists and realists alike can exploit its possibilities, but never transcend its limitations. It must always be mimetic, symbolic, and can never be the thing it represents. As Henry James says of the novel, art must, unlike reality itself, have a beginning and an end. It must also be, in Wordsworth's phrase, emotion recollected in tranquility, the result of the memory of an experience rather than the experience itself. Nevertheless, the attempt to simulate inner states of being must be made. Having defined its bounds, it must be said that cinema has proved to be the most appropriate medium for expressionism. It is more dynamic than expressionist painting, more able to instill a feeling of horror than expressionist literature, and more claustrophobic than expressionist theatre. Just as tragedy is embodied most appropriately in drama, or satire in the essay form, so the muse of expressionism found its own articulate exponent, early in the twentieth century, in the new and rapidly evolving art of motion pictures. Historically, expressionism is a late manifestation of romanticism, which traces its origins back at least as far as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Impressionism was an earlier flowering of the same movement, and expressionism itself only developed as a recognizable form in the early 1900's. Bringing to bear the theories of contemporary philosophical and psychological thinking, in particular those of phenomenology and Freudianism, expressionists attempted to develop an art which represented subjective experience, embracing what was later to become a sine qua non of general semantics-the concept that the individual chooses his own reality, by using his senses to abstract from the world in process. That reality must then again be externalized in the work of art. Recognizing this dichotomy between creation and creator, medium and message, semiologists like Christian Metz have attempted to define the language of cinema by using the precepts of structural linguistics, whereby a differentiation is made between signifie and signifiant-what is to be signified, and