Explain how the political, social and economic upheaval created by the aftermath of both the Russian Revolution and WW1 affected the production and content of classic Soviet Constructivist Cinema.
When The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they attempted to get rid of old ‘bourgeois’ elements in society. A new wave off experimentation came in called avant-garde where due to the new government and end of war a more modernised and futuristic culture came in. Cinema was being experimented with and new innovative ideas were being shown on screen.
The animated picture draws inspiration from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Both have an angular landscape and the characters are standing on a ledge in the distance, their bodies pointed and bent. Also, everything in the scene is in the shadows, while the main character has a background of light.
Although not technically “shot” by a real camera, Tim Burton manages to achieve the “chiaroscuro effect” in The Nightmare Before Christmas, with deep shadows and “low-key lighting”. In the animated picture film, the environment is made up of structures without geometric shapes. There are no squares or rectangles in Halloween town; all the houses are spiralled and curved, the windows crooked, the ground tilted up steeply, and the buildings lopsided. There is no order in the buildings or the environment. These same styles were characteristic of German Expressionism to show the chaos and instabilities of the world.
On the brink of financial ruin, the company was purchased in 1927 by the powerful financier Alfred Hugenberg, a future Hitler supporter who mandated that the company devote itself to films that promoted German nationalism. The company still produced such notable efforts as Der blaue Engel (1930; The Blue Angel) and Der Kongress tanzt (1931; Congress Dances) but was coerced to make National Socialist films almost exclusively when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The resulting films proved popular in Germany, but rising production costs and a shrinking international market (owing to Nazi policies) led to large deficits. The government purchased the company in 1937 and thereafter tightly controlled film content.
Artist seek to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
The German film and cinema industry boomed during the 1920s. The main features of the industry were as follows:
The economic disruption of the Weimar period produced an expressionist style in German film-making, with films often having unrealistic sets and featuring exaggerated acting techniques.
The shortage of funding gave rise to the Kammerspielfilm movement, with atmospheric films made on small sets with low budgets.
Expressionist film-makers favoured darker storylines and themes, including horror and crime.
The most prominent film directors of the time were Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau.
The most famous films of the period were The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922 – based on the Dracula story), Phantom (1922), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927).
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