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| German cinema after the First World War enjoyed a golden age, garnering international acclaim for both its technical and artistic innovation. Films deemed “Expressionist,” such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, are perhaps the most recognizable, but they represent only one stylistic subset of the films produced during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The rise of National Socialism and the pull of Hollywood combined to prompt a large-scale migration of filmmaking talent to the United States. Once in America, Austrian-born Wilhelm “Billy” Wilder set a course for both film noir (Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity) and comedy (The Seven-Year Itch, Some Like it Hot), and cinematographer Karl Freund (Caligari, Metropolis) went on to photograph a range of productions from Dracula to I Love Lucy. These are but two of the many figures to be explored in a course designed to trace key strains of American cinematic culture back to early twentieth-century Germany. The course will proceed along several key tangents, including (1) the issue of exile and the uncanniness of films made by filmmakers not fully “at home” in the U.S., (2) the abiding presence of early German cinema in American films made well after the acme of émigré filmmaking, and (3) the migration of certain trends from Hollywood through the French and German new waves and back again. |
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