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Hitchcock and the “Haunted Screen”— An Attempt to Retrace the Evolution of German Expressionism

And its Impact on the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock

Philipp Kuecuekyan

Spring 2002

Columbia University

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Der toten Geister seid ihr, die zum Flusse, Zum überladnen Kahn der Wesenlosen Der Bote führt. Euer Rufen hallt im Tosen Des Sturms und in des Regens wildem Gusse.

Georg Heym, “Wolken”

Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei, Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei Und an den Küsten - liest man - steigt die Flut. Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken. Jacob van Hoddis, “Weltende” “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses, you’d find swine. The world is hell. What does it matter who’s in it?”

‘Uncle Charlie’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt

Alfred Hitchcock was a well-traveled man. From London to Los Angeles, from

Marakesh to Monaco, from Copenhagen to Capri, Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for trekking

across countries and continents is not only reflected in his frequent trips outside his na-

tive and adoptive countries, but is also plainly visible in his more than prolific œuvre. Yet,

one artistic pilgrimage, undertaken in his early years as an up-and-coming cinematic

wunderkind, remains particularly important, a voyage that ‘brands’ him in creative terms:

in 1924, Hitchcock arrived in Berlin to work as an assistant director on Michael Balcon’s

The Blackguard. It was the first of three month-long trips to Germany Hitchcock would

undertake. By the early 1920s, German cinema had slowly recuperated from the disas-

trous economic climate of the post-World War I depression and studios such as the

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famed Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) provided their grand production facili-

ties to local and international filmmakers. As Donald Spoto elucidates, “Berlin was the

Hollywood of the Continent, the magnet for the best technicians of the medium … no

other city could offer artists a more conducive laboratory for experimenting with new

techniques.”1

Hitchcock himself later professed an admiration for the elaborate production and

sound stages he found on UFA’s Babelsberg grounds: “The studio was tremendous, big-

ger than Universal is today … They had a complete railroad station built on the back

lot.”2 In 1925, Hitchcock traveled to Munich and made his first two films, The Pleasure

Garden (shot in 1925, released in 1927) and The Mountain Eagle (filmed in 1926, distrib-

uted in 1927) at the Emelka Studios in Munich. (The Lodger, made in England, was re-

leased before either of the two ‘German-made’ films). Yet, even more important than

technical resources, Hitchcock found in Germany’s film artists ‘brothers in mind,’ direc-

tors that placed an emphasis on film as a quintessentially visual means of expression, an

art form that could dispense – to the extent possible– with verbal forms of communica-

tion (in intertitles or, with the advent of sound, in dialogue).

As the director explained to François Truffaut many decades later: “When we tell a

story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I

always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of

1 Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Little, Brown, 1983. Quoted at p. 67.

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film in between.”3 Such reliance on “cinematic” storytelling is exactly what he found in

1920s German cinema. As Hitchcock pointed out: “My models were forever after the

German filmmakers of 1924 and 1924 …[They] placed great emphasis on telling the story

visually … with no [titles] or at least very few.”4 And, he added, Friedrich Wilhelm Mur-

nau’s great “The Last Laugh was almost the prefect film. It told its story even without sub-

titles – from beginning to end entirely by the use of imagery, and that had a tremendous

influence on me.”5

Hitchcock had been intrigued by the German cinema ever since he saw Fritz

Lang’s Der müde Tod (1921) in London in the early 1920s.6 While at UFA, Hitchcock met

both Lang and Murnau. Lang was busy completing his epic two part Die Nibelungen (Sieg-

fried and Krimhild’s Rache, 1922-24), and the gigantic set of a “whole forest” built for that

film was among the first glimpses that Hitchcock caught of the Babelsberg studio when

he arrived in Berlin.7 Some weeks later, Hitchcock watched Murnau shoot Der letzte

Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924). One afternoon, as Spoto elucidates, a “particularly difficult

scene was being filmed” and Hitchcock became fascinated by the “odd way things were

2 Cited by Spoto in Spoto, p. 68. 3 Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. With the collaboration of Helen G. Scott. Cited at p. 61. 4 Spoto, cited at p. 68. 5 Spoto, Ibid. 6 See Truffaut, p. 26. 7 Interestingly enough, as Spoto points out, “Hitchcock promptly ordered [the forest be] torn down on his arri-val to make room for his grand staircase in The Blackguard.” In Spoto, Ibid. See also, Brougher, Kerry. “Hitch-Hiking in Dreamscapes.” In Brougher, Kerry et al. (eds.). Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Comtemporary Art. Ox-ford, UK: MOMA, 1999. pp. 8-20.

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constructed.”8 Murnau proceeded to explain to the young assistant director the design of

the set, a railroad station that emphasized “a large railway clock,” while keeping the “re-

mainder of the scenery … in a drastically foreshortened perspective.”9 Hitchcock was

tremendously impressed and confessed: “I picked up a great deal of insight into the

techniques of set building and perspective”10 from the meeting with Murnau. The very

next day, as Spoto emphasizes, Hitchcock moved to change the setting of the Milan Ca-

thedral in Balcon’s film, applying what he had learned from Murnau. (Spoto also finds

references to Murnau’s set in the opening of Hitchcock’s 1932 film Rich and Strange, “the

office of Henry Kendall, the expressionism of its huge clock and odd shadows and

lines.”11)

As we shall see over the course of this analysis, the nexus between Hitchcock and

the German cinema runs even deeper. Traces of Expressionism, the great (primarily)

German artistic movement that dominated much of early 20th century German art, litera-

ture, and theatre can be found in countless Hitchcock features, from his first commercial

release, The Lodger (1927), to such later masterpieces as The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo

(1958), and Psycho (1960). Hitchcock’s films, if not always in formal aspects, retain much

of the Expressionistic Weltuntergangsstimmung, the perpetual doom, gloom, and menace

of the urban landscape and the un-controllability of human existence, an existence that is

8 Spoto, cited at p. 68. 9 Spoto, cited at pp. 68-69. 10 Hitchcock cited by Spoto. In Spoto, p. 69. 11 Spoto, Ibid.

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constantly affected by outside (and inside) forces, where lives are altered by murder and

intrigue.

Critical and biographical literature on the “supreme technician of the American

cinema”12 (so Andrew Sarris’ designation of Hitchcock’s place in the canon of cinema)

often mentions Expressionistic tendencies as a mainstay of Hitchcock’s work. Yet, most

often, such references are more or less en passant and fail to trace the different origins of

Expressionist cinema in the other arts. Here, we will try to give a condensed summary of

Expressionist moments in Hitchcock’s cinema with a thorough exploration of the ques-

tion of “what exactly is Expressionism?” How did this influential movement evolve? What

are some of the most important examples in the arts and in the belle lettres?

We shall then turn immediately to the cinema and find some classic illustrations of

directors and directions in 1920s German cinema. We will also attempt to delineate clas-

sic Expressionism from its cinematic offspring, namely the Neue Sachlichkeit and the

Kammerspielfilm, genres that – though closely related – infuse the cinema with a more re-

alistic tone and combine the emphasis on the internal lives of fictional protagonists with

an exploration of how environments interact and impact a character’s existence. As we

will discover and explain, the question of the interplay between the interior life of a

character and his environment (between pure Expressionist cinema and the reality of the

12 Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1969. New York: DaCapo, 1996. 1st paper-back edition.

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Neue Sachlichkeit) parallels Hitchcock’s quest to be both realistic and expressionistic at

the same time.

As Robin Wood correctly claims, “’Expressionism’ evades simple definition,”13 a

point echoed by Rudolf Kurtz’14 and Jürgen Kasten’s15 comments that in spite of the vol-

umes of literature on the subject, a “clear definition”16 has never been fully established.

Yet, in a nutshell and in unison, all commentators would concur with Wood’s characteri-

zation that a “central impulse” of all Expressionist art is “clearly the attempt to ‘express’

emotional states through a distortion or deformation of objective reality.”17 Expression-

ists, as Neil Hurley elaborates, distort reality in order “to communicate inner feelings and

emotions” and thus aim “at creating a psychological or spiritual effect rather than at re-

cording external events in logical sequence.”18

Expressionism may elude a clear-cut definition, yet the terminology has a precise

genealogy. As Jacques Aumont establishes, the “critic and art historian Wilhelm Wor-

ringer … coined the term ‘Expressionism’ in 1911 to distinguish a group of works shown

in Berlin, notably by the Fauves (Derain, Dufy, Braque and Marquet), which he opposed

to Impressionism.”19 (Hans-Georg Kemper claims that the French painter Julien Auguste

13 Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Cited at p. 207. 14 Kurtz, Rudolf. Expressionismus und Film. Berlin, Germany: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1926. p. 10. 15 Kasten, Jürgen. Der Expressionistische Film. Munich, Germany: MAkS, 1989. p. 19. 16 Kurtz, cited at p. 10. Translation is my own. 17 Wood, Ibid. 18 Hurley, Neil P. Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock’s Fright and Delight. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Cited at p. 170. 19 Aumont, Jacques. The Image. Translated by Claire Pajackowska. London, UK: BFI Publishing, 1994. Cited at p. 223.

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Hervé had used the term two years earlier,20 yet Worringer is the first to have published a

theoretical treatise of the movement.) In Worringer’s writings, the term slowly evolved,

an evolution that begun in his 1908 dissertation with his reference to the “ecstasy of the

expressive attraction” in contemporary painting.21 Of course, the idea of ‘externalizing’

interior life pre-dates both the Fauves and the first wave of Expressionist painters (the

“Brücke” artists, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) and can be traced to

Edvard Munch’s now-legendary Schrei (Scream, 1893; figure 1), a painting that provided

considerable inspiration to Expressionist artists, as is universally acknowledged.22

From there, “the label became immensely popular and was applied to poetry (be-

fore 1914), to theatre (after 1918) and to the cinema (after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,

1919).” Yvan Goll, as Aumont finds, summarized the extent of the success of the term

when he described it as “a state of mind which in the intellectual sphere has infected

everything like an epidemic, not just poetry but also prose, not just painting but also ar-

chitecture … universities and educational policy.”23 Expressionism was not only a par-

ticular style, but also a “Weltanschauung,” a way of looking at the world, as Kasten under-

scores.24

20 Kemper, Hans-Georg and Silvio Vietta. Expressionismus. Munich, Germany: W. Funk Verlag, 1975. p. 13. Of course, it needs to be pointed out that the French (pre-Expressionist) avant-garde painters called themselves “les fauves.” In Kemper, Ibid. 21 Worringer cited by Kasten, in Kasten, p. 20. 22 See for example, Courtade, Francis. Cinéma Expressioniste. Paris, France: Henri Veyrier, 1984. p. 17; Cossart, Axel von. Kino-Theater des Expressionismus: Das literarische Resümee einer Besonderheit. Essen, Germany: Blaue Eule, 1985. p. 67. 23 Yvan Goll as cited by Aumont in Aumont, Ibid. 24 Kasten, p. 19.

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As everyone would agree, the attitude of Expressionists was confrontational, seek-

ing to break with the dominant artistic ‘streaks’ that came before 1900, namely Impres-

sionism in the arts, and Naturalism in literature.25 That spirit is reflected in the words of

Kasimir Edschmid, whom Kasten calls “one of the most eloquent … theorists and propa-

gandist” of the movement”26: “Ein neues Weltbild mußte geschaffen werden, das nicht

mehr teil hatte an jenem zerstückelten Raum, den die Impression [sic] gab.”27 “Expres-

sionism,” as Lotte Eisner elaborates on Edschmid’s position, “is a reaction against the

atom-splitting of Impressionism, which reflects the iridescent ambiguities … and ephem-

eral hues of nature.”28 It also “sets itself against Naturalism,” as she continues, “with its

mania for recording mere facts.”29 For Expressionists, the “world is there for all to see; it

would be absurd to reproduce it purely and simply as it is.”30 The model Expressionist

does not see and does not reflect reality unmitigated, rather he creates his own world:

“Die Realität muß von uns [sic] geschaffen werden.”31 The outside world does not exist as

such, it is rather created by the artist himself. The Expressionist “does not see, he has ‘vi-

sions,’” as Eisner paraphrases Edschmid, “’the chain of facts: factories, houses, illness,

25 See Kasten, Ibid.; see also, Aumont, p. 223, Kurtz, p. 11. 26 Kasten, Ibid. Translation is my own. 27 “A new world view had to be created that did not take part in every piece of the fragmented room given by impression.” In Edschmid, Kasimir. Essays, Rede, Feuilleton: Eine Auswahl. Darmstadt, Germany: Justus von Lie-big, 1990. Cited at p. 12. Also referred to in Kasten, Ibid. 28 Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Translated by Roger Greaves. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969. Cited at p. 10. 29 Eisner, Ibid. 30 Eisner, Ibid. 31 Edschmid, p. 12.

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prostitutes, screams, hunger’ does not exist; only the interior [sic] vision they provoke ex-

ists.”32

Expressionism has the “desire to go further,” in the words of Aumont, tries to add

“something beyond representation … to let the image reach a representation of the invisi-

ble, the ineffable, the transcendent.”33 If Impressionism ‘goes’ from the outside in, then

Expressionism is the exact reverse – from the inside out. The world, as Edschmid writes,

exists within the artist – how the artist perceives it and how he reacts to it – internally –

that is what characterizes the Expressionist movement. In Edschmid’s words: “Mit die-

sem Ausbruch seines Inneren [sic] ist er allem verbunden. Er begreift die Welt, die Erde

steht in ihm.”34 The world is ‘represented’ within the artist, his psyche is connected to

the world.

As Aumont paraphrases Edschmid’s stand on Expressionism “We must create re-

ality ourselves. The meaning of an object is to be found beyond its appearance… And

this can only be found in ourselves.”35 The Expressionist artist is, in the words of Eisner,

“not merely receptive but a creator [who] seeks … the eternal, permanent meanings of facts

and objects.”

For Worringer, the perception of an ever-changing world alters and causes “un-

rest”36 in the artist. “Inwardly discordant, he needs the spiritual unrest,” as Eisner para-

32 Edschmid cited by Eisner. In Eisner, pp. 10-11. 33 Aumont, p. 226. 34 Edschmid, p. 15. 35 Edschmid cited by Aumont. In Aumont, cited at p. 226. 36 Worringer cited by Kasten. In Kasten, p. 20.

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phrases Worringer, and this “primordial anguish makes him want to detach the objects

of the exterior world from their nature.”37 “German painters and writers,” as Paul Vogt

explains, “proved to be deeply involved in that boundless subjectivism which had grown

out of the general crisis at the turn of the century – the feeling of dislocation, the isola-

tion of the individual, the destruction of man’s traditional, confident relationship around

him.”38 Urban centers, Berlin in particular, witnessed an explosion of population growth.

From 1890 to 1909, the number of inhabitants of Berlin almost doubled, from 1.9 million

to nearly 3.7 million in less than twenty years.39 Urbanization brought its own problems

from the necessity to lead a ‘faster’ life to social issues such as poverty and crime.

The artist, often perceived as the cultural seismologist, was called to reflect the

zeitgeist – and it was a tumultuous ‘state of the times.’ Vassiliy Kandinsky, a painter who

experimented with Expressionism starting in the early 1910s, perfectly reflects this mood

when he writes in 1910: “Souls in torment, suffering and searching, deeply wounded by

the collision between the spiritual and the material.”40 Similarly, Hermann Bahr, who

flirted with the Naturalist school in his early years as a playwright, though soon became a

‘convert’ to Expressionism, described the early 1900s atmosphere and the ‘relief’ of Ex-

pressionism:

37 Eisner, cited at p. 13. 38 Vogt, Paul. Expressionism: German Painting 1905-1920. Translated by Antony Vivis. New York: Harry Abrams, 1978. Cited at p. 7. 39 See also Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon, 1998. pp. 239-278, 377-395. 40 Vassily Kandinsky as cited by Aumont. In Aumont, p. 227. Paul Coates in Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. p. 25.

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Never was any period so shaken by such horror, by such dread. Never had the world been so deathly silent. Never had man felt so small. Never had he been so afraid. His misery cries out to heaven: man cries for his soul, the whole period becomes one long cry for help. Art cries out too, cries in the depths of dark-ness, cries out for help, cries out for spirit: that is Expression-ism.41

Ludwig Meidner’s painting Revolution (Kampf auf den Barrikaden) (Revolution, 1913;

figure 2) may aptly illustrates, by way of example, the tumult and the interaction of “tor-

mented” artists and the agitated outside world.

Figure 2. Ludwig Meidner. Revolution (Kampf auf den Barrikaden). 1913. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

The roots of Expressionist painting lie, as Vogt finds, in “the works of Vincent Van

Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom … used the expressive possibili-

ties of color and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the quali-

ties of fear, horror, and the grotesque.”42 Moreover, as Vogt also explains, they were

among the first to break “away from the literal representation of nature in order to ex-

41 Bahr cited by Paul Vogt. In Vogt, p. 7.

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press more subjective outlooks or states of mind.”43 A first important wave of Expression-

ist art was created by a group of painters including Erich Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff

and led by Kirchner who formed a “loose association” called “Die Brücke” in 1905.

These artists, soon joined by the likes of Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, were not

only affected by their 1890s predecessors, but also subject to such diverse influences as

Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and African wood carvings. As Vogt points out, “Ex-

pressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual inten-

sity,” and they stood out by the use of “jagged distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork;

and jarring colors to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in

crowded agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged

atmosphere.”44 A convergence of aesthetics becomes evident in Kirchner’s famous

Strasse, Dresden (Street Dresden, 1907; figure 3), a painting that reflects urbanity as much

as the influence of African woodcarvings.

Finally, as Vogt confirms, Expressionist “works express frustration, anxiety, dis-

gust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response

to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they dis-

cerned in modern life.”45

42 Vogt, cited at p. 18. 43 Vogt, Ibid. 44 Vogt, cited at p. 19. 45 Vogt, cited at p. 20.

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Figure 3. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Strasse Dresden. 1907. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art.

Brücke artists soon stimulated Expressionism in other parts of Europe: Oskar Ko-

kaschka and Egon Schiele in Austria, Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine in France.

Each, as Vogt explains, “developed their own painting styles,” while maintaining “the in-

tense emotional expression and the violent distortion of figural subject matter.”46 Subse-

quently, two important offspring of the early Expressionists ensued: the more abstract

and lyrical “Der Blaue Reiter, propagated by painters as diverse as Franz Marc, Kandinsky,

and Paul Klee; and, the “Neue Sachlichkeit,” which features a more pronounced sense of

realism, and represented by such masters as Otto Dix and George Grosz. Grosz’ works, in

fact, epitomize a whole range of styles from the more abstract urban motif with strong

colors in his earlier Metropolis (1918; figure 4) to the heightened realism of poverty and

crime in a later lithograph such as Die Räuber (1922; figure 5).47 (As we will find later,

Grosz’ paintings and their oscillation between ‘pure’ Expressionism and the more so-

cially conscious Neue Sachlichkeit will offer interesting parallels to Hitchcock).

46 Vogt, cited at p. 21. 47 See also Schneede, Uwe M. et al (eds.) George Grosz: Leben und Werk. Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje, 1975. pp. 10-12.

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Figure 5. George Grosz, Die Räuber… (1922), Wright Museum of Art. Figure 6. George Grosz, Metropolis (1918). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Eisner, whose influential study L’écran démoniaque (The Haunted Screen) has often

been attacked,48 but still remains an important study of this period, especially with regard

to film, adds an important sociohistoric note to her description of Expressionism: the

tumultuous political and social climate of the period from the beginning of the 20th cen-

tury and into the 1920s. As she points out: “[I]n the early years of its short life the

Weimar Republic had the troublesome task of meeting outside demands … while at the

same time maintaining equilibrium internally (the Spartacist revolt of 1919, the unsuc-

cessful Kapp Putsch of 1920.” And she adds: “The material conditions which resulted in

a general decline of values” (read economic depression) “and the inner disquiet of the na-

tion took on truly gigantic proportions.”49 Poverty and “constant insecurity help to ex-

plain the enthusiasm with which German artists embraced this movement which, as early

as 1910, had tended to sweep aside all the principles which had formed the basis of art

48 For example, Aumont in Aumont, p. 225; Kasten in Kasten, p. 9. 49 Eisner, cited at p. 9.

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until then.”50 Germany “before the outbreak of the First World War was filled with a

longing for change,” as J.M. Richie explains.51 And he adds, “[l]ife in Wilhelminian Ger-

many mean for many a state of emptiness and boredom in which the dictum Ruhe ist die

erste Bürgerpflicht still applied.”52 “Little wonder then,” as he continues, “that the talk of

Aufbruch, i.e., the need for a new start was not merely one of the many slogans coined by

avant-garde contributors to Expressionist journals.” Rather, these artists “merely [gave]

their particular form of expression to much more widely held longings for release from

unbearable restrictions.”53

Political commotion and the chaos of war had given a “new stimulus … to the

eternal attraction towards all that is obscure and undetermined, towards the kind of

brooding speculative reflection called Grübelei which culminated in the apocalyptic doc-

trine of Expressionism.”54 Moreover, “[m]ysticism and magic, the dark forces to which

Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves … [and] the ghosts

which had haunted the German Romantics [were] revived,” as Eisner stipulates.55 A

number of the themes found in Romanticism, as David Kuhns explains, are similar to

those of Expressionism including “the general exaltation of emotion over reason and of

the senses over intellect” and an “emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcen-

50 Eisner, cited at p. 10. 51 Introductory words by J.M. Ritchie. In Ritchie, J.M. (ed.) Vision and Aftermath: Four Expressionist War Plays. London, UK: Calder and Boyars, 1969. Cited at p. 7. 52 Richie (1969), Ibid. 53 Richie (1969), Ibid. 54 Eisner, p. 9. 55 Eisner, Ibid.

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dent experience and spiritual truth.”56 Moreover, Expressionism, just as Romanticism be-

fore, places an emphasis on subjectivity, the “self and a heightened examination of hu-

man personality and its moods and mental potentialities.”57

According to Roy Allen, the “dominant theme of Expressionist verse was horror

over urban life and apocalyptic visions of the collapse of civilization.”58 The “ecstatic

[and] hymnlike lyricism” of poets such as Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler, and Georg Heym

was formally “condensed, stripped-down” and utilized “strings of nouns and a few adjec-

tives and infinitive verbs, eliminated narrative and description to get at the essence of

feeling.”59

Destruction, death, and corpses become favorite some themes for poetry, as an ex-

cerpt, “Requiem,” from Gottfried Benn’s poetry illustrates:

Requiem Auf jedem Tische zwei. Männer und Weiber kreuzweis. Nah, nackt, und dennoch ohne Qual. Den Schädel auf. Die Brust entzwei. Die Leiber gebären nur ihr allerletztes Mal. Jeder drei Näpfe voll: von Hirn bis Hoden. Und des Gottes Tempel und des Teufels Stall nun Brust an Brust auf eines Kübels Boden begrinsen Golgatha und Sündenfall. Der Rest in Särge. Lauter Neugeburten: Mannsbeine, Kinderbrust und Haar vom Weib.

56 Kuhns, David. German Expressionist Theatre. The Actor and the Stage. New York: Cambridge, 1997. Cited at p. 28. 57 Kuhns, Ibid. 58 Allen, Roy F. German Expressionist Poetry. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1979. Cited at p. 46. 59 Allen, Ibid.

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Ich sah von zweien, die dereinst sich hurten, lag es da, wie aus einem Mutterleib.60

A doctor by training, Benn’s poetry is obsessed with the subject of medicine, par-

ticularly pathology. His cycle of “Morgue” poems (“Requiem” is the fifth and last piece),

written in 1912, offers a panoply of almost necrophilic imagery, thrilled walks in a coro-

ner’s office seemingly piled with decaying bodies. A brief look at the “Morgue” cycle not

only illustrates the theme of disease, death, and almost grotesque horror, but it also

points to the heightened sense of subjectivity (recurrent use of “ich”). From a formal

point of view, Benn’s poetry imitates, so Paul Böckmann, the changes that Expressionist

paintings sought, namely a move away from the strict adherence to the perspective.

Benn, Böckmann holds, erases not only the syntactical structure of normal language, but

also through his frequent use of enjambments mixed with shorter and longer verses

seeks to break the rhythm of ‘traditional’ poetry.61

Just as ‘gloom’ and ‘doom’ and apocalyptic visions of the world were at the center of

Expressionist poetry, “the impending twilight of mankind … the lust for life even at the

expense of total chaos … and the visionary potential of man” were the hallmarks of Ex-

pressionist theatre, as Ritchie explains.62

In terms of tradition, Expressionist theatre is strongly indebted to the anti-realist

plays of Frank Wedekind and, particularly, August Strindberg, whom Kuhns calls a

60 Benn, Gottfried. Gedichte in der Fassung der Erstdrucke. Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1982. Cited p. 28. 61 Böckmann, Paul. “Gottfried Benn und die Sprache des Expressionismus.” In Steffen, Hans (ed.) Der Deutsche Expressionismus.Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. 2nd Edition. Cited at p. 71.

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“proto-Expressionist.”63 Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakenings, 1891) with

its grotesque imagery (in one of the play’s key scenes, the ghost of one of its characters,

Moritz, is holding his own severed head) and the “dream-like atmosphere” of Strind-

berg’s plays and the “symbolic imagery of psycho-spiritual anguish and social alienation

… seemed to captures so perfectly the young Expressionist generation’s sense of their

own historical situation.”64Moreover, Strindberg’s Ett Drömspel (A Dream Play, 1902) and

Spöksonaten (Ghost Sonata, 1907), so Kuhns, revolutionized drama by staging “half-reality”

and by making the “perceptual experience … of the psyche … the main subject of the

play.”65

According to Kuhns, what “distinguishes the theatre of Expressionism in the his-

tory of the early Modernist avant-garde is the extent to which the process of cultural

transformation was inscribed in the body of the actor himself.”66 The flesh of the actor

becomes a “textualized” sign, expressive and evocative of the protagonist’s struggle with

the external world. The Expressionist “strategy in the theatre for coming to terms with

the crises of contemporary German history was to anthropomorphize [sic] them abstractly

in the body and voice of the actor.”67

62 Ritchie (1969), cited at p. 9. 63 Kuhns, p. 96. Kuhns also notes that, between 1913 and 1915 alone, Strindberg’s plays were produced more than a 1000 times on German stages. 64 Kuhns, cited at pp. 96-97. 65 Kuhns, Ibid. 66 Kuhns, cited at p. 2. 67 Kuhns, Ibid.

20

Such “anthropomorphized” performances also became known under the name of

“Schrei-Dramen” or “scream dramas” (of course, in reference to Munch’s famous paint-

ing). Crying – literally – and unrestrained gesturing became part of the Expressionist

stage lexicon. Expressionist theatre, as Ritchie maintains, “is a theatre of gesture, noise,

colour and movement … in which violent images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of

the spectator.”68 Expressionist dramas oscillate between “long monologues couched in a

concentrated, elliptical, almost telegrammatic language” and stretches of stylized acting,

devoid of verbal communication.69 In Kokoschka’s Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer,

the Women’s Hope, 1907), for example, three characters engage in non-verbal interaction

that consists, according to the stage directions, in: first character “crying out in a slow

crescendo,” with the second character “uttering a piercing scream,” finally, the last one

expressing the “highest tension … in a slowly diminishing scream,” while the other two

“run into his way, screaming.”70

In a newspaper review, a theater critic further described – negatively – the charac-

ter’s interplay: We hear “contrived word excesses” and “the unintelligible yelling,” while

watching “the rolling around of human clumps on stage.”71

Among stage directors, one artist reigned supremely on the German stage: Max

Reinhardt. Reinhardt affected not only the Berlin theatre scene, but he also put his mark

68 Ritchie, J.M. (ed.). Seven Expressionist Plays: Kokoschka to Barlach. London, UK: Calder and Boyars, 1968. Cited at p.7. 69 Ritchie, cited at p. 8. 70 See Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer, the Women’s Hope. In Ritchie (1968), pp. 25-35. 71 Theatre critic for the

21

on acting, acting on the stage and acting in the cinema. As Eisner points out, from 1907

to 1919, Reinhardt “was a sort of ‘Kaiser’ of the Berlin theatre.”72 It would be “incorrect,”

as Eisner rightfully explains, “to claim Reinhardt himself as an Expressionist.”73 While he

added the experimental stage “Das junge Deutschland” to the Deutsches Theater, the thea-

tre troupe he directed, and while he helped promote the plays of Kokoschkas, Else

Lasker-Schülers, and Franz Werfels on that stage, Reinhardt remained firmly committed

to the classics of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich von

Kleist. Reinhardt’s contributions consisted primarily in his remarkable talent to shape

and further acting careers and in changing set design.

As Kuhns finds, Reinhardt possessed the ability to enhance an actor’s “pliancy in

stylization”: he was able to show an actor not how he, Reinhardt, would act the part, but

how that particular actor or actress should do it in order to give full expression to his or

her essential individuality.”74 And, the most successful acting talents, from Conrad Veidt

to Werner Krauss, and Emil Jannings – they all came from Reinhardt’s troupe before

they delivered some of the most memorable performances of the Weimar cinema era.

In terms of set design, revolutionized the Berlin stage: he “mastered,” as Eisner

puts it, “all the secrets of lighting.”75 Then, when “the cinema became an art-form, it

quite naturally took advantage of Reinhardt’s discoveries,” and the “chiaroscuro” became

72 Eisner, cited at p. 47. 73 Eisner, Ibid. 74 Kuhns, cited at p. 65 and quoting Martin Esslin. 75 Eisner, cited at p. 48.

22

the hallmark of Expressionist cinema, the “pools of light falling from a high windows into

a dark interior, which people were used to seeing every evening at the Deutsches Thea-

ter.”76

Reinhardt explored (and exploited), as Eisner elucidates, the “contrast – or, more

precisely, the collision – between light and shadow.”77 Reinhardt was thus able to “con-

centrate the spectator’s attention” by “the sudden spotlighting of a character or object,”

while leaving “all other characters and objects in vague darkness.”78 In doing so, Rein-

hardt created a stage device to implement the “Expressionist axiom stipulating that a sole

object chosen from the chaos of the universe must be singled out and plucked from its

links with other objects.”79

Eisner traces Max Reinhardt’s direct influence not just the to the many (lesser

known) examples of early 1920s German cinema, such as Dmitri Buchowetzki’s Danton

(1921) to Richard Oswald’s Lukrezia Borgia (1922), but finds that the emphasis on the di-

chotomy between light and dark, a keystone of Expressionist filmmaking, goes back to

Reinhardt’s stage.80German film might, as Eisner argues, gotten “off to a comparatively

late start,” yet by the late 1910s and early 1920s, it ‘swung’ into full gear and, with the

popularity of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919), Weimar and German

Expressionist cinema emerged as one of the most influential periods of cinema history.

76 Eisner, cited at p. 47. 77 Eisner, Ibid. 78 Eisner, Ibid. 79 Eisner, Ibid.

23

The question of “what is an Expressionist film” might not be as hard to answer as

finding a definition for Expressionism itself. The attempt to answer it will become a

quasi-synthesis of all of our previous findings – for Expressionist painting, poetry, and

theatre have undoubtedly shaped this early German cinema. Both, thematically and for-

mally, Expressionist cinema is a sum of these parameters and, of course, many more.

For Kasten, Expressionist cinema is intrinsically linked to the objective of film-

makers in the 1910s to transform film into a veritable art form to add, as Kasten puts it,

the adjective “artistic” to the up-to-then still denigrated art form.81 The first such project

was the 1912 adaptation of Paul Lindau’s successful stage play Der Andre by a former

stage director, Max Mack, in the first of a series of so-called Autorenfilme (“famous

author’s films,” as David Cook translates the expression82). Both Kasten and Cook trace

the ambitions of the Autorenfilme to the films d’art movement, the French “high-art film”

designed to bring the great classics (from Shakespeare to Goethe, from Hugo to Dickens)

that began with Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes’ L’Assassinat du duc de Guise in

late 1908 and involved numerous members of the renown Comédie Française.83 Rein-

hardt himself started to record stage productions on film, and the Austrian playwright

Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote what he called a “dream-play,” a script called Das fremde

80 In fact, the centrality of Reinhardt Expressionist film is confirmed in the subtitle of Eisners book, “… and the influence of Max Reinhardt.” 81 Kasten, p. 19. 82 Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Cited at p. 103. 83 Cook, p. 53; Kasten, p. 19.

24

Mädchen made in 1913. Hofmannsthal’s script, as Cook holds, was the “first serious Ger-

man feature film to express a purely supernatural theme.”84

Indeed, whereas films d’art used classics such as Oliver Twist as base material and

made grand themes such as the monarchy their subject matter (e.g., Sarah Bernhardt’s

performance in Louis Mercanton’s La Reine Elizabeth was one of the last and most pres-

tigious films d’art, shown around the globe), Germany’s filmmakers turned to the specific

set of classics, what Eisner calls the “dark forces” of “mysticism and magic”: the Roman-

tics and authors such as E.T.A Hoffmann, Hölderlin, the Brothers Grimm, and Jean-

Paul. Middle age myths, from the Nibelungenlied to the alchemist tale of Faust made a re-

turn to the cinema of the Weimar republic, in the form of films by Lang (Die Nibelungen)

and Murnau (Faust, 1926). (Romanticism itself heavily borrowed from the Middle Ages

and heroic myths became a cornerstone of this literary and artistic period.)

The first picture to stand out from what Siegfried Kracauer calls the “junk heap of

archaic [German] films” is Danish director Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student

of Prague), made in 1913.85 The film, as Kracauer analyzes, is based collectively on vari-

ants of the Faust legend in Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” 1817), Edgar

Allen Poe’s “William Wilson” (1860), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey

(1890).86 The film was shot on location in Prague and starred a former Reinhardt actor,

84 Cook, p. 103. 85 Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Cited at p. 28. 86 Kracauer, p. 29.

25

Paul Wegener. As Cook explains, the film tells the story of “a young student who sells his

mirror reflection, and thus his soul, to a sorcerer who in turn causes the image to be-

come a murderous incarnation of the student’s evil second self.”87 In formal aspects “at-

mospheric lighting” and many “effective photographic illusions… distinguish the film”

from previous cinematic creations. Der Student von Prag also introduces a notion that will

be an important motif for many Expressionist (and for that matter Hitchcock) films: the

“Doppelgänger” (the “double”). Again, literature is an important reference point for the

cinema here. As Cook correctly argues and rightfully disagrees with Kracauer, the idea of

the double and the notion of a split-personality is thoroughly embedded into Germany

literature: into the Faust myth (duality not only in terms of the two Faust ‘personalities’ –

i.e., before and after meeting Mephisto – but in the very idea of the duo of Faust and

Mephistopheles) as into many other Romantic novels and stories such as Hoffmann’s

“Sandmann” (Professor Spalanzani being the sorcerer/sandman Coppelius). As Eisner

demonstrates, Hoffmann makes the most explicit reference to the Doppelgänger motif in

his Elixire des Teufels (1815): “My whole being, turned into the capricious toy of a cruel

fate, surrounded by strange phantoms … I can no longer find myself… I am what I seem,

yet I seem not to be what I am … I cannot solve the problem myself: my ‘self’ is split in

two.”88

87 Cook, cited at p. 103. 88 Eisner, cited at p. 110. Translation is Eisner’s.

26

Hoffmann is also the spiritual godfather for (what many people regard as) the quin-

tessential Expressionist film: Das Cabinet von Dr. Caligari. (Traces between “Der Sand-

mann” and Caligari are abundant: from the protagonists in both stories being students to

the notion that their antagonists, Caligari in Wiene’s film, Spalanzani in Hoffmann’s

story, are Doppelgänger.89) Though Fritz Lang was originally slated to direct, powerful

UFA producer Erich Pommer (the same one who would later help organize the shooting

of Balcon’s Blackguard and, thus, Hitchcock’s trip to Berlin) finally appointed Wiene to

take the helm of the production. The film relays the story of a mountebank artist, Dr. Ca-

ligari (Werner Krauss), whose act consists of interacting with the hypnotized somnambu-

list Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who is supposed to forecast the future.90 The script was writ-

ten by Czech poet Hans Janowitz and the Austrian artist Carl Mayer, who were inspired

by a (real-life) murder spree in 1913 in Hamburg (thus, the fictional town of Holstenwall

actually references the eponymous Hamburg district).

With the arrival of Caligari and Cesare, a series of murders are committed that

leave the town puzzled. A young student, Francis, ultimately manages to trace the mur-

ders to the Caligari, who manages to escape to a psychiatric hospital. There, Francis

comes across literature on hypnosis and discovers with horror that the director of the in-

stitution and Caligari are the same person. In fact, as we discover at the film’s end,

through a Rahmenhandlung (or frame story), Francis is in fact the lunatic, and Dr. Caligari

89 See also Eisner, p. 113. 90 Cook, cited at p. 109.

27

is the one trying to cure him. (Not only a reversal, but also an added Doppelgänger motif

for the protagonist).

The frame story has been the subject of much debate, but what is essential about Cali-

gari is that it provides us with the opportunity to isolate some important themes of Expres-

sionist cinema. As Cook argues, Caligari creates a “highly stylized” world with “exaggerated

dimensions and deranged spatial relationships,” where “jagged chimneys reach insanely into

the sky.”91 (Figure 7, taken from the designs of noted stage designer Otto Reigbert for a pro-

duction of Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn, points to the similarities of stage and film set de-

sign.)

Again, it is worthwhile to return to Wood’s initial assessment of Expressionist cin-

ema as trying “to ‘express’ emotional states through a distortion or deformation of objec-

tive reality.”92 Cook agrees, the “nightmarishly distorted décor of German Expressionist

films and their creation of Stimmung (‘mood’) through shifting chiaroscuro lighting were

expressive of the disturbed mental and emotional states they sought to portray.”93

If the “setting of Caligari is warped and out of joint,” it is because the “film itself …

occurs largely in the twisted mind of its narrator.”94 Moreover, “the creators of Caligari

and its successors” (like other Expressionist artists before) “made deliberate effort to

portray subjective realities in objective terms, to render not simply narratives, but states

91 Cook, cited at p. 110. 92 Wood, cited p. 207. 93 Cook, cited at p. 111. 94 Cook, Ibid.

28

of mind [sic], moods, and atmosphere through the medium of the photographic image.”95

Thus, the woods shown in Caligari (figure 8) are not so much a literal representation of

actual forest, but rather they signify a “forest of the mind” of the protagonist, Francis.

Figure 7. Otto Reigbert’s stage design. Figure 8. Das Cabinet von Dr. Caligari and the “forests of the mind.”

(Wiene hired three well-known Expressionist painters to decorate the film’s set:

Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann.)

Thus, as Cook rightfully notes, Expressionist cinema is trying to create a novum in

the cinema, for nothing is generally perceived as being as objective as the photographic

image. (Caligari may not be the first film to use stylized settings; one need only think of

the famous Méliès shorts or the geometric settings of the Italian Futurist Anton Guilio

Bragaglia in his 1916 Il perfido incanto96 as potential precursors). Expressionist films

achieve their goal of being subjectivist (a notion so key to the movement) through “the

means of exterior realities, or to treat subjective states in what was widely regarded at the

time as a purely objective medium of representation.”97 Hence, this is “perhaps as radical

an innovation for the cinema as Porter’s elaboration of the shot since it added a nonnar-

95 Cook, Ibid. 96 Cook, Ibid.

29

rative and poetic dimension to what had been, even in the hands of Griffith, an almost

wholly narrative medium.”98

So far, Caligari has been used as an example, but, in the eyes of Eisner, the model

‘specimen’ is Murnau’s Nosferatu: eine Sinfonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Hor-

ror, 1922). While Caligari’s Expressionism is essentially graphic, “Nosferatu’s is almost

purely cinematic, relying upon camera angles, lighting, and editing rather than produc-

tion design.”99 Again, as in Der Student von Prag and Caligari, Murnau derived story mate-

rial from the gloom and doom world of the supernatural world; here, he explored the

vampire myth as relayed in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.100

With regard to themes of Expressionist cinema, Eisner points (with a slight wink)

to two quotes: the first is from French statesmen Georges Clémenceau, who noted that

the difference between Germans and non-Germans was that “the Germans ha[d] a taste

for death, whereas [everyone else] had a taste for life.”101The second is a quote from the

narrator of Hoffmann’s “Sandmann,” who confessed that nothing gave him more pleas-

ure than “hearing or reading frightening stories of ghosts, witches and dwarfs.”102 Both

statements point to an Expressionist obsession : not just in cinema, but, as we’ve seen

before in poetry, Expressionists wallow in exhibiting horror, death, doom, and corpses. If

Benn’s “Morgue” poems seem to ‘celebrate’ the corpse, Eisner points to analogous mo-

97 Cook, Ibid. 98 Cook, Ibid. 99 Cook, cited at p. 117. 100 Though he failed to secure the rights and was thus forced to call his film Nosferatu. 101 Eisner, cited at p. 89.

30

ments in Murnau’s Faust, as for example in a scene that shows the “foreshortened view of

a prostrate man stricken with the plague” from a “the shooting angle [that] makes the

soles of his feet become enormous.”103 From Caligari to Faust, from Paul Wegener’s Go-

lem (first version, 1914; second, 1920) to Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod – death, horror, and

murder are intricate subjects for the period.

Psychological states of mind remained on the minds of German filmmakers, only

the surreal nature of the ‘purely’ Expressionist films slowly receded as related genres

emerged: the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Kammerspielfilm. The Kammerspielfilm (literally the

“intimate theater”) dealt, as Spoto explains, with “realistic, limited situations, observed

the unities of time and space, and strove to convey universal values without resorting to

titles.”104 Cook further expands this definition by adding that the “Kammerspielfilm can be

seen as both an extension of and a reaction against the Expressionist cinema, in that it

retained the morbid psychological themes of the earlier films but cast them in realistic

form.”105 Murnau’s Der letzte Mann, the Kammerspielfilm par excellence, not only retains the

Expressionist set design and chiaroscuro lighting (figure 9), but also maintains a subjec-

tivist approach. In what is perhaps the film’s key scene (and one of the great moments of

early cinema), the movie’s protagonist, a night porter (played by Emil Jannings) is dis-

missed from his job and relegated to the position of a toilet attendant. Shattered, he

102 Eisner, cited at p. 95. 103 Eisner, cited at p. 98. 104 Spoto, cited at p. 67. 105 Cook, cited at p. 117.

31

wanders the streets– drunken and humiliated. Murnau puts the viewer in the protago-

nist’s ‘shoes’ through the use of subjective camera, the porter’s point of view. Yet, as

Cook remarks, in another scene the “camera is subjective in another sense too, a sense

which demonstrates roots of German realism in Expressionism.”106 Quite frequently, “in

addition to assuming the position of the doorman’s physical eye, the camera assume the

position of his mind’s eye.”107 At the height of the man’s despair, “we see on the screen

not the doorman, but a visual embodiment of what he feels – a long lap-dissolved mon-

tage of malicious laughing faces in close-up” (figure 10).108

Figure 9. Set in Der letzte Mann.. Figure 10. The laughing faces as subjective experience inside the porter’s head.

As we shall see, putting the viewer into the shoes of the protagonist through subjective

camera combined with ‘psychological’ overtones is a device that Hitchcock will use re-

currently – especially in his later films.

The Neue Sachlichkeit (literally the “New Objectivity”) expanded the use of realism

on the big screen . Psychology and its more and more prominent corollary psychoanaly-

106 Cook, cited at p. 120. 107 Cook, Ibid.

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sis find their first expressis verbis depiction in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Geheimnisse einer

Seele (Secrets of a Soul , 1926). The primary genre of the Neue Sachlichkeit, however, was

the so-called “Strassenfilm” (or street film), named for its “prototype,” Karl Grune’s Die

Strasse (The Street, 1923). In many ways, the Strassenfilm is markedly realist: homelessness,

prostitution, and other social concerns eclipse the thematic of myth and mysticism of the

Expressionist period. Yet, it is still intrinsically linked to the Expressionist’s vision of the

world as a place of perennial danger and to Hitchcock’s cinema as Spoto points out:

Karl Grune’s Die Strasse … pictorially and spiritually corresponded not only to something endemic in the German postwar spirit but also to something close to Hitchcock’s own soul. The film con-cerned a man who escapes from the boredom of marriage by plung-ing himself into the seductive life of the streets. But there he finds only chaos and threats to his safety, and he finally retreats to his former security. The theme of security at home against outer social chaos provided the basis for German street films, and Hitchcock’s films (from Rich and Strange to North by Northwest) make it clear that he felt a spiritual kinship to this motif.109

In fact, this motif starts much earlier, namely in Hitchcock’s first commercially re-

leased film: The Lodger, where the Buntings find themselves threatened by an invader

from the street, the mysterious lodger. As The Lodger so amply demonstrates – in form

and in theme, Hitchcock’s cinema is firmly rooted in an Expressionist tradition. Expres-

sionists themes – the Weltuntergangsstimmung or apocalypse, murder and death (and the

obsession with corpses), the Doppelgänger motif, the lack of individual control over one’s

fate, and subjectivism – are intrinsically linked to Hitchcock’s œuvre. Moreover, Expres-

108 Cook, Ibid.

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sionist forms – geometric patterns, chiaroscuro lighting, shadow and fog, and hallucina-

tory dream sequences – are part of Hitchcock’s visual vocabulary. What unites both for-

mal and thematic Expressionism is the ‘foregrounding’ of subjective experience: to show

on the canvas, on the page, on the stage, and on the big screen, the interior world of

characters and how these characters act and react to the occurrences of the outside

world.

From a biographical point of view, it is important to note that Hitchcock not only

interacted with Expressionist filmmakers, but he also immersed himself quite thoroughly

into German culture, as his biographer Spoto notes extensively.110 Hitchcock was a pas-

sionate fan of the stage (as his films from The Lodger to Stage Fright and beyond so amply

testify). While in Berlin, he reportedly took in a number of repertory performances that

ranged from the classics to such proto-Expressionists as Wedekind. In fact as Spoto

points out, “Hitchcock would not have seen – whatever he saw [in Berlin] – much that

was not visually arresting.”111

Throughout his life, as Spoto finds, Hitchcock was fascinated by the grotesque

worlds of the Volksmärchen of the Brothers Grimm. While in Berlin, Hitchcock soon ac-

quired the necessary language skills to immerse himself not only into these folklore tales,

but he also became thoroughly acquainted with the Kunstmärchen of Ludwig Tieck and

109 Spoto, cited at p. 67. 110 Spoto, pp. 70-71 on Hitchcock’s immersion in German culture. 111 Spoto, cited at p. 70.

34

Hoffmann. Many years later, his library still contained “several editions of Hoffmann” in

both German and English.112

Just as the narrator in Hoffmann’s “Sandmann” confessed to a fascination with

“frightening” stories, Hitchcock himself pointed to similar motives, and, as Sidney Got-

tlieb holds, Hitchcock did believe that an imaginative “immersion in the dangerous, the

grotesque, and the fantastic could be not only ‘thrilling,’ but also therapeutic.”113 In an

interview, Hitchcock explained:

Why do we go to the pictures? To see life reflected on the screen, certainly – but what kind of life? Obviously, the kind we don’t expe-rience ourselves – or the same life, but with a difference; and the dif-ference consists of emotional disturbances which, for convenience, we call “thrills.” Our nature is such that we must have these “shake-ups,” or we grow sluggish and jellified … So, we experience them ar-tificially, and the screen is the best medium for this.114

Of course, Hitchcock’s cinema does not reflect a world of ghouls and goblins, but

to shock is an inherent part of his work. That begins with The Lodger, a film that exhibits

several formal Expressionist elements. It begins with the opening credits and the trian-

gle-shaped cutout on the right side of the screen (figure 11) that features a menacing fig-

ure, ‘tripled’ by his shadow (triangle is, of course, also the symbol of the Avenger, a Jack-

the-Ripper-style serial killer). After the credits have rolled, the geometric shape returns

112 See also Spoto, p. 71. 113 Gottlieb, Sidney. “Early Hitchcock: The German Influence.” In Hitchcock Annual: 1999-2000, pp. 100-130, cited at p. 104. 114 From “Why ‘Thrillers’ Thrive,” originally published in the Picturegoer, 18 January 1935, p. 15. Reprinted in Gottlieb, Sidney (ed.). Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews. Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1995. Cited at p. 109.

35

and opens like a curtain onto the close-up of a screaming face (figure 12), Hitchcock’s

own use of a Schrei.

Figure 11. The Lodger opening with geometry. Figure 12. Opening Schrei in The Lodger. Figure 13. Expressionist distortion of

Screams are a recurrent motif in a majority of Hitchcock films. They open a number of

his pictures, in addition to The Lodger, also Murder! (1930), Rope (1948), and To Catch a

Thief (1955). Hitchcockian screams can be used as transitional device and can occur as a

blending of human and train noise as in The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

In all cases, they serve a double function: first, Hitchcock uses them to build or re-

affirm tension, as in The Lodger, or as in Jo McKenna’s (Doris Day) scream in Albert Hall

in the American The Man Who Knew Too Much, or J.B. Jeffries’ (James Stewart) desperate

shouting in Rear Window (1954) when he is being attacked by Lars Thorwald (Raymond

Burr). Yet, going back to Munch’s Schrei, the scream has (and is being) used (in Hitch-

cock’s films) as the ultimate expression of fear, and by extension, as an expression of an

interior psychological state. Thus, Elisabeth Weis rightfully notes “Hitchcock’s

[E]xpressionist heritage,” when she quotes Hermann Bahr’s claim that the “shriek … is

[a] chief characteristic of Expressionism.”115

115 Weis, Elisabeth. The Silent Scream: Hitchcock’s Sound Track. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1982. Cited at p. 162.

36

In the ensuing scenes of The Lodger, an eyewitness will share her recollections

with the police and with the crowd that has gathered around her. A man begins to mimic

her description of the suspect, while Hitchcock cuts to her ‘interior’ point-of-view, her

subjective recollection of the killer (figure 13), in what William Rothman calls “an

expressionistically distorted image of a man, reflected off polished metal.”116

A shot of a reporter begins a sequence that depicts the beginning of a news cycle.

In fact, it triggers a whole collection of shots that seems to celebrate machinery, commu-

nications equipment, and the entire production apparatus. (These images in some ways

recall Lang’s Metropolis [1926], though it would be farfetched to suggest a direct inspira-

tion, since Lang had only begun pre-production of the film at the time that Hitchcock

worked at UFA. Nevertheless, reflections on man-machine interaction in the context of

urbanization are byproducts of Expressionist poetry, as in Albert Ehrenstein’s “Wien,”

and Expressionist painting, as in Emil Nolde’s Hamburg, for example).

The sequence ends with imagery that is at once geometrically and ‘psychologically’

inflected: Hitchcock specifically designed a shot of the back of newspaper van as a pair of

eyes looking at the spectator (figure 14).

Figure 13. Geometric forms.. Figure 14. Anxiety among Londoners. Figure 15. The ‘Nosferatu’-like appearance.

116 Rothman, William. Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Cited a p. 9.

37

Not only does the image denote geometric forms (two circles and a rectangle), but it also

connotes the atmosphere of apprehension among Londoners. Scared, they seem to look

out constantly for the serial killer (figure 15), and in one single shot, Hitchcock manages

to convey this psychological state of mind.

After acquainting us with the Buntings, Hitchcock finally inserts the menacing fig-

ure that emerges from the “London Fog”: the lodger. As Richard Allen notes, the

“Lodger’s phantom-like presence” as he stands in front of the Bunting home “resembles

Nosferatu,” and Mrs. Bunting’s “reaction recalls the astonishment of the heroine in … Ca-

ligari … when Caligari reveals to her the rigid body of the phallic somnabulist lying

down in the coffin-like ‘cabinet.’”117 In fact, as Allen reminds us, The Lodger carries not

only specific echoes of Caligari and Nosferatu, but it also has a thematic reference to the

third episode of Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924) that deals spe-

cifically with the Jack-the-Ripper story.118 (Moreover, Cesare, Count Orlok, and the

Avenger as serial killers are all members of the same homicidal ‘family.’)

The first glimpse we catch of the lodger is in a long shot that includes a staircase

(figure 15). This brings us to another recurrent motif and another formal ‘bridge’ be-

tween Hitchcock and Expressionism: staircases. Stairs and passageways in general are of

symbolic importance in cinematic Expressionism: one need only think of Cesare’s walk

117 Allen, Richard. “The Lodger and Hitchcock’s Aesthetic.” In Hitchcock Annual: 2001-2002, pp. 38-78, cited at p. 58. 118 Allen, cited at p. 53

38

with Jane, the chases on stairs in Lang’s Der müde Tod and Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922),

Hagen and Gunther walking over cadavers in Die Nibelungen, or the centrality of the back

staircase in Leopold Jessner’s Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921).119 As Eisner remarks, one

“could say a lot about this taste the [Expressionists] have for staircases.”120 Eisner finds a

relatively simple explanation: corridors, staircases, and all passageways are “ideal oppor-

tunities for chiaroscuro.”121 Staircases, as Hurley underscores, “hint at the uncertainty of

existence and dangers that lie unseen.”122 They also suggest, as he continues, “that there

are secrets to be learned.”123

Among the seemingly endless selection of examples, we find John Aysgarth (Cary

Grant) climbing the stairs to bring his wife, Lina (Joan Fontaine), a glass of milk in Suspi-

cion (1941); in Notorious (1946) a staircase separates the concerned T.R. Devlin (Cary

Grant) from checking on Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) who has been poisoned by

Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) and his mother; in Vertigo, stairs are the crucial ob-

stacle for Scottie (James Stewart) to save the (fictional) Madeleine (Kim Novak);124 steps

are equally central in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), among the many important ‘stair mo-

ments’ are the first encounter between Detective Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey) and

Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), second, stairs are place of a murder attempt on Young

119 Eisner, pp. 121, 177-178. 120 Eisner, cited at p. 119. 121 Eisner, Ibid. 122 Hurley, cited at p. 174. 123 Hurley, Ibid. 124 As the dialogue of between Scottie and Judy reveals, the real Madeleine had already been killed by the time that the fictional Madeleine ran up the stairs.

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Charlie (Teresa Wright); in Psycho, stairs lead to the cellar where Norman Bates (Anthony

Perkins) keeps the corpse of his mother, and the master staircase is where Norman mur-

ders the detective Arbogast (Martin Barsam); in Saboteur (1942), the winding staircase of

the Statue of Liberty is the beginning of the final struggle between Barry Kane (Robert

Cummings), the innocently accused man, and the foreign agent, Mr. Fry (Norman Lloyd).

In addition, Foreign Correspondent (1940), I Confess (1950), and Strangers on a Train

(1951), in one way or another, use staircases as an important device to connote the pas-

sage into uncertainty. Stairs in all these examples visually mark a crucial moment, where

the fate of a character will be changed or shaped by the intervention of another charac-

ter. Destinies will be changed by an outside force. Stairs underscore this transition –

quite literally.

As The Lodger demonstrates, Hitchcock amply uses darkly sinister tones in the set

design to imply a constantly impending peril. Fog here is, of course, the first element.

Nature often provides Hitchcock with a convenient device to conjure hostility and dan-

ger: in The 39 Steps, it is the mist; in Spellbound (1946) snow; in Lifeboat (1943) and in Psy-

cho rain; and thunder and lightning are the mood-setting forces of nature in Marnie.125

The second component for The Lodger is the use of shadows cast by the moonlight and

streetlights. Shadows create Stimmung – atmosphere. According to Eisner, this Stimmung

is “most often diffused by a ‘veiled,’ melancholy landscape, or by an interior in which the

etiolated glow of a hanging lamp, and oil lamp, a chandelier or even a sunbeam shining

40

through a window, creates penumbra.”126 Count Orlok’s shadow looms like a constant

danger on the big screen whenever he roams around town, just as the night creatures in

Grune’s Strasse or Pabst’s Die freudenlose Gasse are magnified by the shadows they throw.

A scene from Blackmail proves how Hitchcock combines shadows, the stair motif,

and the scream to create a specific Stimmung, and how he uses the ambience to comment

on the action. Alice (Anny Ondra) and Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), the artist she had been

flirting with all evening, enter Crewe’s apartment building. As they walk up the stairs and

just before they enter the apartment, the handrail of the stairwell throws a strong and

conspicuous shadow not only on the wall, but also on the characters themselves – thus

foreshadowing the impending struggle between the Alice and Crewe (figure 16). When

Alice leaves the same way after having killed her attacker, the stairs, as Lesley Brill points

out, “are now photographed from above … and … [t]he camera now acknowledges the

horror of the murder as it watches Alice go down into a night world of terror and guilt

from which she will never emerge.”127When Alice finds herself back on the street, the

enormous shadow of Tracy (Donald Calthrop) is projected onto the door, thus announc-

ing his pursuit of her (figure 17). And Brill adds, as Alice “walks the dark streets of Lon-

don in a daze, Hitchcock cuts to an extremely high shot looking down on the Thames, a

shot that places Alice in an underworld cut in half by a black river.”128

125 Riley, p. 172. 126 Eisner, cited at p. 199. 127 Brill, Lesley. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cited at p. 151. 128 Brill, Ibid.

41

Figure 16. ‘Foreshadowing’ staircase. Figure 17. Again, a shadow ‘foreshadows.’ Figure 18. Gunman as Count Orlok-lookalike.

Moreover, as David Sterritt underscores, the “atmosphere is charged with her [sic]

anxiety.”129 Some “passerby seem ghostly and transparent, and the arm of a traffic cop …

reminds her of Crewe’s dead arm protruding from behind the bed curtain.”130 In addi-

tion, a few moments later, Alice is passing by a gin advertisement (with the headline

“White for Purity,” referring both to Alice’s own last name and to her loss of innocence),

which “shows a moving cocktail that becomes a stabbing knife in her dazed imagina-

tion.”131 Not only do we find in this sequence all the elements of Expressionist atmos-

phere, but we also discover how much Hitchcock has projected the psychology and the

‘visions’ that Alice has onto the exterior world – a classic example of Hitchcock’s compli-

ance with the theoretical outline of Expressionism.

Other Expressionist ‘moments’ are also to be found in Blackmail: the gunmen ar-

rested in the opening sequence recalls Count Orlok. As Sterritt explains, “we see the

gunmen’s hand moving slowly toward the weapon, his face and arm shodowed on the

wall in a distorted shape that recalls the vampire in … Nosferatu” (figure 18).132 (Uncle

129 Sterritt, David. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cited at p. 42. 130 Sterritt, Ibid. 131 Sterritt, Ibid. 132 Sterritt, cited at p. 31.

42

Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt also has Nosferatu overtones, as Sterritt convincingly points

out; when we first see him, he is lying as if in a coffin, arms folded.133) Finally, at dawn,

Alice still finds herself passing through the empty streets of London, when she comes

across a homeless man. A point-of-view shot shows that she focuses on the man’s arm

while immediately recalling Crewe’s arm in her mind (again, Hitchcock cuts to an ‘inte-

rior’ subjective camera akin to Murnau’s use of the same device for the night porter in

Der letzte Mann). Finally, as Alice begins to scream, her shouting morphs into the outcry

– Schrei – of the landlady discovering Crewe’s body – shots that are intercut and seam-

lessly blend into a cohesive sequence.

Another prominent Hitchcock film, produced decades later, proceeds in similar

ways, though the setting has now been moved from London to New York: The Wrong

Man. Much like Blackmail, The Wrong Man also relies on Stimmung to underscore the sub-

ject of a haunted character. The menace represented by Manny Balestrero’s (Henry

Fonda) environment becomes evident in the first few minutes of the film. As Brill points

out, “[f]rom the beginning, night and descending movements dominate light and ascent,”

and this “careful selection of images of descent and darkness … announces that [the film]

will take place in a shadowy underworld.” 134 A dramatic shot “down the stairs [sic] to the

subway shows Manny disappearing into the bowels of the earth.”135

133 Sterritt, pp. 31, 57. 134 Brill, cited at pp. 113, 114. 135 Brill, cited at p. 114.

43

Other images carry a similar connotation, as Brill continues, from the “[e]erie

shadows [that] envelop the front of the Balestrero home” to a “motif of elevated ‘subway

trains’ [that] carr[y] the subtle suggestion that the underworld is emerging from below to

take dominion above.”136 In addition, Hitchcock not only uses visual, but also aurally ex-

pressive elements to communicate the message that the outside world is about to come

down on an innocent man. As Riley argues, Hitchcock made “extended use of the jarring

sounds of New York City subways and elevated trains to convey a subconscious premoni-

tion of urban chaos through the intermittent cycle of infernal metalic noises.”137 Image

and sound converge into a giant wave that is about to overwhelm Manny, the struggling

musician.

Indeed, overwhelmed Manny soon is, as he fails to find a way out of his predica-

ment. Hitchcock resorts here to one of the tools he had already used in Blackmail: put-

ting us in the ‘shoes’ of Manny, in much the same way as Murnau would do for the

drunken walk of the demoted night porter. And, to borrow Cook’s words from that films

description, the camera does not assume the position of Manny’s “physical eye,” but the

position of his “mind’s eye.” In The Wrong Man, this moment takes place as Manny is

taken off to jail. Initially, Hitchcock had gone to great lengths to accentuate the film’s

real-life dimension: not only does a title in the film’s opening credits announce its ‘true

story’ source (initially reprinted in Life magazine), but Hitchcock also chose an almost ci-

136 Brill, cited at p. 115. 137 Riley, cited at p. 172.

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néma vérité style, with use of real locations, from the real ballroom of the Stork Club to a

real prison to the streets of New York City.

Yet, as Sterritt points out, “Manny’s vertiginous reaction to imprisonment is

evoked by a whirling camera movement that couldn’t be more removed from standard

documentary practice.”138 Rather, it is evidence of the film’s “[E]xpressionist style, which

contributes some of the movie’s most obvious tropes,” from the Stimmung it creates to the

ambience of menace that slowly envelops Manny.

This inclusion of the protagonist’s subjective experience will be used most memo-

rably and in its most accomplished form in Hitchcock’s next film: Vertigo. As the director

reiterated numerous times, relaying the story from the character’s (subjective) perspective

is one of his foremost concerns. In an interview in 1936, he claimed that: “In order to ap-

preciate what the characters … are going through, we have to project ourselves into their

consciousness [sic].”139

Vertigo’s hero, Scottie, suffers from acrophobia or fear of heights, a psychological

condition that, as Wood elaborates with the help of a medical definition, “arises from the

tension between the desire to fall and the dread of falling.”140 Scottie first becomes aware

of his ‘illness’ during the film’s initial rooftop chase sequence. To convey the emotion,

project it onto the screen, and thus, make the viewer feel what Scottie feels, Hitchcock

138 Sterritt, cited at p. 69. Emphasis has been added. 139 Gottlieb, cited at p. 109. 140 Wood, cited at p. 110.

45

famously used the “dolly and zoom simultaneously,”141 tracking backwards with the cam-

era while zooming forward with the lens of the camera (figure 19; as Hitchcock explained,

he tried to achieve a similar effect in Rebecca, but did not devise a strategy until a few

years later142). The same technique later recurs as Madeleine climbs the stairs, while Scot-

tie is forced to stay back (figure 20).

Figure 19. Rooftop ‘vertigo’ from Scottie’s P-O-V. Figure 20. Scottie looks down and has the same sensation. Figure 21. Shots of Scottie’s spying as objectification …

(Interestingly enough, Hitchcock manages to imitate the psychological condition in the

mechanics: just as the acrophobe wants to jump, yet dreads to fall, the lens ‘plunges’

forward, while the camera itself ‘goes’ back.)

Yet, Vertigo is filled with countless other moments that similarly illustrate a subjec-

tive and psychological state of mind. In fact, as one may suggest, Scottie’s entire pursuit

of Madeleine/Judy confirms a pattern consistent with what Freud calls the Schautrieb, the

desire and drive to watch. Scottie is the rightful “heir” to L.B. Jeffries’ voyeurism, as

Sterritt puts it.143 His constant pursuit of Madeleine (initially with a professional motive),

141 Truffaut, cited at p. 246. 142 Truffaut, Ibid. 143 Sterritt, cited at p. 85.

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slowly morphs into an obsession to locate someone who, for all Scottie initially knows, is

dead.

Another reading by Slovoj Zizek, this time inspired by Lacan, points to Scottie’s

obsession and shows that Madeleine has become for Scottie the personification of the

objet a, the objectification of his desire, or rather the “transsubstantiation” of the Freudian

“Ding” (or in Lacanian terms, of the “Chose réelle-auffreuse-impossible-à-supporter”). In

both cases, Scottie (as the stand-in for voyeurism) and Madeleine (as the objectification of

a desire) themselves become signs for and expressions of psychological (or psychologi-

cally charged) states of mind.

Once Madeleine has died, Scottie’s obsession fails to subside, and he becomes the

hostage of his own mind. As the psychiatrist explains, Scottie “suffers from acute melan-

cholia, combined with a guilt complex. Again, to express Scottie’s condition through the

character’s own subjective view, Hitchcock inserts a nightmare (dream) sequence

In its mix of memories, colors (purple, blue, and especially red), animation, and

recollection, the sequence is clearly indicative of Scottie’s “forests of the mind” (to recall

Caligari for a moment). In this sequence, we relive not only the most important objects in

the first two acts of the film (figure 22, for example; a sketch of the flower bouquet disin-

tegrating into a set of geometric forms), but we also literally enter his mind. In this series,

Scottie is at once afraid to look over the edge and almost driven to jump (figure 23).

Hitchcock thus also reflects the duality of acrophobia (desire to fall and dread of falling),

the ‘main’ condition he suffers from.

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Figure 22. Animation in the dream sequence. Figure 23. Dream sequence jump.

We shall not neglect to mention at least one other instance that gives Hitchcock

the opportunity to use the screen as a canvas of Scottie’s interior life: his successful

transformation of Judy into Madeleine (‘bis’). As soon as Judy agrees to do her hair the

way Madeleine did, Scottie reaches an emotional peak (as Bernard Herrmann’s score

thoroughly implies). The ensuing 360° pan, with other moments of the past projected

onto the background, clearly reflects Scott’s mindset at the moment. It is, by no means, a

denotation of objective reality in Judy’s hotel room, the place where the actual kiss takes

place (figure 24).

Just as the nightmare sequence demonstrates, geometric forms are a major preoc-

cupation for the film and the recurring spirals (in the titles and again in the nightmare

sequence) recall, enunciate, and remind us of Scottie’s psychological condition (figure 25).

Figure 24. The famous 360-degree pan. Figure 25. The spirals as reminders and annunciation of Scottie’s condition.

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Spirals superimposed over the eye make the connection to the subjective shots even

clearer, and it serves as an alert: Whenever we are going to witness a vertiginous impres-

sion, it is through someone’s eyes (Scottie’s, of course) that we are looking through.

A dream sequence as an expressive sign of a character’s state of mind also occurs

very strikingly in Spellbound, a film that makes the connection between geometric forms,

expressive set design, and psychology eminently accessible. The dream is filled with con-

notative signs with Freudian echoes and surrealist imagery (designed by Salvador Dalí).

First, of course, this sequence helps solve the film’s murder mystery and John

Ballentine’s (Gregory Peck) childhood trauma. Yet, second, it also – and above all – de-

notes Ballentine’s anxiety, a state of being haunted by images in a (dream) world that

seems to have lost sense. (As Dr. Brulov/Michael Chekhov explains, “dreams tell you

what you’re trying to hide from your self, but they’re telling it to you all mixed up”).

Spellbound pays tribute not only to Freud, but also to a filmic precedent of the Weimar

period: Pabst’ Geheimnisse einer Seele, the ‘mother’ of all ‘psychoanalytically inclined’ pic-

tures. (Even the often preposterously simplistic dialogue is reminiscent of the precursor).

In both Hitchcock and Pabst’s films, psychoanalysis and graphic symbols in dreams are

the key to solving the films’ mysteries.

In Marnie, Hitchcock finds a similar device to let the viewer experience the world

through a character’s eyes: suffusions of the color red. As Wood explains, because of

Marnie’s “traumatic experience, the color red, seen under conditions of great tension …

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acts as a release mechanism for Marnie’s suppressed tensions.”144The “immediate effect is

to provoke a sort of hysterical swoon, a panic reaction, as the terrifying, buried memory

forces itself dangerously near the surface of consciousness, which in turn produces unre-

ality.”145

And, as Wood rightfully claims, Hitchcock “doesn’t want merely to show us a

woman caught in this condition, he wants to convey to us the feeling of the condition it-

self – wants us to experience it directly as Marnie experiences it, as far as that is possi-

ble.”146 Hitchcock uses the same trick with an abrupt zoom on bundles of money, in or-

der to convey to us Marnie’s obsessive desire for cash.

For Hitchcock, this notion of projecting “ourselves” into a character’s “conscious-

ness” goes hand in hand with the idea that a picture should be laden with emotion, and

that the viewer should be emotionally invested in the picture. As he reminded critics and

interviewers over and over again, “it was precisely not … the intellectual experience of the

crime thriller that interested him.” Rather, as Spoto clarifies, what Hitchcock “always

tried to add was the emotional factor.”147

Emotional impact and Aufbruch were precisely at the heart of the Expressionist

movement. Expressionists, Riley had noted, distort reality in order “to communicate in-

ner feelings and emotions” and thus aim “at creating a psychological or spiritual effect

144 Wood, cited at p. 175. 145 Wood, Ibid. 146 Wood, cited at p. 176. 147 Spoto, cited at p. 504.

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rather than at recording external events in logical sequence.”148 This is exactly what

Hitchcock tries to achieve with dream sequences, red suffusions, and other effects of

blending reality and psychology (the 360° pan in Vertigo, for example). (Even the acting

in some of these sequences is exaggerated and ‘theatrical’: Marnie’s over-acting, for ex-

ample, in Mark Rutland’s [Sean Connery] office or during their free association game – in

both instances, lightning and the color red, intervene.)

Schrei moments in Hitchcock similarly recall instances of Expressionist emphasis

on subjectivity over ‘objective’ reality. Yet, in general, for all the formally Expressionist

elements in Hitchcock’s works, his cinema maintains – nonetheless – strong ties to the

‘real’ world. In an interesting way, formally Expressionist elements interact with Hitch-

cock’s film universe in much the same way as in the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Kammer-

spielfilm. And, in both cases, it is at once a rejection and an affirmation of Expressionism,

as Cook had noted. Hitchcock reconciled his artistic ambitions (after all, Expressionism

was a high art movement, as Kasten reminds us) and his desire to root his cinema firmly

in reality.

It is exactly as Spoto had suggested: Hitchcock’s vision of the world intersects with

the one presented by Karl Grune in Die Strasse. Bored or just oblivious to the ever-

present dangers of the world, the hero wanders onto the street, only to be stricken by

horror and thrown off his tracks: boredom or even flirtiness lead Alice to follow Crewe to

148 Hurley, Neil P. Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock’s Fright and Delight. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Cited at p. 170.

51

his apartment in Blackmail; Richard Hanney (Robert Donat) is just visiting London and

has no idea that Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) has the keys to the enigma of The 39 Steps;

Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) takes an innocent stroll along the shore, before find-

ing himself accused of murder in Young and Innocent (1937); David Kentley (Dick Hogan)

has no clue that his friends have anything else on their mind than inviting him for a pre-

party drink in Rope (1948); even Scottie in Vertigo wants to retire in peace before he is

forced to encounter Madeleine/Judy. The list could be continued (almost) indefinitely.

In all cases, the lives of these protagonists (or sometimes side characters as in Rope)

are turned upside-down in the blink of an eye. An outside force intervenes – sometimes

consciously (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Vertigo, Rope) sometimes unconsciously (the girls

that accuse Robert in Young and Innocent have no idea whether or not he has murdered

the swimmer; even Phillip Vandamm [James Mason] has no clue that George Kaplan does

not really exist and thus presumes that Roger Thornhill [Cary Grant] is the – non-existing

– spy).

Suddenly, as Jacob von Hoddis writes in “Weltende”: “Der Sturm ist da, die

wilden Meere hupfen” and “Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.” All of the sudden, the

world can collapse. Hitchcock shares von Hoddis’ Weltuntergangsstimmung. Hitchcock’s

Uncle Charlie has a similar Weltanschauung: “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do

you know if you rip the fronts off houses, you’d find swine. The world is hell. What does

it matter who’s in it?” As one scholar convincingly argues, one would be right in equating

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Charlie’s position with Hitchcock’s own, since the filmmaker does not really present

someone to rebut this position.149

It is thus that Hitchcock shares a thematic position with Expressionist poetry. He

also has other subjects in common, notably his obsession with murder and death. Since

The Lodger, murder is inextricably linked to Hitchcock’s cinema and virtually every Hitch-

cock film tackles the subject (even in a film like To Catch a Thief, Foussard [Jean Marti-

nelli] is killed himself while trying to murder John Robie [Cary Grant]). Corpses, an ob-

session especially in Benn’s poetry, are a recurrent Hitchcock motif, most notably visible

in Under Capricorn (1949), in The Trouble with Harry (1955; figure 26) – an entire movie (!)

about a corpse – Psycho – an entire “kingdom of death”150 – The Birds (1963), and Frenzy

(1971; figure 27).

Figure 26. What to do with a corpse? Figure 27. Murder victim in Frenzy.

The other strong thematic intersection between Hitchcock and Expressionism (by

way of its own connection to Romantic literature) is the Doppelgänger motif, that begins

in German literature at the very least with the story of Faust. In fact, as has been pointed

149 Richard Peña, “Hitchcock and Shadow of a Doubt.” Personal communication, 2002. 150 Spoto, cited at p. 70.

53

out, Strangers on a Train (with an evil character suggesting a ‘pact’ that the good character

does not want to fulfill) may be Hitchcock’s own variant on the Faust myth.151 In Hitch-

cock, we find the Doppelgänger in a number of different ways: the relatives that form a

‘couple,’ like Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt; split personality as

in Psycho and Frenzy; and, finally, in the form of a favorite Hitchcock motif, the mistaken

identify, for example, as in The Wrong Man or North by Northwest.

Finally, as Hitchcock recalled later in his life, he had always wanted to make a film

about city life, a project he tentatively called Life of a City. As he told an interviewer:

This is something I’ve wanted to do since 1928. The story of a big city from dawn to the following dawn. I wanted to do it in terms of what lies behind the face of a city – what makes it tick – in other words, backstage of a city. But the canvas is so enor-mous that it is practically impossible to get the right story … It must be done in terms of personalities and people and – with my technique – everything would have to be used dramati-cally.152

Hitchcock never got around to finishing his project. Yet, in a majority of his films,

Hitchcock became the chronicler of city life, from London (The Lodger, Blackmail, Sabo-

tage, Foreign Correspondent, to name but a few) to New York (Saboteur, Rope, Rear Win-

dow, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest) to San Francisco (Vertigo). In all these films, the

director records the ups and downs, the dynamics, the intricacies, and the perils that

wait just around the corner. It is this fascination with city life that makes him – through

151 Spoto, p. 326.

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and through – a spiritual brother to every Expressionist. The subject looms large in Ger-

man Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painting as it does in Hitchcock’s work, as a

comparison between Grosz’ Kurfürstendamm (1925; figure 28) and a shot from Sabotage

(1936; figure 29) suggests:153

Figure 28. Grosz’ Ku’Damm (1926). Figure 29. Street scene in Sabotage (1936).

As we have seen, Expressionism in all of its forms, from painting to theatre, from

theatre to cinema had an enormous influence on Hitchcock’s work – both in formal and

in thematic aspects. As Gottlieb notes, while Hitchcock was eminently proud of “being

an Englishman and an English filmmaker,” and though he “was shrewdly aware of some

of the advantages of a ‘national’ cinema, one that would appeal to a ‘home’ audience,”

the ‘master of suspense’ was in fact subject to an enormous range of ‘foreign’ influences.

Not only the German Kammerspiel, but also Soviet montage, not only F.W. Murnau, but

also D.W. Griffith have shaped Hitchcock’s cinema. But, as he mentioned himself, the

152 Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It. New York: Knopf, 1997. Cited at p. 494. 153 As suggested in Païni, Dominique et al. (ed..). Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales. Milan, Italy: Mazzotta, 2001. pp. 264-265.

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idea of making ‘pure cinema,’ telling stories in primarily visual ways is something he may

have learned from a specific artistic period: from Expressionism.