shadows
(of expressionism)

What (you may wonder) is the distorted silhouette of Max Schreck doing on the wall of the dark room -- besides lurking there sinisterly, as is it's wont? Well, Max's shadow represents the deep and lasting impression that German Expressionism of the '20s and '30s had on the visual style and thematic undercurrents of what eventually became known as film noir.  (Come to think of it, They Live By Night -- one of the all-time great noir titles -- would serve quite well as the name for a celluloid shadowplay featuring Max's Nosferatu and his fellow blood-sucking insomniacs...)

A prominent artistic movement in post-WWI Germany that influenced many disciplines (among them theater, painting, and sculpture, as well as film), Expressionism sought to give shape to psychological states through  stylized visuals -- particularly (in the movies) using sharply exaggerated shadows and high-contrast lighting, disorientingly skewed set design and off-kilter camera angles.  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is probably the most famous early example of expressionism in the movies (indeed, it has interesting structural parallels to the noir masterpiece The Woman in the Window (1944), directed by Fritz Lang, who was originally chosen to direct Caligari.)

As the Nazis rose to power, quite a few German filmmakers (including Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edward G. Ulmer) left for Hollywood,  bringing with them artistic influences that would later found dramatic expression in many of the key films noir of the '40s and '50s.  Lang, for example, was already famous before he began his Hollywood career as a top-line director; his German films include such Expressionist masterpieces as Metropolis (1926) and M (1931) -- dark and disturbing pictures that forshadowed noir (as Metropolis could also be said to foreshadow the Third Reich) with their nightmarish urban landscapes and their doom-filled stories of lust and violence.... 

	Dr. Caligari ( ) feeds Cesare (Conrad Veidt), the somnambulist in Robert Weine's extraordinarily influential Expressionist masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The sets were constructed at crazy, unsettling angles, some of them featuring bizarre shadows that were actually painted on.
There's nothing quite like an immense, black, creeping shadow to indicate an imminent threat:  In Fritz Lang's M (1931), another influential expressionist milestone, the sinister silhouette of child molester and murderer Peter Lorre looms over his targeted victim -- while partially obscuring the killer's own "Wanted" poster behind her.
	Like mirrors, shadows can create what critics Janey Place and Lowell Peterson have called "two-shots of one character."   This one, of Edmond O'Brien in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), suggests the presence of a darker alter-ego.  (For more on this idea, don't   forget to check out the Dark Room mirror...)
Talk about crow's feet!  At the end of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), sometimes cited as the first true film noir, bad girl Brigid O'Shaunessy (Mary Astor) takes her place behind bars and is branded with the indelible mark of the black bird, that elusive treasure fashioned from the stuff of dreams.
	The only film directed by famous actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter (1955) is one of the utterly unique experiences the movies can offer, a wild concoction of fantastic, expressionistic, even surrealistic imagery. It's a primal fable about two children menaced by a crazed  preacher (Robert Mitchum) who marries their mother (Shelly Winters) as part of his plan to coax (or force) their secret from them: where they've hidden the stash of money their father left with them before he was arrested.  Here, the preacher lurks outside their house, a streetlight casting a grotesquely menacing shadow on their bedroom wall.
Sharp shadows increase the sense of tension and menace in this interrogation scene from Samuel Fuller's The Crimson Kimono (1953), about a racially mixed pair of LA cops investigating the murder of a stripper.  Ads sensationallistically played up the "daring" (for the time) romance between the Chinese-American cop and a white woman.
	Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), released the same year as The Maltese Falcon (the movie usually selected to mark the beginning of the noir cycle) gleefully adopted and expanded the stylistic vocabulary of Expressionism. It's said that Kane probably created more directors than any other movie, and its impact on noir style -- and filmmaking world-wide -- was tremendous.  Although it wasn't exactly noir, it used many of the same stylistic devices -- stark shadows and fames-within-frames, vertiginous camera angles and wildly distorted shadows.  It even took the customary noir form of an epistemological quest for meaning, an investigation into the mystery of "Rosebud," the cryptic last word of Charles Foster Kane.  But instead of the investigator being a cop or a private eye, he's a faceless newsreel reporter -- who appears in the film as a mere shadow without a face....
On the wall behind Fred MacMurray's head in the Dark Room there appears, as mentioned above, the digitally distorted spectre of the mysterious Max Schreck, playing the title vampire in German director F.W. Murnau's still-scary (and hauntingly beautiful) Nosferatu (1922).  Murnau later came to Hollywood and made one of the most stunningly gorgeous of all American films: Sunrise (1927).

Take a closer look at the blinds to learn more about shadows and noir...

back into the dark room