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THE GERMAN FILM
of the cinema. They seize upon Dziga-Vertov and deny the existence of Karl Dreyer; they saturate their minds with the sound film and forget the intrinsic structure of visual images. It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception, for the true cineaste must see and realise the importance of its realisation as well as that of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, The Last Laugh, ToVable David, Finis Terrce, Jeanne Ney, and Turksib. Each of these films is related, each overlaps in its filmic exposition of thought. It is absurd to deny their existence on the grounds of theatricalism, expressionism, individualism, or naturalism. Without the creation of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, much that is admired in the cinema of to-day would be non-existent. It bore in it a suggestion of the fantasy that was to be the prominent characteristic of the art film. Some short time later, Kobe's Torgus, or The Coffin Maker, again with expressionist architecture, was another indication of the mystical fantasy which was to be the underlying motive of Warning Shadows, The Student of Prague, Waxworks, and others of a similar type.
The essence of the middle German film was simplicity of story value and of actional interest that eventually led to a completeness of realisation fulfilled in The Last Laugh. Many of the themes were simple experiments in film psychology. Karl Grune's The Street was a reduction of facts to the main development of one character during a short period of time. It obtained its mood by the coordination of light and camera psychology rather than by the acting, which was crude and mannered. Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows was again a simplification of detail, a centralisation of incident into small units of space and time, decorated by a fantastic touch. Waxworks was yet another example. Nearly all these films contained the fantastic element. They were seldom wholly tragic or wholly comic. They were often melodramatic, as in the case of Doctor M abuse.
Earlier than this middle period of simplicity and fantasy there had been a wholesale production of theatrical costume films that made use of the German's natural love for spectacle and the property room. These served as a foundation for the stylised school of German film acting. At all periods of the German cinema, the actors have exerted a stabilising influence on the fluctuation of the various types
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