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250 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA
" Floors and pavements are streaked, splashed and spotted, divided and decorated in bars, crosses, diagonals, serpentines and arrows. The walls become as banners, or as transparencies, space fissured by age, or as slates upon which the lightning blazes strange hieroglyphs. Or they become veils and vanish in a mosaic of scrambled forms and surfaces, like a liner in camouflage. A grim effort is made to extend perspective not only in flight from the spectator — that is, toward the background— but into and beyond the foreground, to overwhelm the spectator with it, to penetrate and transfix him with its linear life, to draw him into the trammels, the vortex of the action. The first effect that strikes the eye in the Caligari film is the plastic richness and accentuation of all the masses. We are plunged into a cubistic world of intense relief and depth, a stereoscopic universe. The modelling of the scenery is emphasised by painted high lights, by artificial shadows, by bands of colour outlining masses and contours."1 Pretty, but no money in that, as a Film King would say.
Such is the setting. But what of the characters? They are far too naturalistic. They do not harmonise with the background.
The writer gives the credit of the " creation " to Messrs. Reimann, Rohrig and Warm. But the production was indirectly influenced by the Berlin Sturm Group of ultra-expressionists associated with Herwarth Walden. From my friend Walden I learned that the painter decorators copied the ideas of the Sturm painter Arnold Topp without so much as a word of acknowledgment. In " The Golem," " a fantastic, cabalistic Jewish romance of ancient Prague, by Gustav Meyrink," we see the new architect making a practical use of space. But Herr Poelzig, to whom belongs the credit of having built Max Reinhardt's "Theatre of The Three Thousand" during the War, obtains his expressionistic effects by means of plastic form instead of by painted scenery as in " Caligari." The picture
i " The New Spirit in the German Arts," by H. G. Scheffauer.