Haunted Screens shines loving light on early film era

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Art+Film exhibit; “Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s,” opens Sept. 21. The exhibit transports visitors into the highly influential era of German Expressionism just in time for the centennial anniversary of World War I.

 

“Haunted Screens” showcases the dual worlds of filmmaking and film content through a curated collection of production design drawings, photographs, posters, documents and equipment, as well as the shadowy worlds of the films themselves. The stylistically striking show is located in the Art of the Americas Building, which previously housed the Stanley Kubrick and Gabriel Figueroa exhibits.

German Expressionism, as expressed in silent film, was an artistic movement that took place during the Weimar era, a liberal period in the interwar years, and extended the early 1900s Expressionist movements involving literature and visual, auditory and kinetic arts. The wave of German émigré directors, cinematographers and production designers brought this background to Hollywood, where its imprints still resonate in the noir, sci-fi and horror genres.

The exhibit, like the filmmaking industry, is a collaborative effort. USC architecture professor Amy Murphy, a professor at the USC School of Architecture, partnered on the design of the exhibit with her husband Michael Maltzan. Murphy was hired for the project through a Trojan connection — a student who was in the first USC studio class she taught, Victoria Behner. Behner is the senior exhibit designer at LACMA and a lecturer at the USC School of Architecture .

“[Expressionist films] can’t exist without the concepts about the city at that time, but they relate to how we think about cities today … the anxieties but also some of the pleasures of urban life,” Murphy said. This psychological oscillation is a battle between control and repression, freedom and expression. It is physically expressed through spatial design that distorts reality in the films and the exhibition space. The design team constructed the space in the dramatically curved shape of a waving carpet to allow the two realms to be next each other and also to respect the need of film to stay in that dark dream space. The top of the carpet is all white, and the bottom of the carpet makes dark tunnels.

In these tunnels, small, suspended screens cycle clips from films including Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the Crime and Punishment-inspired Raskolnikow (1923) and F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). The distorted camera angles and slanted set designs run parallel to the geometrically angled walls of the tunnel. The screens are double-sided so that the film can be viewed from both sides of the screen but backwards, a further distortion of reality.

Murphy still teaches these Expressionist films every year in her course ARCH 434:  City Cine: Visuality, Media and Urban Experience. Last week, the class screened Fritz Lang’s crime thriller M (1931), one of the featured films in the exhibition. The class then discussed the kinetic feeling and the paranoia of cities and related it to life on campus.

Within the exhibit, the viewer is free to wander or take a preplanned route. “While the exuberant forms are in many ways what you’re known for as an architect, it’s really the quality of the space, the feeling or the type of the space, that has the biggest and lasting effect,” Maltzan said.

In other respect, the exhibit is like a Mobius strip — the dark spaces lead back into the light — and there is a curious weaving movement through the two worlds, mirroring the looping temporal and narrative structures in the films. “You always have an idea about the path you’d like someone to take, but the reality is that, like in life, people have both the opportunity and the predilection to take their own route,” Maltzan said.

Throughout the exhibit, details are sprinkled in with a wink and a nudge. A jagged corridor serves to house a series of drawings with the motif of stairs. The robot from Lang’s science fiction epic Metropolis (1927) looks down upon its audience, self-consciously regarding a poster depicting an image of itself. Behind the robot, a small cubby replicates the chiaroscuro lighting effects so common in Expressionist cinema.

The nearly 250 works come from the collections of LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and La Cinémathèque française, where this exhibit was held a few years ago, and private collections. The Paris exhibit inspired LACMA CEO Michael Govan to bring the show to Los Angeles. This exhibit is supported by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and film producer Riza Aziz.

Many of the drawings, manuscripts, posters and set models were collected by Lotte Eisner, a German émigré film historian who wrote The Haunted Screen in 1952. This fall, LACMA and the Skirball Cultural Center are working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to present three exhibitions on German Expressionist cinema, one of which is “Haunted Screens,” which will be joined later by “Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950,” and “The Noir Effect.”