Test 2 Study Questions

Question 1

What characteristics of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari make it an expressionist film?

Answer 1

• visual motifs and themes
• photographing its action against a back-
  ground of recognizably painted Expressionist sets that weirdly distort the natural world into forms that externalize the tortured inner world of the film’s disturbed narrator.

Question 2

Why, according to Fabe, did Murnau view Caligari as both an inspiration and a dead end? How does The Last Laugh respond to the perceived limitations of Caligari’s expressionist style?

Answer 2

• It was an inspiration because it abandoned the slavish imitation of a real, objectively perceived world to present a subjective vi- sion. At the end of the film, which is narrated as an extended flashback, it is revealed that the distorted look of the world was a function of the narrator’s mentally unbalanced mind.
• Caligari was a dead end because it projected the character’s vision primarily through the film’s mise-en- scène, that is, its two-dimensional painted sets, a means borrowed from the theater. Hence, it did not fully exploit the expressive possibilities inherent in the cinematic medium.

In The Last Laugh, the doorman moves through a convincingly real mise-en-scène (in contrast to the obviously artificial sets of Caligari). However, the film is richly emotionally expressive because of the way Murnau’s photographic tech- niques (his use of close-ups, camera angles, moving cameras, superim- positions, distorting lenses–all the transformative effects of the enframed
image) convey the doorman’s inner states of mind.

Question 3

What are the key stylistic qualities of Italian neo-realist cinema?

Answer 3

• its location shooting, post-production sound, and low-budget look, poor- quality black-and-white film stock, and the use of a mobile camera
• neorealism cannot be pinned down or defined according to one style or even in terms of the themes or kinds of stories told,
• neorealism is best defined by what it is not.
• calligraphism, which he defined as decoratively photographed adapta- tions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction.
• neorealist films were shot on location.
• Use of post-production sound. their films silent, dubbing in the dialogue and sound effects later. Unburdened by cumbersome sound equipment, the camera had greater freedom of movement, creating the effect of captur- ing events fortuitously, on the run, the way images of life appear in doc- umentaries and newsreels.
• Neoreal- ist stories also tend to end abruptly, without closure, with loose ends dan- gling and problems unresolved, also making them more like life and less like fictions.
• avoided three-point lighting system

Question 4

How does the neo-realist movement break with the conventions of Mussolini-era Italian cinema?

Answer 4

• Not always shot on location. Some films were shot on constructed sets in empty warehouses.
• Most interior shots used the standard three-point lighting system.
• Employed artificial, expressionistic lighting techniques.

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