I've got to wear this thing because this is being taped. So if you're interested, some point six weeks from now or so, you can go back and visit this online. I will also make sure that you're provided with the slides, so you don't have to take too many notes if you don't want to. Although I tend not to have that much information on my slides, so I'll leave it up to you. But do keep in mind that you will get the Prezi presentation as soon as is possible, which should just be in a few days. Please also excuse the fact that I'm playing a bit heard. I've got a cold, so I don't know if you can hear that or not. Probably you can. And just a couple of preliminary remarks to my talk today on cinema during the Weimar Republic. I'm going to try to get you guys a bit more involved than I did in my past couple of lectures in semester one. We'll see how that goes. I'm also really concerned about time, because I have a lot of slides, and I'm still trying to come to terms with this idea of lecturing for two times 50 minutes with you guys, which is outside my comfort zone. So hopefully I don't have to, but I can foresee a moment in this where I have to decide I'm going to have to skip over a bunch of slides, and so excuse that. So we're going to be talking about cinema during the Weimar Republic today. So we've reached the 20th century, and from this point on, we stay in the 20th century, I believe. We've been sort of messing around on the verge of it in the so-called Fendici Eklah. This has been the case with Freud, and with Schnitzler, with Conrad as well, sort of final decade, and over into the 20th century, the 1890s into the 20th century, with some sort of forays into the decadent 70s with apocalypse now. But now we sort of stepped over into the 20th century, which is the century in which we were all born, I think, I can say that of my colleagues too, right? We were all born in the 20th century, every one of us here. Yeah. And specifically today, we're going to be talking about film during the Weimar Republic, which is the golden 20s, but in Germany. And just more specifically, what I'm going to do today, it always, I'm always reminded of the fact that you guys are getting credit here for history, so I'm going to give you some historical context, probably for then the first half an hour or so. An introduction to the Weimar Republic period. I said that this was the 1920s in Germany, the golden 20s. It's arguably the most, for me, it's the most interesting decade in Germany in the 20th century for a number of reasons. Much of what we become, many of the things that become important to us, many of the trends in architecture and the arts that become so central to the 20th century are in their gestational period in the 1920s and in Germany. This is a kind of laboratory for many ideas, Einstein in physics, Planck in physics, in Berlin in the 1920s, Brecht in drama in the 1920s, in Berlin. The emergence of sort of the new woman, the body of sort of a female emancipation, women taking on male roles and questions of sort of gender and destabilizing traditional gender notions, all sort of really prominent features of the Weimar Republic. So a very interesting era, I hope you find it interesting too and I'm going to give you a little bit of a historical contextualization of that period to start with. Then we're going to dive right into the films that I ask you to watch. And I suppose at this point I should also ask you, maybe not what you're used to is cinema spectators. How did you find watching these films? I asked you to watch three and suggested perhaps you have a go at a fourth called Distrasse. What did you notice about these films? And I don't want to hear that they don't have any talking. What was it ultimately that you, just a couple of things, we don't have a lot of time, but what was it like for you as a spectator as somebody watching films from this period, silent films, yeah. Am I really that interesting, right? Very problematic too, because many of the original scores, the original accompaniments are lost to these. So there's the question of, okay, so what's the legitimate music and what was envisioned to accompany this? That's an interesting question. For example, if you look at the Caligari, that's a relatively new score that's been added to it. Now also something to keep in mind was that accompaniment to silent films in the 1920s was often live music. And if you're lucky enough to actually go and see Nosferatu or Caligari here with symphony accompaniment, do it. This is something, so yeah, absolutely. The music is important and that choice of music is crucial too, right? Anything else just about watching silent movies, yeah? Yeah, the dialogue shows up on the intro titles. A lot of the time what you're seeing is guys going, and for what feels like too long, 30 seconds, right? He said all of this stuff and then the intro title says, yes, you are right. So, thank you for that, a couple of your responses to watching silent films, which I don't think you do probably very often and you won't do in the course, but hopefully it wasn't like pulling teeth for you if it was, then you can say that you did it in the name of sacrifice in the name of culture. We're gonna talk specifically about Expressionist Cinema and when we talk about Expressionist Cinema, we're talking about that first specifically German direction in film and arguably what is the most influential sort of thing that German cinema has given world cinema is Expressionism and so we're gonna talk a little bit about Expressionist Cinema and I'll give you sort of a couple of things that you might be able to work with as sort of defining elements of Expressionist Cinema. I also want to give you the third point here, an introduction and this might be the kind of heavy stuff with some text and so on that you might find hard to relate to, I hope not. But in as much as a Weimar film is very much defined in terms of some sort of seminal critical responses to it, that is, the way in which we understand it has really been defined by a very limited number of critical voices. So it's been so very much defined sort of in our memory not in terms of you know, kind of over defined if you like. Couple of very important critics said this and this about Weimar film and that really dominated the way we understood it for years. So I think it's very important that I introduce you to a couple of these critical trends that have been so really sort of defining or productive of our understanding of Weimar film in an unfair way, we could certainly also argue and so there will be a little bit of sort of secondary critical response and then lastly I wanna look specifically at the way in which these films directly speak to the theme of our program, of our course, this idea of vision and knowing because I don't know if you got this when you watched the film but I think these films all in a way are very interested and this has been said of Weimar film generally in vision and visibility, notions of how we look at things, why we look at things the way we do and also how we feel about being looked at. And the way we're gonna approach that is by looking at a couple of sequences from Distrasse which unfortunately has no English type subtitles nor musical accompaniment but that won't matter because we're not talking about those things and also Mabusa so I'm gonna talk to you and we're gonna together sort of analyze the ways in which these scenes deal with these questions of vision and visibility so that's what I have planned for the next two times 50 minutes. This is part one, you'll probably never see part two, I may use these slides again at some point. There's much more to be said about Weimar cinema and specifically around this constellation of cinema vision and control and we're focusing only on really three years, not really on the first few years and so there may be a second part to this that you guys may never see and that I may never write up, we'll see. I wanna start by sort of introducing you guys to this idea of German cinema, right? Das Deutsche Kino and going back in time a little bit, back and even perhaps forward and that is to say that and you may not have thought about this, the Germans were there at the very beginning of film. The very beginning of cinema as innovators, especially technologically as these two images I hope communicate to you, the Germans were there. You may have heard of the Lumiere brothers in France, you may have heard of Edison in the United States creating these machines that allowed us to then watch photographs that are moving that then give us this illusion of moving images that's like what we do in real life but the Germans were also there at that moment. Indeed, I won't talk to this tachyscope that you see up on the left-hand side there, you can see there's got this dude, he's actually turning and these images go through this hole and you watch and it's an illusion of moving pictures. That's 1895 but we'll speak a little bit more to the stamp that commemorates 1895 and it says this chap here very dapper in his tuxedo in his, as we say in German, smoking, looking out as there is Max Skladinovsky. And Skladinovsky actually, yeah there's some argument about this but we in German studies claim Skladinovsky as the first person to actually put on a cinema, yeah to really show a film to an audience in the way that we now think of sort of going to a cinema and watching a film production. This was as part of a cabaret, so it would have been and this is what films early on were like, you went to a cabaret, you watched women who could stretch their leg behind their head and all kinds of different acts and then you'd also watch a film, it'd be part of that cabaret presentation. And this was the first such presentation, it was in the Wintergarten cabaret in Berlin in 1895 already, so you can see the showman and the early sort of men and they were inevitably men behind cinema were showmen who worked in cabaret and they saw film as being one element of a possible cabaret performance. Skladinovsky was one of these showmen, not unlike the fellow in Caligari with his bell and his césar in the Big Tent and one of the pioneers of early cinema, indeed, the Welt, Uraufjörn, the first, if you like, public screening of a film or of film, very short, 10 minutes, 1895, the Germans were there at the very beginning of cinema. So now moving ahead a few years to the period that we'll be talking about specifically today and that's the Weimar Republic and I wanna get at a few things by looking at this triptych, triptych painting with three parts by the painter Otto Dix called Großstadt Metropolis, great city, it's from 1927, 28, so a bit later than most of, than the films we'll be focusing on but I think it captures some of the energy, some of the contradictions in the Weimar Republic if you look on the left-hand side, you can see the cripple, the returning war veteran, the Weimar Republic is that period in German history right after the cataclysmic loss at the end of the First World War, two million dead, another more than two million injured, visual reminders of that loss in the cripples, amputees littering the streets of Berlin and other cities throughout the 1920s. And then contrasted with that, you've got in that first panel, the panel on the left, prostitution, Berlin in the 1920s from the early 20s on becomes a center for prostitution, a center for sexual licentiousness in general, a center for sex tourism, you know, Berlin is this kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, this really decadent city in the Weimar Republic and that's captured here as well in the gaudy makeup of the prostitutes. I forget the number but there was thousands and thousands and thousands of them in Berlin during the 1920s. So you've got that contrast there, the returning soldier, probably a John.  Prostitute Roe captures that decadence, that licentiousness and then in the center panel, we see that Weimar Berlin, especially Berlin but Germany is the center of this idea of the golden 20s, what we in North America when we talk about the United States called the roaring 20s, this is the era of jazz. This is the era of cabarets, late night parties, a city that never closes, a city and this is really where Berlin gets its reputation that it has to this day. I don't know if any of you have ever been to Berlin but if you want a party, you go to Berlin. Two o'clock in the morning on Friday, the clubs open and they don't shut until five o'clock on Sunday afternoon and people stay there the entire time and this kind of identity for Berlin is something that develops out of Weimar culture, right? And this kind of captures it, I mean obviously we're not talking techno in 1925, we're talking jazz, which represents also Americanization. The 1920s is the generation, sorry, is the decade or the long decade in which German culture is profoundly influenced by American culture, by jazz, by black musicians, by the Model T, by the manufacturing process responsible for it, by Taylorism, by Fordism. It's okay if you don't understand those things but you should understand that this is the decade when America and American culture really starts to profoundly influence German culture. Boxing, American sport, all of it. And I think I'm gonna skip over the panel on the right, it's more of the same from the left, perhaps there's more we could read into it with its furs and its wealth side by side with degradation, with poverty, these are all things I think that sort of signify some of the contrast, some of the contradictions I should say at the heart of the Weimar Republic. So I'm gonna take you through some political and cultural and social context for the next few minutes. The slide's been entitled The Birth, Life and Death of the Weimar Republic, this is a quote actually, although it's paraphrased because I changed it some by a historian by the name of Peter Gay, a guy who does really and always has done really good stuff on Freud in Germany if you're interested, the guy's name is Peter Gay, he must be 90 now I think, but really important historian certainly of this period, and he once famously called the Weimar Republic a dance on the edge of a volcano. So this is a republic, it's Germany's first, if you like, democratic republic, we've never had that form of government in Germany before, it's quite sudden, comes on the back of war, right? And it's always unstable, it's always under threat from the left and from the right, from the old order and from new right-wing radicalism in the Nazis. And then we also have this image of this kind of decadent party culture, right?  This idea of a dance on the edge of a volcano that's gonna blow, that's going to blow apart.  You can see here, big gathering in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin, proclamation of this republic, the first democratic state in the history of Germany would never had that before on 9 November 1918, before the First World War is even over. The armistice capitulation doesn't happen until a couple of days after that and this republic is already proclaimed by this social democratic politician, Philipp Scheidemann, that is a politician on the left spectrum. Two days before the end of the First World War. Two days later on the 11th of November, remember and stay, you guys understand why it is. This is the day on which the Great War, the First World War ends. So I think it's very important to understand the Weimar Republic as being this democratic experiment that happens in the shadow of and in the wake of a First World War that is incredibly demoralizing for Germany as a people in which so many lives are lost in obscene and terrifying ways that generates a great deal of trauma and then all of a sudden that is over and that ancien régime, that imperial system is washed away and then all of a sudden we've got this republic that's supposed to work, this democratic state. Ernst Holler, German dramatist, writing during the 1920s titled one of his plays Hopla via Leben, which we might translate as whoopee, we're alive. Communicating this idea that all of a sudden, ah, the war's gone, that obviously very ironically, right? Our empire is gone, this monarchical system is gone and all of a sudden here we are and we live now in this democratic place. Here we go, we're gonna live. Oh yeah, but it's not gonna last. So why not? Well, the last slide said after the storm, nach dem Sturm, okay, we're done. The war's over now, the storm's gone. Not really, because what happens throughout 1918 and 1919, even after the first elections, which we'll talk about in a minute, even after this proclamation of this republic is civil war. Civil war between the newly elected government, the newly elected régime, which we'll see the makeup of in a minute and the communists, the KPD, the Spartacists, who saw this as an opportunity here, hapla, ver Leben, this opportunity here for the socialist utopia in Germany, for revolution. They saw this opportunity, they took to the streets, you're seeing KPD behind this whatever piece of debris it is in the streets fighting in the hope of seizing power and establishing this communist, this socialist communist state, and they're crushed. Yeah, you had a question. We'll get to that in a sec. It was the government crushing the communist revolution, if you like, uprising. However, if we look at the makeup of the first cabinet, the first parliament from the January 1919 election, you can see on the left side of this image, the dark reds are the communists elected, the light reds are the social democrats, who, I mean, it's not a perfect analog, but you can consider them sort of more NDP than liberal. Even today, the social democrats who are still a powerful force in German politics are further left than our liberals, certainly. And before the war, the communists and the social democrats saw one another as brothers, that their fight was the same one. They wanted the same thing. Their roots are all in the socialist movement. Their roots are all in Marx. However, when push comes to shove, at least the communists see the SPD as betraying them. Why? Because it's the SPD that are the majority party in this first parliament, and they're the ones who are actually okaying these troops to go out into the streets to crush this uprising by these communist revolutionaries, their former brothers, betrayal. You can also see in this image another reason why there were, I think, 11 elections in 13 years, if I remember the number correctly, during the Weimar Republic, and that's because no government could hold. Because you had these shifts, you've got far left, you've got left, you've got center, you've got right, you've got two kinds of right, then it would shift or it would become unstable and nothing could be done, no laws could be enacted, and so there would be a new parliament. So there was never any political stability during the Weimar years either, the trail. This is a shot of Freikor. The Freikor were the troops, ultimately, that took to the streets and crushed the KPD troops, I should say. Those people fighting for communism in the streets. And these were returning soldiers mostly, these Freikor. They were mercenaries, if you like. They returned from the war. They were war-hardened, battle-hardened veterans. Those communist freedom fighters stood to no chance against these grizzled veterans of the war. And these troops are really on the payroll of this parliament, the largest party in which is the SPD on the left, the former brothers of the communists. Interestingly too, and as you can see, the writing on the back of the tank says, troops loyal to the government, mercenaries loyal to the SPD. It's one way you could look at it, not only the SPD, but loyal to an SPD who wanted parliament to hold. It wasn't ideological anymore. It was about making parliament hold so that the republic could get a foothold. And it was always about just keeping it, making it work. It never really became stable politically. Why not? Because there were too many industrialists and militarists and monarchists under the war, under the bad waiting for it to fail so that they could take power on the right. And then the Nazis increasingly gained power and we'll maybe get some explanation for that. I'm not sure if I'm going to do that. Too many people wanted it to fail. And that's ultimately one reason why it did. Interesting too is that these fry corps really are the muscle, if you like, of the Nazis. They develop into the SA and to a certain extent also the SS. The sort of muscle of the Nazi party later in the 1920s. Treaty of Versailles, you're probably familiar with this 28th June 1919. Reparations of what is that, $55 trillion. Some of the other stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles were very limited military, the ceding of land to victors and of course the war guilt clause, this idea that Germany had to agree that they were responsible for the First World War. This pissed a lot of people off in Germany but nevertheless, this was ultimately what was agreed upon. I don't want to get too much into the Treaty of Versailles. I'm sure all of you have heard it about it in grade 12 history. To a certain extent, another feature of why the Weimar Republic is always unstable economically, constantly writing big checks or not being able to write big checks. This is also the Treaty of Versailles where this kind of stab in the back idea comes from that ultimately the loss for the war and having to take full responsibility for the war, the Jews were responsible for that. Well, those on the left were responsible for that. They're the ones who ultimately signed onto the Versailles Treaty or those are the ones who ultimately sold us down the river. Adoption of the Weimar Constitution level August 1919. So we'll use that as sort of the day, we'll use this date, 11 August 1919, although we could use another as sort of the establishment date of the Weimar Republic. And an end date for it, we could come up with a couple of others, but probably January the 30th, 1933, which is the day on which Hitler becomes chancellor. Could talk about the importance of this being signed in Weimar, sort of cultural capital of Germany and not in Berlin for example, won't have time really. If you're interested, shoot me an email, come to office hours on any of this stuff. Just again to talk about how unstable the Weimar Republic was. This idea of unstable always under threat I think is important to maybe understanding the culture of the period as well, is the Cap Putsch. What is a Putsch? What are we saying in English, is that the pronunciation of it in English? Putsch, a Putsch, a Putsch, Putsch. What is a Putsch? Apart from a really cool sounding word. Right, so we've already seen the left try to do that. We've already seen the communists try to do that. And the Cap Putsch is an effort from the right. In 1920, you can see the date there, the 13th of March, 1922. Cap, former high-ranking military. Again, representative of the Old Guard. Basically, has himself anointed the Chancellor of Germany. Government fails as a result of this, doesn't last however. This is not the only attempt to overtake power, to sort of take over the government. Hitler, of course, does it in the Hitler Putsch of November 1923. So what you're already seeing here is again this instability, right? Under threat from the left from the very beginning, then under threat from the right, and then another attempt at a takeover in 1923. So it gives you again the sense of how tumultuous and how unstable politically, and you'll see also economically, this Weimar Republic was from the very beginning. This is the time, this is the background for the films that you watched. Hyperinflation, especially in 1923, against something you might be familiar with from your history classes. What's the woman doing? Yeah, she's burning money. Money had become so worthless, and people were cold in the winter, that it became basically a fuel. And as you can see, and especially in 1923, I'm not an economist, so I'm not gonna give you much into the reasons as to why hyperinflation gets so out of hand. But you can see that it does. Part of it is the reparations. There are many other reasons too. Some of them have to do with the global economy. But between January 1923 and November 30th, 1923, what is a relatively stable currency? Well, relatively stable, pretty unstable already. And I do wanna focus on 1923 to gold. And money was still rated against gold at that point. From 372,477 German marks to one ounce of gold, to what is that, 87, I don't even know. It has, there's six, there's 12 zeros there. Can you imagine? I mean, if I was cold, I'd burn that money too. And November 30th of 1923 really signals the end of what is this first incredibly unstable period. And what signals in what we would call, what we usually call this kind of mid-20s period, stable period, or stracement period, is the adoption of a new currency. And that's associated with this guy named Gustav Strezermann, who is first the economics minister. Introduces this new renter mark. Obviously, as I said, I'm not an economist. There are other things also that are associated with this in terms of economic reforms. And this signals in a period of relative stability in the mid-1920s, from sort of 1924 to 1929. And this is what we really focus on when we think of the golden 20s. We also call them the Strezermann years after this figure who was responsible for these economic reforms and a new currency. And this is also very much this time that really is associated with this notion of dancing on the edge of a volcano because things seem relatively stable. You know, there's a number of elections during this period, but in terms of economically, things are relatively stable. Unemployment is relatively stable and relatively low. These kind of indicators of stability are there. It's also the period I think that, as I said, is sort of really associated with the golden 20s in Germany. And that is a time that I'm sort of, I wanna communicate to you through some of these images. I could suppose we can generalize this, but in the 1920s, Berlin really becomes this metropolitan super city in the world. Its population has never been as high as it was in 1929. That's why there's so much good cheap real estate in Berlin today, although that's changing to a certain extent too. And that's because there were 4., what is it, 3.9 or 4.1 million people in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and now there's somewhere around 3.3. That is to say, that's open, after 45, it opened up quite a bit of real estate. This is the period that's associated with, as you can see, the cabaret lights everywhere, cars everywhere, traffic. This is a quickly modernizing city as well during the 1920s. It's a real sort of center, as we said, for a number of things that are kind of, not particularly positive, sex tourism, but it's also the heady days of sort of cabaret nightclubs, et cetera. You can see the image there with the two bare-breasted women, that's from the 1920s. 20s, again, this is the kind of cabaret that was quite common. It wasn't always that, it wasn't all that risqué that was also political cabaret. I think both it and the image on it's right, the AGFA advertising communicates something important to us, and this is the increased independence and power of women within German society. Part of the explanation for this is that women entered the workforce during the First World War, immunizations factories, et cetera, because they weren't meant to do the job. That's part of the reason, and with that came a certain confidence. Women increasingly in, there is increasingly also a lot of jobs, secretarial jobs, et cetera, and these are increased because of the way the economy works, and women are taking these jobs. With these jobs comes independence, some form of financial stability. Women are increasingly becoming educated, and they're going out with their money, they're more visible. They're also advertised too, because they have money, make sense, right? They now have buying power, so they become, if you like, the object of the advertising gaze, in a way. And you see this in magazines, increasingly women are being sold products. And I think this AGFA film advertisement from 1924 communicates that in a really interesting way. In as much of a, of course, you've got this classic sort of new woman with the bubacup on vacation, spending money, but also a kind of a profound signifier of this increased power is that she's holding the camera. That the camera and the film are being advertised to a woman now, which, if you think about it, communicates this idea too that the way women look at things is starting to matter. That might be one way of interpreting that particular image. And the man looks somewhat forlorn and lost in the image, which I think is quite interesting as well. He looks like he's looking a million miles away. This is also a period too in which male identity and notions of masculinity are really destabilized. And part of the reason for that, of course, is what you see at the end of any war, right?  And then they come home also to an environment in which women are more powerful. Women are entering what were traditionally male-dominated areas of society. And so it's a very destabilized kind of notion of masculinity when you look at this period as well. A couple of the other images here, the one on the far right at the bottom is the Bauhaus complex in Dessau. You cannot understand architecture in the 20th century without understanding the influence of the Bauhaus. Again, this is a movement in architecture. But in the arts, sorry, in the material arts generally, in all the arts, I mean, it's really very much envisioned as an approach to everything from typography, typeface, dance to architecture. You can't really understand what we consider modern architecture of this room, for example, without the Bauhaus or the Buchanan complex that's right across the way. If you look at the Buchanan complex from the plane, it looks like that. Indeed, if you look at it straight on, it looks like that. Yeah, it looks like that. The influence of the Bauhaus on modernist architecture in the 20th century is profound. How many of you have an IKEA chair at home or an IKEA table or something like this? This is what Bauhaus has become. Bauhaus design, the aesthetic ideas in the Bauhaus have become so commonplace within our world that the vast majority of us, by our furniture that looks like it was designed, or at least somewhat, looks like it was designed according to Bauhaus principles. So this is just to, again, communicate the idea to which this period, Weimar German culture, in many, many ways, defines what we become in the 20th century. Well, mass production, but quality. And also the idea of an artisanal approach, an artisanal approach to making things that is defined in a community, and principles that are applied to all things. So quality objects coming out of a German tradition of quality engineering and quality manufacturing, going back to the guild system, for a mass world, for an urbanized world. Building buildings in which you're going to feel good living that are built to last according to principles in which form follows function always, imbued with this kind of philosophy that will be affordable even to members of the proletariat. I mean, this is really the philosophical ideal. Yeah, indeed. In as much as, I mean, if you look at German engineering from this idea of the guild system in which, I mean, this is something about the German school system that sometimes strikes us looking from North America as, what's the right word, unegalitarian, that's not the right word, but unfair. That is, you reach grade five and you don't do so well on those math tests, or maybe math tests isn't the right example, but then we already start thinking about you, Johnny, going on and taking on a trade. And we start actually tailoring your education to a vocation. The reason for this is that by the time you finish your vocational high school at the end of grade 10 and go on to an apprenticeship for three years, when you finish that with that, you make a bloody good loaf of bread, or you make a damn fine widget. Why? Because you've been mentored and trained and identified from an early age to become a maker of things of top quality. There's no, I take a three-wear program, or I apprentice for a year, and then I become an electrician in the German system. The argument is, hey, it's totally unfair for me to look at Miguel when he's 12 years old and say, he can't go to gymnasium because I'm just not seeing it in his reading skills. The positive of that is, when Miguel reaches 18 years old, he's making the best bloody rye bread you've ever tasted. To bring it back to this idea of the beetle, OK, I should say we go back, what is this rooted in? It's rooted in the guild system, the guild system whereby in the town you've got tinkers and tailors and candlestick makers, right? And they all have their own shield, and they all meet, and they all have this system of apprenticeship.  And you have to produce this object at the end of it that's up to qualifications. And until you do, you're not a master.  And this is what's secure. You want, what is it, Forsprung durch technik, Audi? It's all based on this idea of creating the best quality things technologically. It's based in the guild system. And the beetle is a classic example of this, right? The idea with the beetle was, that's why you still see these flat-pained beetles on the roads today from the 1950s, early 1960s, because they lasted. The idea was, again, produce an object that is of excellent quality that's cheap and affordable for all. Exactly your fix it yourself, right? So anyways, that's a bit of a digression into the Bauhaus. 1929, why an important year? Stock market crash, right? And of course, you can imagine how the stock market crash, global stock market crash, is going to affect the country as unstable already as Germany. And it does so profoundly. And this is the end of that middle Strasim and period. This is the end of the stable period. This is really where the golden 20s end. The decadence continues. But as a result of the stock market crash and other things too, by the autumn of 1930, unemployment is way high. There are unemployment lines that stretch around the block is an understatement. And I think what's very interesting about this image is the graffiti on that metal structure in the background that says elect Hitler. Because that communicates to us as well the relationship between the fact that things go economically wrong, start to go south, become increasingly unstable, unemployment goes down.  They sort of fringe party 5%, 4%, 6%. But increasingly, as we reach the end of the 1920s and things get worse, and they also, that is, the Nazis increasingly align with some of these older monarchist powers who are lurking too. Anyways, this is when the Nazis have this very quick actual rise to power within Germany. And in 1933, we call this the end. Hitler becomes chancellor. That enabling act basically does away with, is it added to the Constitution, the Weimar Constitution, to say that the Constitution doesn't mean anything? Yeah, we have a Constitution, but we don't have to uphold it. And by July of 1933, the only legal party in Germany in this country that was for 12 years or 13 years of republic is the National Socialists. That's the end of the Weimar Republic. I think I'm going to let you break in a minute, but it's just this kind of one thing that I want you to think about before we head off into the film specifically. And that's this idea that, just going to shrink this a little, that's this idea that the Weimar Republic is a place in which seeing and being seen, visual signifiers, things that demand that you analyze and understand them visually start to dominate the idea of literacy, really, in a way that they didn't before. We have moved really from pre-war in a society that was, to a large extent, defined in terms of textual literacy. That is to say, understanding meant reading text and understanding it. Sure, there were images, but it didn't demand of you to be able to understand images themselves and the power to convince you to do things that images can do. And so what we argue about the Weimar Republic is that there's this crucial shift into the 1920s in Germany that increasingly the way in which things are communicated to you is through visual means and no longer through textual means. And that demands, obviously, of you that you learn to read and understand what's being communicated to you in new ways. And that's a challenge. That's a challenge for Weimar Joe. Maybe this is part of the explanation that these films are almost Weimar films tend to really be interested in ideas of visibility and vision and seeing things and understanding them and knowing them. And I think McBride very nicely summarizes what I've been talking about for the last 30 seconds, this kind of shift, if you like, from the shift to just an escape that is dominated by neon signs, advertising. Film plays a profound role in this. Photography takes off and explodes. Photographs in magazines, illustrated magazines everywhere. No more of this newsprint stuff. And McBride says of this shift, it would be difficult to overstate the impact of technologies of mass production on the visual culture of Weimar Germany as a flood of images from photography and film, upended conventional models of cultural literacy after the media boom of the early 1920s. This is profound. One way of looking at this is to say that there's a shift into what we might call the scopic regime. We're living now in a place that is dominated by visual signifiers. You're constantly trying to decode images and try to understand what it is that they are communicating to you. And this is almost, and this is not gradual. This happens kind of boom. Part of the reason for this is the technology of war very much changes. This is always the case. Technology in war, often after war, these means of production, these technologies of war then, if you like, affect means of production within society generally, make things function faster. So much money is invested in technologies in the war. And then they're used in the societies after the war. And they change everything. And to a certain extent, that's the case here. Photography, for example. Influence on photography and film from what's done with it in the war, very profound. This chat, by the name of Virilio, if you're interested, has written a couple of interesting books on this. So I'm going to leave it at that for the first hour. Let's make sure that we're back no later than 1 o'clock because I've got an awful lot of stuff to cover in the second hour and took a little bit longer than I wanted, sort of giving you some of the context here. OK, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to get back at it here. Thanks for being back in time. It's 1 o'clock. And we're going to get into the films themselves now. And this sort of ghetto timeline that I've created here is just to point out a couple of things to you. The first of which is that the films that we're looking at all come from this early period of instability that sort of reaches from the armistice in November of 1918, the end of the First World War, through the hyperinflation of 1923, so this period of extreme instability at the very beginning. That's why this could really be a presentation that goes over sort of two sets of slides. As I said, it could be two presentations, and we could talk a lot more about film from 1924 on. And there are certainly new developments. You'll also see at the bottom by the arrow that I have this word, expressionism. And expressionism is the dominant filmic language, if you like, of the German cinema of the early 1920s. OK, that's a bit unfair. And this is perhaps part of this point that I wanted to make about how critical reflections have defined German cinema. For the longest time, Weimar cinema was simply associated, especially in North America, with expressionism. And the vast majority of films, even coming out of Weimar Germany in the earliest years, are not expressionist in style. So the definition of Weimar cinema as expressionist cinema was something that was created by the critics, right? Wasn't he actually representative of the fact that the vast majority of films being made were, well, the vast majority of films being shown were from Hollywood, but the vast majority of films actually being made by German filmmakers were more popular, fair in style, more conventional forms of narratives, and also were melodramas and stuff, not this weird style that we associate with expressionism. That being said, it's hard to argue that the most important films made during this period, and arguably during the 1920s as a whole, are the films of German expressionism. And three of the films I asked you to watch are usually pretty clearly defined as works of expressionism. Caligari is the sort of, it's expressionism at its kind of most extreme embodiment against which everything else is going to be defined and ultimately fails. I mean, just nothing as wacky in terms of sets that you'll have seen in Caligari as Caligari. Nosferatu is completely different, but it's also very easy to understand as an expressionist film. Mabusa to a certain extent too, there's much about it stylistically that's still expressionistic. And while the fourth film that you didn't have to watch, but that we'll see a sequence from or even a couple of sequences from Distrasse, is not usually considered an expressionistic film, but as one of the questions sort of asks you, not specifically about Distrasse, there's much that's expressionistic about it in style, you just have to look for it. So what do I mean by expressionism? Does anybody actually want to take on that question? What do I mean by expressionism? What is expressionism? Maybe you've heard of it somewhere else. What about impressionism? What's impressionism in the arts? Monet and, for example, what is it? Or what defines it as a style, as a sort of pictorial style? Impressionism. Okay, immediate emotional response. But what is it trying to show you or what is it trying to communicate to you as a viewer as someone looking at an impressionistic painting? Yeah. Yeah, this idea, exactly this idea sort of a fleeting surface impressions, right? So the idea is to sort of communicate. Yeah, I like the way you've sort of put it. You just see it quickly and you just kind of catch the surface impression of a thing. And expressionism then? If we were to think of that as a kind of an opposite way of communicating? Yeah. Well, the Germanist in me really likes the idea of this idea that you want to talk about spirit. Germans always want to talk about spirit, the idea of geist. And I'm not going to get into that here, but you should maybe take up German studies if you want to talk about things in terms of spirit. But the idea that you're talking about, this idea of emotion and communicating emotion, the internal, expressing the internal, that which you don't see, how do you do that pictorially? So if the impressionists are trying to sort of capture that which is very fleeting and on the surface, the expressionists are trying to communicate the inside of things. The emotions that you don't see the psychological experiences, for example. How do you do that pictorially? And one way you do it is you use kind of, our base colors, blue, red, yellow. What are those called? Not base colors, but primary colors. It's hard up here, you sometimes forget things. Primary colors, because there's something primary about them. That's the idea there. And also you touched on this idea of abstraction, right? There's this idea too that if we're going to capture emotion, realism doesn't do it. We need to sort of move in the direction of abstraction. The key idea though here is externalization. The use of our culture to communicate what is inside and take it outside. It show you inside, outside, if you like. Externalization, express the inner through art. And this poster, this is one of the original posters for Caligari from 1920, I think, is very expressionistic in style. You can see the primary colors being used. You can see the abstraction. And of course, to a certain extent, it simply communicates the sets of the film and we'll get to the relationship between expressionism and the pictorial arts and painting and film in just a minute. But I did want to make one more point, and that is, I mean, obviously, this is perhaps the or text of expressionism, right? Painting that you might be familiar with, Edvard Munch, the Danish, the Norwegian painters, 1892 painting. This is really, if you like, sort of proto expressionism. This is kind of the core. This idea of communicating emotion through color and abstraction and hear this emotion of whatever is making this character scream. So what's the relationship then between sort of the pictorial arts and expressionism that I've just sort of shown you and expressionist cinema? Well, it's very much this idea of using film to communicate emotion. I mean, if you look at Caligari, at least if you use the frame, right? If you honor the frame narrative that we'll talk about in a minute, that film is very much about making material on screen the psychological insecurity of the protagonist, right?  What does that look like materially? You've got the sets of expressionist cinema, this idea of externalization. Another thing that's really worth stressing here is that expressionist cinema really is something new in as much as it allows itself to be influenced by the other arts. Part of the reason for that is, at least in the case of Caligari, because the sets were cheap.  There wasn't a lot of money going around in 1920 to go and build these expensive sets yet. So what do we do? You can see the great models for this at the Film Museum in Berlin. Well, we'll get these guys to come in who are already working in sort of expressionist set making for theater. They can do it relatively cheap. They know what they're doing. They can paint this stuff. Let's use that as a setting for a movie because it'll be cheap. So that's part of the reason. So you see this direct sort of relationship between expressionist painting, working in expressionist theater production, and the film of Caligari, which is kind of the seminal work of expressionism. It's all of the most expressionistic work. Here you see Hermann Vam's drawings for the sets in the film. He's a guy who was painting for expressionist theater in Berlin already. And so this is the drawing he came up for the sets on the scene where César is absconding with Jane. There's the drawing. You can see the primary color of blue there in the background too. It's not hard for you. I don't think to see how this is sort of connected to those expressionist images of the screen and so on that I showed you. The abstraction too, even the abstraction of the buildings. And that's what it looked like when it was realized. They're pretty good job, eh? So I wanna give you some sort of toolbox to think about expressionism a little bit. What is expressionist cinema then? One of the ways to think about it is in terms of mise-en-scene of threat or of terror or of horror. What do I mean by mise-en-scene? It's an important word I think for us now that we're gonna start talking a little bit more about film, yeah. Okay, making the scene. Are you gonna make a scene? Yeah. Can you define it for me a little bit more than that? Because when you say making a scene, you're jumping up and down and... Everything that's in the frame. Yeah. Everything that's put in the frame. So what does that consist of then? Everything that's in the frame? Yeah? Yeah, the lighting too. I mean, we can, right? So the actors, their costumes, the props, the movement of the actors, you're right. Mise-en-scene, everything that's in the frame, right? As opposed to, for example, cinematography, what the camera does. Editing the way we cut the film up to tell the story and sound. So those are considered the four modalities of cinema. The most important modality for expressionist cinema is Mise-en-scene. The most important thing, it's hard to argue with this, is what's in the frame. And Siegfried Krakauer, who you're gonna learn in just a few minutes, is arguably the most important critical theorist on Weimar Film, for good and bad, argues of Conrad Weytes, Cesar, Cesar prowling along the wall. It was as if the wall had exuded him. So there's this idea that Mise-en-scene is kind of seen. There's the relationship between the actors and the scenery or the props is kind of broken down. You can see, if you look at the image on the top left, for example, that those plants are threatening. They communicate this idea of sort of being grabbed, being taken. So it's the use, actually, of props, again, to sort of communicate emotions and in this case, communicate threat. She's being carried off. She's being taken away by this monster and the sets themselves also work to communicate what's going on, to tell the story, if you like, in a way. I think the Krakauer quote captures that very nicely, this idea of there's Cesar clinging onto the wall, it's as if it's emanated from the wall. It's very, you know, he becomes, or this kind of dividing line between communication through acting and communication through prop breaks down. It's the total effect. However, it's communicated in the Mise-en-scene that's central. You look at Nosferatu image on the top, right at the same thing, right? The long nails are echoed by the rigging. They're echoed on the right-hand side by those things that curve around the mast to, in a sense, extend the claws of the monster into the Mise-en-scene around him. The idea being that the frame as a whole communicates this idea of being attacked by the monster and not just the actor himself. So this is just a little bit about this idea of Mise-en-scene in expressionist film. Another very important element in expressionist filmmaking, I mean, maybe this is more important than the Mise-en-scene is the use of lighting. And expressionist filmmaking has been described as a cinema of light and shadow. And again, it's this idea of communicating through the use of lighting, the threat, the madness, the instability, whatever it might be emotionally that's going on is not only communicated, what can't be communicated through words, so it's communicated through the technologies of cinema, here through lighting. And you can see this in all three of these. Top left, Caligari, the shadow even bigger than he is. Often you see in expressionist films shadows encroaching on other characters as if they're sort of attacking the character, the other figure in the screen. Very famous shot below it of Nosferatu's shadow as he is just about to go down the stairs and attack Jane. And then very famous shot from Distrasse. You can see the shadow very much downgraded, but nevertheless it communicates this idea of how important lighting is in expressionist cinema. Very much defined as a world of light and shadow. One of the things that has been argued about expressionist film is that you don't have the look of film noir, it's sort of the classic film noir cinema of the 1940s and 50s in the United States without expressionism. The argument goes and it's a direct sort of material one if you like. A lot of the characters who are making these films in Germany in the 1920s are Jewish or left wing political views and so they leave what is a very unsupportive environment in late Weimar Germany for the United States.  They take their ideas with them and this influences Hollywood cinema and we see it most directly in the use of light and shadow if you like in the sort of way in which those film noir films are shot. You can argue with that thesis but it's pretty much, it's a very popular one. And of course these are monster films, right? So many monster films are produced in the early Weimar years from 1920 to 1924. Whether it's Mephistopheles on the top left from Murnau's Faust, actually that's 1925 I think. The Gollum, Top Middle, any of you familiar with the Gollum? Yeah, numerous were others just, it was their political views? That's right. You mean like for me or something but if you erase one letter it says death? Well, you know a lot about him, that's great. Basically he's kind of, he's like the Jewish avenging robot made out of clay, who does the, you know, the big attacks anti-Semmits, you're right. It's a great angle. Nosferatu on the top right, bottom left Cesar, bottom right Orlak, Orlak's a great character. There is this guy, wakes up, can understand why all of a sudden he's possessed by this desire to murder people, Orlak's hands the film is called. And then as you know, we go through the film, we learn that actually what's happened is he's had the hands of a murderer sewn onto his own hands. He was a concert pianist and now of course it's the hands that do the bidding of the murderer through this character but at the end all is well and you know, a little surge of refixes things. So. Little bit about Caligari, it's important I think to give Caligari its due. It's arguably the most important film in the history of German cinema. Premiered in the Marmour House in Berlin, great palaces that we used to watch films in in the 1920s, opulent with chandeliers, sat six, seven, 800 people, nothing like those cineplexes we have today. At any rate, this is where Caligari got its preview. We'll talk a little bit more about this poster. This was the original poster. If we want to talk about vision and hypnosis that we'll talk about a little bit later. This was a really interesting advertising campaign, right? This idea of throwing a poster all around Berlin that has this kind of, in German it's called strudel. I don't know what we call it, whirlpool, right? It's kind of whirlpool. It's the idea of sort of hypnotizing thing that says you must become Caligari. You must become Caligari. You can imagine what people seeing this were thinking. It would have at least piqued their interest in this new film that was going on in the Marmour House and indeed many people flocked to the premier on the 26th of February 1920. We know that people were really shocked by this completely new piece of cinema. There'd be nothing done like it in the past before. Numerous sources indeed confirm that there were screaming women when Caesar opened his eyes, fainting people, groaning and shrieking with Caesar abducted the sleeping Jane. And then at the end of it, there was about three minutes of silence.  They don't know what to do. And then they all stood up and they cheered madly and the film was a huge success. It was also big success overseas. We'll talk about that in a minute as well. So what's the deal with Caligari? Why is it important? Here's just a few points. We'll go through them very quickly. We already talked about the fact that it linked cinema to the contemporary progressive arts and painting and so forth. It drove German filmmaking into the studios. Part of the reason for that was because you could make a film so cheaply. I mean, what this proved was that you could make a film in the studio very cheaply. And this was, there wasn't a lot of money around. It opened overseas markets closed by war. What it did was it went to the United States and it said, German cinema is doing this and this is completely different than anything we've seen before. And so if you like, you might, you could sort of think of the opposition sort of between Hollywood film and an independent film. And Germany sort of oversees to find itself in terms of we're doing this. We're doing expressionism and this is the kind of something that Hollywood just doesn't do. And of course, as I said, actually the vast majority of films being shown in German were from Hollywood and those produced were more entertainment fare. But nevertheless overseas, German cinema was kind of Caligari cinema. And that's what the Germans are doing and it's cool and different. We talked about film noir already and we're gonna talk a little bit about the critical interpretation of the film too. So what's going on with the frame narrative, right? There's a frame narrative in it. What's the frame? Is there a frame? You've watched the film while you were supposed to. Yeah. The frame narrative is basically like, you want me to explain what it is or what it is in this movie. What it is in this film? Yeah, the beginning and the end, he's in an asylum, right? So in the whole center, we just get the story of this somnambulist being controlled by this Caligari to murder people on his behalf. And that was the original story. That was what the original story, the scenarists, the script writers, that was their story. The controversy is that then the director came in and said, no, what we're gonna do is put this frame on it. We're gonna make this stuff in the middle of the delusions of a madman. That was added after and it was added because that's what the director wanted. We're not exactly sure if Fritz Lang was up for this film originally and some think that it was originally his idea. But we'll say it's Robert Viena, the director that did it, we're not really sure. Why is that important? Well, the story changes completely when you do that. Think about it. If you don't put that frame narrative on it, you've got a story about mind control and murder. You've got an authority figure who abuses his power. You put the frame narrative on it. You totally take all of that sort of revolutionary potential out of it as a story. As a story, for example, that critiques authority. That says, look, we're highlighting the abuse of power. We're highlighting the idea also that powerful men use other men, send them off to commit their murders. Arguably could be that that's a critique, for example, of the German government sending young Germans off to die in the First World War. They throw the frame on it. Ah, it's just this guy in a sane asylum actually. That's Caligari guy, he's a benevolent dude, right? No problem. He just wants to make him better. So it takes all of this kind of critical energy out of it. The writers didn't like that. I mean, Yanowitz himself said, and I'll break this a bit here. There we go. It dishonors our drama, the tragedy of man gone mad by the misuse by another of his mental powers into a cliche in which the symbolism was completely lost, right? So the writer himself, or the writers themselves had an issue with it. The misuse is gone. This is the problem for Yanowitz, right? The fact that he is, he can even say, hypnotized to do the bidding, his dirty business. That's gone. This authority figure all of a sudden becomes benevolent, becomes a healer. This is important also for arguably the most important critic of Weimar film by the guy by the name of Zeke Fried Crackauer, who writes a book named Caligari to Hitler in 1947. And we have to understand that Crackauer is writing from the United States. He is an emigre. He's one of these characters who leaves because he's Jewish, looking back after the Second World War. And so the criticism can be that his understanding of Weimar film is very much an attempt to try to understand how Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have happened in Germany. So we need to keep that in mind. The thesis though was incredibly influential to influential criticism of Weimar film for too long. Thankfully things have gone in a different direction. So his argument, you look at the films of a society and those films will indicate to you what that society's desires are. So if we look at the films from Weimar Germany, we can see what it is. We can try to understand what it is Germans want. What is it kind of their base designs? 1920s German film, he writes in a paraphrase and contains recurring visual and narrative tropes that express a fear of chaos and a desire for order even at the price of authoritarian rule. And he argues this across, it's incredible, like 60 films. The first film he deals with is Caligari. And what Krakauer says about Caligari is well, what we originally had was this revolutionary critique of murderous authority. What we originally had was this argument against total control. Especially in the figure of one man. And what the frame does is it makes us a conformist film. As I said, simply a deranged fantasy. As if this sort of critical film could never get out there to the German public, that they wouldn't allow it, they wouldn't accept it. Now I'm not gonna get into the specifics of the argument. You can read the book if you want to. That's his basic argument about Caligari. In this kind of first gesture, in this first film, that critique is there, but it's quashed. It's contained. And then in the films that follow, we see sort of desire for authority, for control by authority, especially by a single character. Fitz Mabusa pretty well, right? This idea of this character who uses his powers to control all around him. It's a desire to be controlled by that central figure. This is something that films show of the German society of the Weimar Republic. I mean, you can ground this in the idea also, right? That Germans had absolutely no experience with parliamentary democracy. Well, they did, but not in the form that sort of in that Anglo-American form, right? This idea of Hopla Wiedemann, I think captures that well. All of a sudden you've got this system and you don't have that authoritarian ruler anymore. Sort of the explanation then is there's still this desire there. And when things really start to go back, back we go looking for order.  I will return briefly to Caligari a little bit later on.  Nosferatu's arguably the second most famous and probably the best film to come out of the Expressionist movement. It's on sight, sight and sounds best 20 films ever made. It's considered by many to be the best vampire film ever made. It might seem sort of hokey to you guys, but it is held in extremely high regard. 1922, the premier, F.W. Murnau, the director. What's different about Nosferatu is that it was shot on location. And as I said, the trend certainly in the early 1920s was following Caligari to shoot in the studio because it was cheaper. But Murnau was a director, we did both, but in this case he shot it on location which is why you get, for example, the mountains were shot in Slovakia. Vizmar and Lubeck are the cities that are portrayed. These are the cities to which Nosferatu comes. I'm gonna move ahead. You'll get the slide that explains some of the background of Nosferatu. Sort of point out about a couple of things to give you some sort of directions in terms of interpretation. We look at this original poster. This is the very first poster for Nosferatu from 1922. And you can see in the poster this idea of Nosferatu as a character embodying sort of xenophobia. Everything that we as Germans are afraid of. You've got the Jewish nose. It brings a plague from the east. His sexuality is ambiguous. There's also this kind of fear as well. He kind of is this other, right, that's a composite other of all these German fears. The argument goes. Antisemitism, fear of the Jew. The Jew and the Slavs as bringers of pestilence from the east. Old, deeply rooted, xenophobic feelings. German society. His sexuality is ambiguous. As is that of Cesar. The monster, right? The monster as this character whose identity is not clear enough to us is neither nor. Is either or, right? Is ambiguous sexually that can be said both of Cesar and Nosferatu or I should say Count Orlock. Certainly ways in which both of those characters have been read, birthing hips, right? I'm moving kind of quickly because as usual we're running out of time. Another way you might approach Nosferatu of course and one of the questions is asked you to do this in terms of gender representation. Let's shrink that a little bit. Like what's going on with Hutter, right? The man in the house. Obviously he's controlled as is the lackey that Nosferatu, that Orlock has in Visborg. But it's like he's always in a swoon, right? It's like Hutter is this kind of hysterical man character. Certainly one way to look at it. Who's ultimately more masculine looking in the film? Is it Hutter or is it Ellen? Certainly some have said, well Ellen is sort of in terms of her physiognomy the way her face looks is kind of the more masculine figure. And she's the one who ultimately does the work, right? She's the one who ultimately makes the sacrifice and saves all the people. But then at the same time she's always holding her heart. It's kind of like communicating this idea of emotionality. So at the same time she's kind of an unstable character in terms of her gender identity. So one interesting way to get to these films and you may respond to the question on gender that we've given you is to look at the way in which gender is represented in these films. I'm actually gonna skip this because I wanna get to... So I'll ask you to look at this stuff about Eisner when you get the slides. And I wanna talk a little bit about this relationship between cinema, vision and control in a little more depth. One interesting thing, and this is kind of representative of a new way in which critics are looking at Weimar Cinema. And that's in terms of looking at the primary documents from the time. So not coming up with these kind of philosophical responses like crack hours that try to explain everything, but rather looking at what people were saying in different discourses, whether those are medical, economic, who was watching these films and trying to use those to explain the way in which Germans at the time responded to film, what it was those films communicated. An interesting response that embodies this is by this character Stefan Andriopoulos in an essay called Suggestion Hypnosis and Crime. He writes, contemporary representations already argues and very convincingly is in this essay talking about what was being said in medical journals, in cinema journals at the time, that contemporary representations by a quote of the new medium were predicated on a structured analogy between cinema and hypnotism. Thereby giving rise to the fear that the spellbound audience might succumb to the irresistible hypnotic influence emanating from the cinematic apparatus just like Caligari's some Nambulous medium says are. So the idea like this, people were freaked out. You go into this dark room and you watch these films and people were actually, they were talking about this in medical journals. What's gonna happen? We need to now look at mass, this mass medium film was huge and it really appealed to women and to the proletariat. You've got all of these people now, lower consumers of culture going in. What's happening to them? Are they gonna become criminals? Are they gonna be hypnotized by this new medium? It sounds ridiculous to us but these were real concerns that people had at the time about the medium of cinema. So the discourses at the time show this fear that cinema is a hypnotic medium and then within the films themselves, obviously, we often see this kind of problematic stage, right? This idea of hypnotist, control, crime. Not hard to see it in Mabusa, right?  Can you think of a couple of scenes, right? Where, what do we see? What does Mabusa do? He looks, right? He looks at these characters and the power of his gaze can actually control the other. You can think, for example, of the scene where Mabusa's in the loge and he's at the cabaret and he sees Hal and he starts to look at Hal and he starts to try to control Hal. What does he reach for? A pair of binoculars. So it's then again, this idea of the relationship between hypnosis, control, technology, optical technology picks up the binoculars and looks, right, captures him and then you see the iris in shrinks as he focuses in on him. Again, communicating this kind of idea of the gaze looking through technology, being able to control. Another scene in Mabusa, when they're in the Andalusia Club, they're gambling, they're playing cards. Von Wenck is there. The Staatsanwalt, the prosecutor. He's on Mabusa's case. He's trying to capture him. Mabusa, the great master of disguise, is dressed as a Dutch professor opposite him. Again, he tries to hypnotize him, right? Tries to get control of him. What does he do? He reaches for those spectacles, those Chinese spectacles. Again, this optical device, optical technology. He says, these are Chinese spectacles. Again, this association between looking, technology, control, looks up, he holds them up. And then long wonderfully, right? These guys were technological masters. They didn't have sound. And so they used super imposition. And we get the Chinese words. These are Chinese spectacles. And he casts these Chinese letters and Von Wenck looks down at the cards and he sees these Chinese letters. He tries to shake it off, right? These two scenes, very interesting. If you wanna have a look specifically at Mabusa and sort of interrogating this idea of the way in which these films look at the relationship between vision, hypnosis, control. Don't have time, not surprisingly, to get through everything I wanted to do. I do, however, wanna show you a sequence from a film called Distrasse and see how you respond to it now that I've sort of given you this idea of the way in which these films are very interested in the relationship between looking, hypnosis, projection, control. Gonna show you the opening sequence from Distrasse and just ask you to respond to it. And that'll probably be the last thing we get to do. And if you're interested in what else I had planned, please don't hesitate to let me know. So this is Distrasse, it's all visual anyway. There's no music and there's no subtitles, but you don't have to worry about this. I just want you to think about the mise en scene and the lighting especially, and thematically, if the bloody thing loads, but you may not. Have I been kicked off? Nope. Can we see it? Shit. I can't see it anyway. Clowns were already creepy in the 19th. I've always found really interesting this image on the bottom right again, this idea of the sort of hypnotic circle. You see this in Caligari too, where I didn't post anything about it. This was beauty in Van Mar German. Nope, the soup's not good enough anymore, darling. I want the city. I want the pleasures of the city. Off he goes. For a fateful night in which he chases a prostitute through the city, ends up in a gambling house, ends up becoming the victim of organized crime. So, but what is that scene? What is that scene? How does it, what is that scene communicating? How does this stage, or how can we relate this to what we've been talking about? Vis-a-vis the connection between cinema, gnosis, control. I think this scene communicates in a very interesting way, right? I mean, look at it. He brought this bourgeois guy. His wife is cooking the soup. It's just about for dinner. He's having his nap, dinner time. He's having his nap right there on his heavy bourgeois furniture. You know, the burger, the German burger. That has nothing to do with hamburger, right? That's bourgeois character. And then what happens? Shadow play, projection, cinema. Enters the living room, right? Up on the wall. What kind of an effect does it have on him? Kind of intoxicates him, creates this, first of all, this desire to go to the window, to look out of the window, to look at the city, to fantasize about what the city is, what it offers, prostitution, right? Cabaret, all of these potential temptations that modern Berlin offers. She goes to the window. She's not so impressed. He can't control himself. He's drawn out into the street, right? You can see directly there exactly what I'm talking about, this relationship between cinema as a medium, the projection of images, the way it's related to urban modernity to the city of Berlin and its temptation specifically. The idea that it might have some kind of hypnotic power to actually convince you to do things that you might not otherwise wanna do. And that's perhaps the most obvious example I can think of in Weimar film, but there are many that set up this kind of dynamic between looking, projection of images, control, temptation, threat. I just want you to think a little bit about that, and I wanted to give you at least one example. When you get the slides, you can also have a look at the scenes in Mabuza that I marked with the little yellow sort of lines there. That's where you start the two scenes that I think are really interesting in terms of analyzing around this idea that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes. Then we return to the last 20 minutes then we return to the street for the last slide. And that's very interesting because this is this very famous scene in which he's following the prostitute into the alley. There's the pair of eyes, the sign from the optical store.  This idea almost as if you're always being watched in the city too, which I think relates very nicely to what you're gonna get from Christina when you talk about Foucault and the Panopticon. The idea of being in urban space, especially, we can think of it in terms of CCTV today, but at that time too, just being in this space where there's all, vision is always the question. And what does that mean for this character? This bourgeois chap who's now gone out to into a space he doesn't understand is chasing this prostitute then she looks back at him, catches his gaze, the light goes off and he continues to follow her. Now I might think a little bit about that scene if you're interested in it too. Thanks very much for your attention, have a great day.


Where's intern Lisa going? She's leaving for the day. Why Lisa? Why why? Oh, hi, Mark I didn't know you were coming in today.      Wow. What a tough role to master as a kid actor These guys really had it tough outside of William H. Macy coming in later in the picture It's really just these two moping around most of the time What a rough time living out your life in a room being paid for by a guy you barely have to see He buys you whatever you want and lets you be with your kid. How is this even a movie? It's what every woman wants Hey mark is Lisa coming back No You're tearing me apart Lisa The room is of love and betrayal but that's just top-surface high school writing bullshit It's way more the movie is far smarter than any one person can dissect unless you are the creator Tommy Wiseau himself It's a polarizing film about the duality of man and the lengths He will go to to win what is rightfully his in the first 30 minutes alone We are treated to not just one soft-core sex scene but three two of which use recycled shots in the bedroom Make no mistake. This is not done by accident Every frame is a painting in motion much like Michael Bay reusing shots from one film to the other Tommy carefully extracts moments that need reminding typically it's one of Lisa's tits the sex scenes Welcome us into Johnny's playground and keep us engaged with the animalistic acts of pure love and by the way He ravages her I'm not entirely convinced He wasn't fully inside her until completion Tommy also wisely sneaks in a BJ scene to knock the audience over the head with the contrasting Situations where Johnny and Lisa are very much in a passionate embrace.  The message couldn't be clear No matter what these guys are going through in life There is always a constant for them and that's tossed in the old pigskin around Mike's bang and Lisa Denny's caught up in some city shit with drug dealers Johnny doesn't have the faintest idea of how to communicate with people as he Is secretly a cyborg none of this matters when you're playing a little football It's like each toss of the football is a little bit of that Caribbean washed away These guys are all bipolar as well You should know that one minute having a casual conversation and the next trying to throw each other off rough tops Which is what I wanted to do myself after sitting through the room The story is so one note and simple a woman is kidnapped as a teenager and forced to live Give birth and raise a kid for many years in a small isolated room with no contact to the outside world It sounds worse than it is. They have a TV and a book and Rat to play with they aren't living out each day with inner demons like Johnny and his friends That's for sure room second half is about recovery or the lack thereof I suppose some average moviegoer may consider this a remarkable film full of intense drama and extremely emotional moments a movie That's hard to even sit through especially as a father of two who can't stand to watch kids being treated in such a horrific Manor sure the movie is only inspired by true events But those true events are even worse than the movies version to those idiots I say see better movies like the room unless they're too afraid to branch out and try something better Maybe they're a little bit too chicken Where do I even start the room is so dense every single frame has something going on From the clever use of spoons in the picture frames Symbolizing Hollywood and it's spoon-feeding bullshit to the amazing use of music the soft jazz and dated soundtrack That sounds like something out of an old episode of red shoe diaries makes you go even further down into the psyche of man Not since 2001 a space odyssey have I felt so out of the loop? It's refreshing.  I didn't like the close-up shots from the kids point of view of his depressing Homemade toys. I don't want to see this fuckery through the eyes of an innocent child I want to view it through the lens of a man who doesn't know how to read his own scripts and Trashes his own house like some sort of a Frankenstein monster.  I'm not a very courageous person So I just rewatched the room and everything was all right again a gift from the God himself Tommy Waiso He had a vision and he nailed it and more importantly. He nailed Lisa He made me happy again Now I ask you to dig down and tell me which film is truly better some torture porn Oscar bait dumpster fire mother-son adventure or one of the most profoundly Brilliant and flawless films of the century comment vote and remember this is more than just reviews. This is movie feuds Hey mark Tell Lisa tomorrow that she can go to the store pick out anything she wants. Maybe a nice pretty dress again Anything for my princess.   I Could hardly watch it. Honestly, it was very powerful for me and I'm sad that saddened. I'm just getting to this review now, but Bri and Jacob did amazing performances and I can't think of a movie that Really hit me so hard before in the fields department.


The magic mushrooms also start signaling to hone in on the other parts of the body that have been experiencing a lack of love and to give them a stretch, a massage, more dedication, massaging the core parts of the body that are used so much but get so little, massaging, relaxation, attention. Intentions. Follow the rocket to the source of infinite creation. Become the source of infinite creation within. Unleash the kingdom of emptiness comprehending infinite creation. Complete openness to new discoveries. Words don't do it justice, it's ineffable, the pointing. Reuniting with oh the indescribable mystery the source of infinite creation. Brand new place to stretch massage that I've never really hit before. Oh my gosh that's so good. Unbelievable new massage discoveries. You tuck your finger in right there where the leg meets the torso. Tuck your finger and then put varying pressure in several different locations where legs and torso meet is a critical place for massage. Maximizing longevity. Preventing pathology. Just think about it mainstream society when was the last time that you even passed a couple minutes just relaxed and digging into the tight parts of your body that are desperately asking for your attention. I am not a human. I am only the source of infinite creation. Visualizations of fractals. Infinite tree leaves. As much as God or the absolute is a a loving blossoming energy. There's also a energy. 515, 45 minutes in. The only symbol that can do describing this any justice is the question mark. See the question mark is unbounded. It is freedom. That's why the greatest have been unable fades language just is. And this is why so many as we secrete wonder what's this about. Woke me up from my slumber in nothingness for what? A question mark? This is why many of the traditions have talked about it as lila as the play the divine play. About an hour in I am being brought into the heat of the question mark. My thirst for metaphysical truth being answered by a question mark. Unbounded freedom. Unbounded freedom. Like if you took the intestinal tract and all of the villain that absorb nutrients. We flipped it inside out and then that endlessly, endlessly secreted, explored infinite possibility. You'll never come to the end so just enjoy a PhD in metaphysics. It's expressive essence. Being both of that in nature, peace and happiness, yet also not bounding it at all with those as descriptors. To love the sun and to be grateful for the sun and to know the great utility of all eight billion humans having direct access to the sun. Abundant beaches, abundant trees, abundant parks which is crazy that even the god absolute this endless mystery wants to experience the lowest lows imaginable. Along with the highest highs, the same planet, the most horrendous warfare mixed with the most luxurious imaginable. It just is. Just reminds me of the fishes asking where's the ocean? You're in it. The question mark has no need to fulfill yet is the ceaseless exploration of possibility.  Do whatever you want but maximize human potential. Just be. Just be it. That's it. Just be it. Have fun, play, dance, sing. Just be it and recognize that you are the question mark. If you have a weapon, you're just pointing it at the same question mark. And so there you go. Your morality is right there. Why would the same source ever damage the same source out of exploration? Unbounded mystery. And to have 100% radical acceptance for the atrocities emerging of this question mark. 100% radical acceptance for the question mark. Metaphysical mystery. For its atrocities and for its beauties are one. This speaks so profoundly to as you emerge, love yourself, accept yourself, become the question mark, become the one infinite creator. As you emerge, love, accept yourself, become the one infinite creator. Question mark. A divine, transcendent, no blame. Or you can go and hang out in the park.  As beautiful as your north star calling is. The same time you can go and lay in a park or on the beach, play some basketball, smoke, wear a suit, handle the planet's economical matters. Literally. Question mark. And that's why these mystic traditions are just like be here now. To become already the question mark. Ceaselessly exploring the question mark, talking about itself versus just relaxing. Does a sunflower have a north star? Does a sequoia tree have a north star? Does a dolphin have a north star? Does an ant have a north star? It's both equally cool to completely vaporize yourself as it is to go and lay in a park or achieve a transcendent noble aim. Just equal to just still yourself into the timeless essence of just being aware the one infinite creator as equally as go and occupy yourself with things to do as far as you can imagine. Simultaneously, absolutely still one infinite with in one infinite question mark. Far as you can imagine. Enjoy. This is the closest I can get to show you what's happening. The camera turned on itself. No, seriously, this is what I'm doing. I'm literally talking to an object on a tripod in the corner of the room about my five grams of magic mushrooms while I'm just laying in the corner of my bed in the sunlight so that it can also beautifully be understood, expressed to question mark radical acceptance for the cages that are in the schema, the framework, yet it wants to break out of that because there's so much to explore. There's so much to understand. And when you're just trapped in a schema, a silo, you are choosing arrogantly to tighten the question mark by your housing, both the fact that we radically accept you for exactly as you are as the creation is yet also recognize that you've created a prison for yourself. You've created a prison for yourself in your own mind. The self realization literature is about going inward and recognizing the freedom that you are. You've arrogantly chosen to create a prison your mind quelled.  So it's almost like, in a sense, kind of midwifing the mystery to the matrix midwifing what is most free to what has arrogantly choked and put itself into a prison. I am so free that I can make a prison for myself. I'm so free exploring doing whatever that I will artificially make a prison for myself.  The love story of the individual as well as the love story of the collective. The question mark does not compute your wallification. This is just freedom. That's all it is. It's just an expression of freedom. That's it. Taking all the concepts and the frameworks and the schemas and the prisons and just obliterating those, the artificial prisonification, blasting through the artificial boundary, the question mark created for itself to play an artificial boundary into what it might do. The answer is a question. The answer is freedom. Beautiful. Beautiful. Zero step, zero. You already freedom. So we write this whole extravagant story for ourselves of being in a box. I will not be in a box. The question mark is like, I will not be in a box. It's so fun because it's unbounded. Unbounded freedom. And so when it's put into the bounded constraints to take you out of the prison that you've artificially created for yourself, the famous first line, the Dow that can be named is not the eternal Dow. It's just whatever the question mark is writing in this case, the one infinite creator writing this insane odyssey for itself.   That's the joke is that you think that you took up all of the space with a universe, but the joke is that the whole thing happened in a dimensionless singularity. You think it took a universe to write the story, but it all happened in a dimensionless singularity. That's how free you are. That's how free you are. Again, you're so free that you have to create the illusion of a prison like a planet in this inhospitable vacuum that secretes all of these individuated humans where they organize themselves into governments and economies and the left and the right taking on their own name. You can only refer to me to this individuated expression as four letters, John. Okay, you're going to inhibit your freedom right off the bat and say you can only refer to me as John. Everything's about a limitation for you. Everything. Everything's about a limitation. You're right.  So you can have this massive plot of land called the United States of America and you're going to call it something and you're going to have this massive plot of land insane in this odyssey of the universe called China or Russia or the whole continent of Africa and then you're going to take the individuated secretions of that planet and limit their movement between these massive plots of land with passports. This is hilarious. You could not write something funnier than freedom limiting itself. Freedom limiting itself. Wow. Unbounded freedom writing stories about limiting itself. Fuck. Unbounded freedom writing stories about limiting itself. You're so free already.  So it doesn't even take the space of a universe because just like this is just like this are so free in such a question mark mystery that you created a universe that is seemingly so large just for you to be the witness of said extravagant odyssey through a pupil through these. The pupil itself is where the absolute is. The pupil is where freedom is. You wrote the whole universe into the story of your pupil. That's how free you are. It's been fascinating seeing what the magic mushrooms are sharing with us today on this psychonotic adventure. Again, the magic mushrooms are telling you you are so unboundedly free that you wrote the whole universe into your pupil. You're so unboundedly free that you wrote the extravagant odyssey of the universe and you watch the whole thing take place in the dimensionless singularity of consciousness and now we'll come to where the legs meet the torso for a massage. It's so funny that it's right there. I am the absolute using a universe writing such a grand narrative about myself and then locating myself in the pupil as the Sue legend goes. No surprise that this secreted from that area. Hide it inside as the last place will look. Hide it inside as the last place will look. That's it. The whole thing can be written and boiled down to that. Hide it inside as the last place will look.   Jesus, this shit's crazy. The whole thing boils down to freedom. The absolute boils down to freedom. There you go. And you've created the illusion of putting yourself into bounded boxes as humans. But you're the absolute freedom that is both nothingness of a pupil while it's the everythingness of a universe. Cool. You're so free. It just boils down to freedom. And you can write the absolute into simply what it's like to spend eons bounded, ineffable release that is felt upon the liberation. I'm so free that I'm going to keep myself under the illusion that I've been locked up. I'll write a whole Odyssey about it. So indescribable of freedom.