PROLOGUE

German Expressionism is called one of the most important influences on American film noir so often as to seem self-evident. What is usually meant, though, is not the Expressionist movement in the arts. When it comes to film noir, (German) Expressionism stands for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919/20) and the dark distinctiveness of the best-known films of the Weimar Republic that followed, from 1919 to early 1933, the end of World War I to the Nazi regime. Many films produced in Germany during that time are far from noir, but memory and viewing availability have been selective. Certain Weimar titles and directors come back again and again in the vast literature on film noir.

Noir's inheritance from Weimar cinema has been seen in two different ways: (1) resemblances in style, structure and themes, especially a visual language that menaces the characters while seducing the audience, conveying anguish or worse for characters trapped by uncertainties and betrayals. Framing stories sometimes lead to the past (via flashback) where most of the story takes place, a structure that, in this kind of film, underscores fatalism: it is too late – it has already happened; and (2) skills and cinematic experiences brought to Hollywood by the flood of emigres from the German film industry (regardless of national origin) fleeing the Hitler regime during the 1930s – directors, cinematographers, editors, writers, composers, producers, actors and almost every other trade – that could be put to new use when the time came.

Paul Schrader's 1972 ‘Notes on film noir’ is still one of the most influential essays on the subject. Schrader devotes an entire section to ‘The German Influence’: