Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- PART I EXPRESSIONISM IN GERMAN CINEMA
- PART II EXPRESSIONISM IN GLOBAL CINEMA
- 7 The Austrian Connection: The Frame Story and Insanity in Paul Czinner's Inferno (1919) and Fritz Freisler's The Mandarin (1918)
- 8 “The Reawakening of French Cinema”: Expression and Innovation in Abel Gance's J'accuse (1919)
- 9 Here Among the Dead: The Phantom Carriage (1921) and the Cinema of the Occulted Taboo
- 10 Drakula halála (1921): The Cinema's First Dracula
- 11 Le Brasier ardent (1923): Ivan Mosjoukine's clin d'oeil to German Expressionism
- 12 Nietzsche's Fingerprints on The Hands of Orlac (1924)
- 13 “True, Nervous”: American Expressionist Cinema and the Destabilized Male
- 14 Dos monjes (1934) and the Tortured Search for Truth
- 15 Maya Deren in Person in Expressionism
- Index of Names
- Index of Film Titles
14 - Dos monjes (1934) and the Tortured Search for Truth
from PART II - EXPRESSIONISM IN GLOBAL CINEMA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- PART I EXPRESSIONISM IN GERMAN CINEMA
- PART II EXPRESSIONISM IN GLOBAL CINEMA
- 7 The Austrian Connection: The Frame Story and Insanity in Paul Czinner's Inferno (1919) and Fritz Freisler's The Mandarin (1918)
- 8 “The Reawakening of French Cinema”: Expression and Innovation in Abel Gance's J'accuse (1919)
- 9 Here Among the Dead: The Phantom Carriage (1921) and the Cinema of the Occulted Taboo
- 10 Drakula halála (1921): The Cinema's First Dracula
- 11 Le Brasier ardent (1923): Ivan Mosjoukine's clin d'oeil to German Expressionism
- 12 Nietzsche's Fingerprints on The Hands of Orlac (1924)
- 13 “True, Nervous”: American Expressionist Cinema and the Destabilized Male
- 14 Dos monjes (1934) and the Tortured Search for Truth
- 15 Maya Deren in Person in Expressionism
- Index of Names
- Index of Film Titles
Summary
The hothouse of unhappy emotion that is Mexican writer-director Juan Bustillo Oro's Dos monjes (Two Monks, 1934) ruminates on the differences between art and reality, and the misleading and potentially disastrous collisions of reality and perception. The film is also a reflection of many cultural markers, some unique to Mexico, others not: echoes of the 1910 Mexican revolution; a brewing Mexican nationalism; moderne Mexican stage aesthetics; the Social Realism art movement; split personality; and the cross-continental influence of Weimar Germany, specifically, Expressionist filmmaking.
Expressionist art, whether on canvas, on stage, or on film, is pointedly selfreferential. It is conscious of its own form, and invites exaggerated viewer attention to the medium. For filmmakers, Expressionist thought and concomitant techniques bring a new—and wholly intentional—artifice.
Film provides a false image of the world. We do not witness screen characters empirically. We are not there with them. Motion pictures—like all photography—put us at a remove from reality. The American documentarian Errol Morris wrote, “We imagine that photographs provide a magic path to the truth … With the advent of photography, images … became more like dreams.”
Expressionist films do not merely tell stories; they manipulate camera movement, point of view, and narrative structure, so that dreamlike and other psychological (frequently, psychosexual) effects are called to the fore, and heightened. And Expressionist film frequently imagines—that is, creates— images suggestive of disturbed or aberrant mental and emotional conditions.
Frequently, as in Robert Wiene's great German psychodrama Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; 1920), Expressionist technique is so potent, so stylized, that the viewer is pushed away from the experience, even as he or she is engaged, realizing, I'm watching a movie. This isn't real, but it's compelling because I've been invited to experience that character's thoughts.
A great deal of Expressionist art invokes struggles for identity, and one's place in the world. In this, the movement parallels some of the political and artistic activity going on in Mexico in the twenty years prior to Dos monjes.
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- Expressionism in the Cinema , pp. 266 - 286Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016