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Fritz Lang

It was only a little over one hundred years ago, in 1891, when Thomas Alva Edison patented his kinetograph camera and kinetoscope viewer (ôSignificant Developments. . . ,ö 2001). Since then film has gone from being a ten-minute black and white novelty that depicts people leaving a building after work, as the Lumiere Brothers filmed in Paris in 1895 (Yahnke, 1996), to 120-minute Hollywood color productions that not only tell stories, but do so with amazing special effects, not all of those produced by the camera.

Although it may seem as if the film industry has always been rooted in the United States, many creative breakthroughs in storyline, camera angle, lighting, etc., were actually made in Europe during the early years of cinema and then brought to America later. For example, such genres as the spooky horror film, the ôscoff flickö, and the film noir spy movie, in fact, have their roots based on a post-World War I philosophy of film known as German Expressionism (Giannetti, 1990; Morris, 2000). German Expressionists ôsought to give shape to psychological states through stylized visuals û particularly (in the movies) using sharply exaggerated shadows and high contrasting lighting, disorientingly skewed set design and off-kilter camera anglesö (Emerson, 1998, par. 2). Subsequently, many of the films made during this time were visually outstanding and set visual and story standards that are still in place today in the movie industry. There were several directors who were at the forefront of this method of movie making. ôFritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, and [F.W.] Murnau formed the great triumvirate of the golden age of the German cinemaö (Thomas, 1997, Cal. 16:4). A prominent artistic movement, many filmmakers, including the above as well as quite a few others, moved to Hollywood as Hitler and the Nazis gained influence and power in Germany. These filmmakers would bring with them lasting artistic influences on the American c...

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Fritz Lang. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:50, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702057.html