German Expressionism and Hardboiled

The German Expressionism movement of the 1920's and 30's has been one of the main areas that influenced the Film Noir movement in America later in the 40's and 50's.

Recovering from World War I but unable to compete with the lavish films coming out of Hollywood, German film makers began to experiment. Creating films with moods and deeper topics an extreme non-realism was created. The most famous films from this era are undoubtedly Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M. The fantastic horror Nosferatu was also born from this movement. While this era was short lived in German many German film makers immigrated to America when the Nazis' started to gain power. Through them both horror and film noir were influenced.

While bring their style into the films Hollywood was making, such as Karl Freund who was the director of photography for Universal's 1931 feature Dracula, several directors were heavily influenced by the style. Orson Welles who would go on to make Touch of Evil. Carol Reed who would go onto make The Third Man and Alfred Hitchcock who would make the noirs Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound and Suspicion.

Using mise en scene and non-realistic looking sets to create symbolism often created a dark moody atmosphere for the films. This has transferred in, a way, to film noir in the canted angles to created a disjointed feeling from the audience watching. Confusion or insanity are also often shown from unusual angles. Extreme high and low angles are also common place in film noir and again this is often to show the loneliness of the characters and there alienation, not just from the world there in but from the audience as well.

There is no doubt that German Expressionism helped break the trend of "happy" movies that were coming out of Hollywood and were a major influence to noir's dark and mysterious edge.


Noir was not just influence by Germany though. America itself participated heavily to the noir genre. The Hardboiled crime fiction books that started in the 1920's and continued through the 1930's had a much tougher and unsentimental portrayal of sex and violence. This was something not seen in Hollywood movies. Firstly published alongside the pulp magazines, later many authors like Raymond Chandler would become very well known for their novels, many of which would be adapted later into movies (such as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep). These gritty crime stories, with their anti-heroes and femme fatale's along with their particular style of dialog helped formed the narrative structure that would become common place in film noir.

Together German expressionism helped form the famous visual style that would work perfectly with the Hardboiled narrative structures to create truly one of the most interesting styles in the history of cinema.