Weimar to Hollywood film series

In conjunction with The mad square

The mad square: modernity in German art 1910–37 highlights radical innovations made by artists in Berlin, affecting painting, sculpture, print-making, photography and the decorative arts during the inter-war years. Weimar to Hollywood demonstrates the decisive impact of German filmmakers of the same period. Screening classic cinema from the 1920s onwards, it reveals the transatlantic destiny of Weimar cinema.

Nine weeks of the program are devoted to two key directors.

FW Murnau (1888–1931)

7 September – 2 October

FW Murnau was the Wunderkind of cinema in Weimar Germany. By 1926 he had completed 21 films, most of which are lost or exist in only fragmentary form. Dedicated to art and experimentation, Murnau insisted that the relationship between characters, objects and camera should form a ‘symphonic unity’. He was a brilliant visual storyteller, harnessing the play of light to suggest dire feelings of a culture in distress. Influential during the transitional period of German Expressionism, when it moved from the traditional arts into film, he made a profound impact on Hollywood when he emigrated in 1926.

Fritz Lang (1890–1976)

5 October – 6 November

Among the most significant films produced in Weimar Germany are Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). Their expressionist style, in which shadows and silhouettes were used to evoke the state of mind of the central characters, accorded with the disillusioned post-war German mood. Soon after Hitler’s rise to power he fled to the US. He made 21 features during the next 21 years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood. These films influenced the evolution of 1940s American film noir.