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The shadows as a staple aesthetic trope of German Expressionism. Arthur Robison: Warning Shadows (Schatten, 1923).
Source publication
Prerogative of what Jung calls visionary art, the aesthetics of German Expressionist cinema is “primarily expressive of the collective unconscious,” and – unlike the psychological art, whose goal is “to express the collective consciousness of a society” – they have succeeded not only to “ compensate their culture for its biases” by bringing “to the...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... this point, the shadows -along with the forceful chiaroscuro effect of the ubiquitous low-key lighting -are playful, even meta-cinematic comments on the shadows as a staple aesthetic trope of German Expressionism. [ Fig. 2.] They represent "a pregnant metaphor that translates […] the everyday experience" into "knowledge that we have a 'twilight zone', an obscure part of ourselves in which many presences reveal themselves" (Connolly 2008, ...
Context 2
... the snowy vistas of Medieval Russia or the bridges of Venice and the jungles of China, with their oneiric atmosphere, point to the archetypal nature of the protagonists' experiences. Moreover, despite of their ostensible geographical and historical scope, these two films -"in diametrical opposition to nineteenth-century historicism" -bring to bear "a visual poetics of parallelism and homology, emphasizing trans-historical affinities and commonalities rather than distinct inner principles" (Baer 2015, 146). Indeed, the deployment of oddly shaped edifices and visual patterns underscores the metaphorical-mythological nature of the narratives, making these films representative pieces of visionary cinematic Expressionism, whose ultimate goal is just that -to express, "to show, or metaphorically exemplify" archetypes, "rather than to explicitly describe and conceptualise [their] meaning" (Smythe 2012, 154). ...
