German Expressionist Film and Mannerism as Reflections of the Social Unconscious of Their Time Periods

초록

Stemming from the social and political confusion of the sixteenth century, characterized by the decline of feudalism, the establishment of the absolute monarchy, and the outbreak of religious wars, Mannerism can be regarded as artistic movement which attempts to refuse the ideal of the High Renaissance, which tries to maintain stability in artistic presentations by displaying harmony and balance. Instead Mannerist painters usually depict exaggerated and elongated human bodies, unrealistic spatial compositions, and discordant perspectives in order to provide spectators with mysterious and unnatural effects. The German Expressionist films of the early twentieth century can be seen as reiterating the stylistic experiments that the Mannerists try to develop. Mannerism’s resistance to established traditions and criteria is a tendency that has been recovered in various artistic forms and genres. That is to say, Mannerism, like various other artistic styles, displays contextual characteristics related to its time through the coexistence of heterogeneous images, intentional unfamiliarity, and deviation from the existing norm; the mentality behind this Mannerist tendency visibly reappears in German Expressionist film. Like Mannerism in the sixteenth century, the aesthetics of German Expressionist film in the early twentieth century correspond to a sort of idealism that the material world should be recognized by spiritual and mental processing, and to a metaphysical worldview that pursues the relationship between human recognition and actual circumstances. Consequently, this paper compares practically mise-en-scene and the figures of characters in some images of the German Expressionist films with compositions and bodily figures depicted in the Mannerist paintings.

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