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GOALIER THAN THOU



Last Updated: 11/18/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 101
Sign: Leo

City: Hockey Falls
State: Ohio
Country: US
Signup Date: 9/29/2005

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Thursday, April 26, 2007 

Current mood:  determined
THE GOALIERNATION'S CREEED!

 

Pressure makes all Goalies brothers of a sort, And the very nature of their job separates them from their teammates, while inviting extreme physical and emotional stress. No one understands him, no one wants to be him, they only know they need him.

In a sport famous for speeding skaters and non-stop action, the Goalie rarely moves from his position Yet skating just as hard. Moving from post to post, Challenging the shooter, All the while skating in a way to not open 'holes' and with as little movement as possible. goalies cover as much ice as any other player only in a way they the "skaters" could never understand; while other players are constantly changing on the fly, he is replaced only because of woeful ineffectiveness, debilitating injury, or to send a message to his teammates "we need defense too".

Goalies must stop shots that can travel at speeds of more than 100 mph, an assignment that can cause nausea before games and even chronic nervous disorders. Sometimes a giant innocent grin.

A goalie is judged only by the goals he gives up, and each one activates a red light that illuminates his failure for the world to see.  The goaltenders victories are measured in other ways.  When a player bangs his stick on the ice in frustration, when the bench cheers because he just kept them alive, when the defenseman skates by with a smack on the pad and says "nice save", and knowing that when the shooters just keep hitting him and he looks "bored" he is at the top of his game. That moment when the whistle blows and he stands up, turns over the trapper and the puck falls to the ice. "not today he thinks"
For the Goalie there is no end zone dance,No home run trot,Because he knows the only save that matters is the next one

Because the demands on a Goalie are mostly mental, it means that for a Goalie the biggest enemy is Himself. Not a puck, Not an opponent, Not a quirk of size or style.

Himself.

The stress and anxiety he feels when he plays, the fear of failing, the fear of being embarrassed, the fear of being physically hurt, all the symptoms of his position, in constant ebb and flow, but never disappearing.

The successful Goalie understands these neuroses, accepts them, and puts them under control. Uses them to be stronger and determined to beat not only "them" but himself as well.

The unsuccessful Goalie is distracted by them, his mind in knots, his body quickly following.
When most men scramble, duck or turtle for cover the goalie casts aside every natural instinct of self preservation and heroically stands his ground, whatever the cost, whatever the pain, his purpose is eternal, singular and constant….
 STOP THE PUCK!!!!
 
9:31 PM 
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Saturday, March 03, 2007 

Current mood:  depressed
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

REPRINTED HERE WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM FISTFULOFWESTERNS.COM

 

How to ruin a Sergio Leone movie -

There are two kinds of people in this world my friend ... those that like pan'n'scan ... and those with loaded guns.

Yes, that's right ... if you like pan'n'scan you should be shot. OK, maybe that's a little strong, but pan'n'scan really is the bane of the home cinema (non)experience, and this is nowhere more apparent than with the films of Sergio Leone.

Pan'n'scan is the method used to convert a movie from is original cinema aspect ratio (commonly 2.35:1) for display on a regular T.V. set (aspect ratio 4:3). The process involves cropping the image to a selected 4:3 area of the original frame by chopping off the sides. The cropped area is panned left and right to follow the characters and action across the screen. But the result is that you are in effect only seeing half the film.

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The only way to properly see a film as the director intended is in full widescreen. The notion that black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are bad as they reduce the amount of picture displayed is archaic.

Pan'n'scan is akin to buying a Picasso at Sotheby's and then chopping the top and bottom off the painting so that it will fit in an Ikea frame. Ironically it is the best films that suffer most by pan'n'scan, and all of Leone's films have at one time been butchered in this way for TV or video release.

One scene from 'The Good, the Bad and The Ugly' illustrates the problem with pan'n'scan perfectly - the final showdown at the Sad Hill cemetery. Leone has obviously deliberated the composition of each frame, but in the pan'n'scan print, the long shot showing the three men in the arena is reduced to two men with a pan across to show the third. And the close-ups of eyes become close-ups of the bridge of the nose. The pan'n'scan print is, quite frankly, a mess.

Admittedly there is one process far worse than pan'n'scan, and that is the straight cropped image. Here there is no attempt to select the most appropriate region of the original frame and no panning of the image. Instead the 4:3 image remains centred to the original frame with the sides cut-off. This was more commonly used for lower-end video releases, and as such many a Spaghetti Western has been butchered in this way. A telltale sign of the cropped image is a blank screen as two characters that hold a converstaion are cut from either side.

To see a Leone film properly you really MUST see it in widescreen.



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Original cinematic
aspect ratio 2.35:1		 .. Pan'n'scan for T.V.
aspect ratio 4:3
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Currently listening:
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Expanded)
By Ennio Morricone
Release date: 18 May, 2004
9:09 PM 
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Thursday, January 18, 2007 

Current mood:  complacent
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Dracula-1930

 

The Prototypic Faces of Death in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s

The silent era of horror films focused almost exclusively on the hideous, deathlike appearances of the monsters rather than the ghastly crimes they committed against society. The chief reason was that the grisly makeup had to compensate for the lack of sound in these features. And so any number of strange and bizarre bogeymen that populated the screen greeted the viewer. Take for instance John Barrymore's Mr. Hyde (1920), which depicts the counterpart of Dr. Jekyll as a creature with a Neanderthal, almost satanic visage. Or consider the very first vampire film, the German silent Nosferatu (1922), that turned Count Orlock into a "walking skeleton" of horror with "his pale skull-like face, his blazing eyes, pointed ears, and long tapering fingernails"

Lon Chaney as Erik with Mary Philbin in the famous unmasking scene

 

The Universal Studios period of horror films spanning the 1930s and 1940s continued to invest most of their special effects budget in the title creatures' features at the expense of adequate plot development, noteworthy musical scores, and prominent death scenes. Thus, the great works of literature like Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) were converted to one-dimensional productions with the ghoulish monster once again occupying the central position on the screen. The 1930 Todd Browning version of Dracula cast the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the role of the Count. His broken English, exaggerated hand gestures, pasty face makeup, piercing eyes, aquiline nose, and high cheekbones gave Lugosi a kind of cinematic immortality for recreating the image of the Old World nobleman into a mysterious, somewhat disturbing creature of the night. Interestingly, very few humans would die at the hands of this cinematic Count, unlike his literary predecessor.

The very next year Universal tried its hand at Shelley's Frankenstein (1931), giving the actor Boris Karloff his chance at fame for playing the Monster with a good deal of pathos. The film reviewer Byron Preiss describes Karloff in the following way: "tall, ill-clad, lumbering, with a square head and pegs sticking out from his neck, his face gaunt, his eyes baffled . . . he stands unsteadily with his arms upthrust toward the light which, with the innocence of the newborn, he tries to seize" And while the Monster executes some humans in the worst way imaginable (from drowning a child in the lake to hanging the hunchbacked servant with his own whip), these sequences take a backseat to the very realistic, corpselike appearance of Karloff that the viewer never tires from seeing.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster -1931-

Other Universal monsters populated the screen during this interval, such as The Mummy (1932), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and The Wolf Man (1941). However, few would ever reach the stature of Count Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster in looks or atrocities, overt as well as covert. It was not until the 1950s that the creature features would return to the screen in a never-before-seen blood-thirsty glory by the Hammer Film Studios in London, England.

 

According to the film critic William K. Everson, the horror film is the most unique of any film genre because rigid guidelines do not have to be followed as closely by the director or, for that matter, the screenwriter. The horror film's message of terror and death can be subtly communicated to the audience or conveyed in very intense (and ultimately disturbing) visual and auditory cues. While other film genres might use restraint and logical explanation as their overriding criteria, the horror film need not follow this standard formula; thus, many cinematic tricks and techniques are available to filmmakers to employ at their discretion. The end result is that the audience can experience a wide range of negative effects, from minor irritation to overwhelming nausea, when viewing a film of the horror genre.

Based on Everson's remarks, one might conclude that the salient reason given as to why people watch horror films is that they want to be scared. In fact, this scare drive is so powerfully addictive to some viewers that they keep coming back to these films over and over again, desiring more terror and craving more thrills with each viewing. However, a deeper, more psychological explanation can be provided as to why humans have been fascinated with gore and bloodshed since the very beginning of recorded history.

To help one understand this motivating force in the human psyche, one must consider Carl Jung's psychoanalytic theory of archetypes. Jung believed that all humans have inherited a set of primordial images that are contained in the collective unconscious. For the most part, these archaic images (referred to as archetypes) remain buried within the unconscious; at significant moments of one's life, however, they can be realized and fully expressed through religion, philosophy, art, literature, and, more recently, the cinema. Jung noted that the most powerful and perhaps most dangerous archetype of the group is the shadow. By definition, the shadow contains all of humanity's unacceptable behavior, bestial impulses, and repressed desires. Using a horror theme analogy, the shadow is "the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll . . . the side of our personality that wants to do all the things that we do not allow ourselves to do [normally]". Thus, human nature is really comprised of two selves: an outward, everyday persona and a dark shadow that people try to keep in check and hide from others as much as possible.

Fredrick March as Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde-1931-

Universal Studios made a name for themselves in silent horror, including several groundbreaking films with Lon Chaney, the legendary Man of a Thousand Faces. Their adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera stood alone; the producers had no interest in a shared world of horror. Only with the success of their early gothic "talkie," Tod Browning's Dracula, did a recognizable "world" of classic movie monsters begin to take shape. The films, for the most part, take place in a fogbound, mythic Europe, filled with gnarled trees, torch-bearing peasants, and silver screen melodrama. The histrionic acting and cheesy special effects seem dated now, but the films have a lasting appeal, and their iconic characters continue to sell videos, posters, masks, toys, action figures, models, and other paraphenalia. The Universal Monsters have become part of our culture, particularly evident around Halloween.

The idea that the films composed a story cycle only gradually emerged, and the series is wracked with continuity errors,- or, retcons. The retcons mostly apply to the Frankenstein films. Prior to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (if then), it seems as though Universal intended each movie to be the last. Consequently, they told the story for dramatic effect and did not worry if the ending precluded the possibility of a character returning, or a setting being accessible. When profits suggested a sequel was a good idea, they simply ignored those aspects of the previous film that were inconvenient.

 

The Universal Directors and Producers

Carl Laemmle Jr.-PRODUCER

Carl Laemmle Sr and Carl Jr. 

(April 28, 1908 - September 24, 1979) was in charge of production at Universal Studios from about 1928 to 1936. He was the son of Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures. Laemmle developed a reputation for spending too much money at the studios on several films that did not earn back their cost. Although Universal had great success with All Quiet on the Western Front (film), Dracula (1931 film), Waterloo Bridge (1931 film), Frankenstein (1931 film), The Mummy (1932 film), The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man (1933 film), Imitation of Life (1934 film) (which Laemmle, Jr. did not personally produce, as he did the others), and Bride of Frankenstein, by the end of 1935 the studio had spent so much and had so many flops that J. Cheever Cowdin proposed to buy out the Laemmles. The great success, financially and critically, of the 1936 screen version of Show Boat, was not enough to correct the downslide, and the two Laemmles, father and son, were both forced out of the company. Neither of them worked on another film again, despite the fact that Carl, Jr. lived another forty-three years. Charles R. Rogers became the new head of production at Universal.

Laemmle, Jr., died from a stroke at the age of 71.

James Whale -DIRECTOR

(July 22, 1889 – May 29, 1957) was a ground-breaking Hollywood film director,

Whale was best known for his work in the horror genre, making such momentous and iconic pictures as Frankenstein, where he was one of the first directors ever to move the camera through the shot (the German silent cinema, and especially the films of F. W. Murnau, seem to have heavily influenced Whale in their use of the fluidly moving camera), Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Universal Pictures owed its stellar success in the 1930s much in part to the huge box-office receipts of these three blockbusters. Further, these pictures established the screen careers of Gloria Stuart, Colin Clive, Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff and Claude Rains, to name just a few, most of whom Whale had known previously in England and had personally selected for their roles in his films. Whale was also responsible for such major films as Waterloo Bridge (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), the 1936 Show Boat (all for producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.), and The Man in the Iron Mask, which he made for independent producer Edward Small. Whale directed The Road Back in 1937, starring Richard Cromwell and Noah Beery, Jr. It was the ill-fated sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Over Whale's protest, The Road Back was re-cut and shortened to the studio's liking before it was released, and then when it (not surprisingly) fared poorly at the box-office, Whale left Universal. He then made The Great Garrick at Warner Brothers - his only film there. A fictional comedy about the actor David Garrick, it featured an astoundingly detailed reconstruction of the eighteenth century, but was another flop. So was Port of Seven Seas, Whale's only film at MGM, a somewhat disguised film version in English of Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy. Whale made only one more successful film - The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) , starring Louis Hayward and Joan Bennett. The rest were films that have faded into obscuWhale lived with producer David Lewis who released Whale's suicide note shortly before his own death in 1987. Whale is the subject of the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram which was the basis for the biopic Gods and Monsters (1998). The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, starred Ian McKellen as Whale. Biographies of Whale have been written by Mark Gatiss (James Whale: A Biography or James Whale: the Would-Be Gentleman) and James Curtis (James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters).

In his later days, Whale experienced difficulty with his memory due to a debilitating stroke. He became lonely and suffered from depression and had difficulty putting the war behind him. He committed suicide by drowning himself in his swimming pool on May 29, 1957 at the age of 67. As his suicide note was originally withheld (and first published in James Curtis's biography of the director), circumstances of his death were not known until years later. His suicide note read, "The future is just old age and illness and pain... I must have peace and this is the only way."

James Whale was openly gay during his time in Hollywood. The film Gods and Monsters featured this aspect of his personality, his amateur painting, his medical condition, his mental health, and his emotional condition.

A memorial statue was erected for Whale in 2002 in the grounds of a new multiplex cinema of his home town, Dudley, England. The statue depicts a roll of film with the face of Frankenstein's monster engraved into the cells and the names of his most famous films etched into the film-tin shaped base-stone.

 

Charles Albert Browning, Jr.-Director

 

(July 12, 1880 - October 6, 1962), better known as Tod Browning, was an American film actor and director whose career spanned the silent and talkie eras. Best known as the director of Dracula (1931), the cult classic Freaks (1932), and classic silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney, he directed many movies in a wide range of genres.

Browning's feature film debut was Jim Bludso (1917), about a riverboat captain who sacrifices himself to save his passengers from a fire. It was well-received.

Browning moved back to New York in 1917. He directed two films for Metro Studios: Peggy, the Will o' the Wisp and The Jury of Fate, both starring Mabel Taliaferro, the latter in a dual role achieved with double exposure techniques that were groundbreaking for the time. He moved back to California in 1918 and produced two more films for Metro: The Eyes of Mystery and Revenge.

In the spring of 1918 he left Metro and joined Bluebird Productions, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, where he met Irving Thalberg. Thalberg paired Browning with Lon Chaney, Sr. for the first time for the film The Wicked Darling (1919), a melodrama in which Chaney played a thief who forces a poor girl from the slums into a life of crime.

The death of his father sent Browning into a depression that led to alcoholism. He was laid off by Universal and his wife left him. However, he recovered, reconciled with his wife, and got a one-picture contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The film he produced for MGM, The Day of Faith, was a moderate success, putting his career back on track.

Thalberg reunited Browning with Lon Chaney for The Unholy Three (1925), the story of three circus performers who concoct a scheme to con and steal jewels from rich people using disguises. Browning's circus experience shows in his sympathetic portrayal of the antiheroes. The film was a resounding success, so much so that it was later remade in 1930 as Lon Chaney's first (and only) talkie. Browning and Chaney embarked on a series of popular collaborations, including The Blackbird and The Road to Mandalay. The Unknown (1927), featuring Chaney as an armless knife thrower and Joan Crawford as his scantily-clad carnival girl obsession, was originally titled Alonzo the Armless and could be considered a precursor to Freaks in that it concerns a love triangle involving a circus freak, a beauty, and a strongman. London After Midnight (1927) was Browning's first foray into vampire film and is a highly sought-after lost film which starred Chaney, Conrad Nagel, and Marceline Day. The last known print of London After Midnight was destroyed in an MGM studio fire in 1965. In 2002, a photographic reconstruction of London After Midnight was produced by Rick Schmidlin for Turner Classic Movies. Browning and Chaney's final collaboration was Where East is East (1929), of which only incomplete prints have survived. Browning's first talkie was The Thirteenth Chair (1929), which was also released as a silent and starred Bela Lugosi.

After Chaney's death in 1930, Browning was hired by Universal Pictures to direct Dracula (1931). Although Browning wanted to hire an unknown European actor for the title role and have him be mostly offscreen as a sinister presence, budget constraints and studio interference necessitated the casting of Bela Lugosi and a more straightforward approach. Although the film is now considered a classic, at the time Universal was unhappy with it and preferred the Spanish-language version filmed on the same sets at night.

After directing the boxing melodrama The Iron Man (1931), he began work on Freaks (1932). Based on a short story by the screenwriter of The Unholy Three, it concerns a love triangle between a wealthy dwarf, a gold-digging aerialist, and a strongman, a murder plot, and the vengeance dealt out by the dwarf and his fellow circus freaks. The film was highly controversial, even after heavy editing to remove many disturbing scenes, and was a commercial failure. Browning's career was derailed.

Browning found himself unable to get his requested projects greenlighted. After directing the drama Fast Workers (1933) starring John Gilbert, who was also not in good standing with the studio, he was allowed to direct a remake of London After Midnight, originally titled Vampires of Prague but later retitled Mark of the Vampire (1935). In the remake, the roles played by Lon Chaney in the original were split between Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi (spoofing his Dracula image). After that he directed The Devil Doll (1936), originally titled The Witch of Timbuctoo, from a script he wrote himself. It starred Lionel Barrymore as an escapee from an island prison who avenges himself on the people who imprisoned him using magically animated dolls. His final film was the murder mystery Miracles for Sale (1939).

After Miracles for Sale, Browning did some scenario work for MGM. In 1942 he retired and moved to Malibu. He became such a recluse that soon after his wife died in 1944, Variety accidentally published an obituary for him. Even his neighbors rarely saw him. In the late 1950s he developed throat cancer, necessitating tongue surgery. When his brother Avery died in 1959, he attended the funeral from a private room and would not let family members see him. On October 6, 1962, he was found dead in the bathroom of some friends.

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Tuesday, January 16, 2007 

Current mood:  cynical
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Movie lessons Are The New thing this Year

Mainly to point out that (with few exceptions) Just about everything that drops from the fetid bowels of Hollywood is ripped off from from bygone era's.

Why? I'll tell you why,Because cable television has destroyed the imagination of of Generation X and turned them into tech savy morons. They have no ideas of their own that are worthwhile and thats why so many remakes are put out out and are usually so poorly concieved and made that It literaly makes me sick!!!!

I'm starting with the roots of the modern Sci Fi/Horror/Monster movies and more specifically The German Expressionists of the 1920's

I will copy and paste from other sources on the net,cuz i don't have time to type all that shit myself.

 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1923)

 

 

The horror genre is nearly as old as film itself. The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by film pioneers such as Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the most notable being his 1896 Le Manoir du diable (aka "The Devil's Castle") which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Another of his horror projects was the 1898 La Caverne maudite (aka "The Cave of the Demons").

Le Manoir du diable (French: The House of the Devil) is a two minute long French film directed by Georges Méliès. The film contained many traditional pantomime elements and was intentionally meant to amuse people, rather than frighten them. The film is often called other things by mistake, some of these include:

  • The Haunted Castle
  • The Devil's Manor
  • Manor of the Devil
  • The Manor of the Devil

It was released on Christmas Eve, 1896, at the Theatre Robert Houdin, 8 boulevard des Italiens, Paris. It was from this two minute short that many assume the horror film was born.

 

The film starts off with a large bat flying into a medieval castle. Once in, the bat circles slowly while flapping its monstrous wings before suddenly changing into Mephistopheles. After preparing a cauldron, the demon produces skeletons, ghosts, and witches from its bubbling contents before one of the summoned underworld cavaliers holds up a crucifix and Satan vanishes in a blast of smoke.

Le Manoir Du Diable (1896)

 

The early 20th century brought more milestones for the horror genre including the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame who had appeared in Victor Hugo's book, "Notre-Dame de Paris" (published in 1831). Films featuring Quasimodo included Alice Guy's Esmeralda (1906), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).

Many of the earliest feature length 'horror films' were created by German film makers in 1910s and 1920s, many of which were a significant influence on later Hollywood films. Paul Wegener's The Golem (1915) was seminal; in 1920 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was both controversial with American audiences, due to postwar sentiments, and influential in its Expressionistic style; the most enduring horror film of that era was probably the first vampire-themed feature, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

 

German Expressionism, also referred to as Expressionism in filmmaking, developed in Germany (especially Berlin) during the 1920s. During the period of recovery following World War I, the German film industry was booming, but because of the hard economic times filmmakers found it difficult to create movies that could compare with the lush, extravagant features coming from Hollywood. The filmmakers of the German UFA studio developed their own style, by using symbolism and mise en scène to insert mood and deeper meaning into a movie

METROPOLIS (1927)

The first Expressionist films, notably The Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) were highly symbolic and deliberately surrealistic portrayals of filmed stories. Other early examples came from Austria, just as Der Mandarin (1918) by Fritz Freisler, Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (1918) with Fritz Kortner, Inferno (1920) by Paul Czinner and The Hands of Orlac (1925) by Robert Wiene. One of the best expressionist actors was Fritz Kortner, who played as well in Viennese films as also in Berlin-films. The dada movement was sweeping across the artistic world in the early 1920s, and the various European cultures of the time had embraced an ethic of change, and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films); the German name for this type of storytelling was called kammerspielfilm (chamber film in English). Later films often categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionism include Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), both directed by Fritz Lang

Wiene &Lang's influence through Metropolis And Caligariis are seen in Modern films,Like "The Crow" & "Dark City" Directed by Alex Proyas

STORYBOARD FROM DARK CITY

 

THE CROW
 

 

 

NOSFERATU (1922)

The extreme non-realism of Expressionism was a brief-lived fad, however, and it faded away (along with Dadaism) after only a few years. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into later films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery, light, and shadow to enhance the mood of a film. This dark, moody school of filmmaking was brought to America when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. They found a number of American movie studios willing to embrace them, and several of the German directors and cameramen flourished, producing a repertoire of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on the medium of film as a whole.

Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism were the horror film and film noir. Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera. German emigrees such as Karl Freund (the cinematographer for Dracula in 1931) set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing the benchmark for later generations of horror films. Meanwhile, such directors as Fritz Lang and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to the crime dramas of the 1940s, influencing a further line of filmmakers and taking Expressionism through the years.

  German Expressionist Film Today

Ambitious adaptations of the style are depicted throughout the contemporary filmography of director Tim Burton. His 1992 film Batman Returns is often cited as a modern attempt to capture the essence of German Expressionism. The angular building designs and severe-looking city squares of Gotham City evoke the loom and menace present in Lang's Metropolis. One may even notice the link between the evil character of Max Shreck, portrayed by Christopher Walken, and Nosferatu's leading star.

Burton's influences are most obvious through his fairy tale suburban landscape in Edward Scissorhands . The appearance of the titular Edward Scissorhands none too accidentally reflects the look of Caligari's somnambulist servant. Burton casts a kind of unease in his candy-colored suburb, where the tension is visually unmasked through Edward and his gothic castle perched above the houses. Burton subverts the Caligari nightmare with his own narrative branding, casting the garish "somnambulist" as the hero, and the villagers as the villains.

THE CABINET OF DR.CALIGARI (1920)


The familar look of Caligari's main character can also be seen in the movie "The Crow". With the tight black outfit white makeup and darkened eyes Brandon Lee's character is obviously a close relative to Burton's Scissorhands.992 film, Shadows and Fog, is a pastiche of expressionism, taking cues from several films, such as the plot of M (1931) and the look of Nosferatu.

The 1967 version of the James Bond film Casino Royale had an extended sequence set in an 'expressionist' mansion. Being a spoof, it parodied the practicalites of attempting to climb crooked stairs whilst insane.

The film version of Sin City (2005) is also cited as a return to the style.

EDWARD SCISSORHANDS(1990)

SIN CITY(2005)

Many of the same elements can be seen in Ridly Scott's Sci-Fi classic Blade Runner (1982) as well

 

Ties to other media

Expressionism as a movement spanned across media to include theater, architecture, music, painting, and sculpture, as well. Architecture, in particular, serves as an iconic way to bring the inner emotions of the individual into the public sphere, and therefore is most closely tied to the concepts of German Expressionism, but film extends the visual strengths of architecture into a more compelling, natural format. Many critics see a direct tie between cinema and architecture of the time, in the sense that the sets and scene artwork of expressionist films often reveal buildings of sharp angles, great heights, and crowded environments, such as the frequently shown Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

 

Now Quit watching The So called reality shows,and find something Real People!!!

4:23 PM 
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