German Expressionism

After the first war, German film studios began painting the shadows directly onto the walls.

The sets leaned, the streets twisted, and the light itself was brushwork, because the point was never how the world looks; it was how it feels to a mind in trouble. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opened in 1920 with its story told by a madman, and for seven years the German screen kept that permission: sleepwalkers, vampires, doubles, a city of machines. Hollywood noticed and bought the people who made it, and Murnau sailed in 1926. The style outlived the country: by 1933 most of the men who painted those shadows were refugees, and the movement’s afterlife happened in Los Angeles, in the dark corners of the crime pictures the exiles shot there.