<>Slowly, a such spider
on
its fabric, the killer advances in a landscape. In 1920, “the Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari” inaugurates the cinema expressionnist. For the first
time since the invention of the brothers Lumière, the screen
refuses reality and becomes populated dreams. Nearly ninety years after
work founder of Robert Wiene, the Cineclub celebrates this movement
through an exhibition and a retrospective.
Art of the decorations and the light, the expressionnism invents a
figure of the body. The spider is called Conrad Veidt. At twenty-seven
years, it interprets the assassin hypnotized by the Caligari
manipulator. The actor is made puppet, his body does not belong to him
more: its uncontrolled arms sweep the air, its face carves compulsive
grins. A such reason on a vase, its profile yields with the shape of
the decoration: its twisted silhouette evokes the hooked trees, the
broken lines of the imaginary city. After “Caligari”, Veidt continues
its work expressionnist and schizophrene: Dr. Jeckyll in “the Head of
Janus” (Murnau, 1920), pianist with whom one grafts hands of assassin
in “the Hands of Orléac” (Wiene, 1922), he becomes “the man who
laughs” in the adaptation of Hugo turned by Paul Léni in 1928.
The cinema expressionnist is exhausted when Fritz Lang injects an
amount of realism with “Metropolis” (1926) and especially in “M the
Cursed one” (1931). In the years 1930, the movement dies out
definitively when more than 2.000 artists and technicians flee the Nazi
Germany to form “Weimar of the Pacific” in Hollywood. Their art of the
shades will be integrated into “black film”, their science of the
decoration and of the make-up the “cinema of the fantastic will
nourish”… As for Veidt, it will find in Hollywood only roles of
officers Nazis. The most famous remainder that of “Casablanca” of
Michael Curtiz (1942). With its death, on April 3, 1943, it had largely
given up its tortured style of the years 1920. However, Veidt did not
cease a réincarner by impregnating the set of various actors.
Today, its plane shade at Tim Burton in “Edward with the money hands”,
where Johnny Depp finds the mean profile of the sleepwalker of
“Caligari”, and it is with the eyes of Orléac that it looks at
the shears which hang at the end of its arms. In the same way, in
“Batman”, Jack Nicholson borrows his smile grimaçant from “the
man who laughs”. Thus, by bequeathing its body to Caligari, Conrad
Veidt offered to all the cinema. For general public, its name was
erased but its art and the heritage expressionnist contaminated the
screens forever.
A d r i e n G o m b a u d
