II.

The Silent Period

During the silent era, Paul Wegener, a major German stage actor, produced a series of feature films based on themes from German fantastic literature of the 19th century, starting with Der Student von Prag (1913; The Student of Prague) and The Golem (1914). During World War I, Ernst Lubitsch emerged as a major director, assimilating something of the American approach to comedy and drama, and also incorporating advanced graphic design in films such as Die Puppe (1919; The Doll) and Die Bergkatze (1921; The Wild Cat). Then, immediately after the war, there were a few films featuring decors heavily influenced by German Expressionist art, which had just started to be used for stage plays in Berlin. The first and best known of these was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), but this and its few successors over the next three years had no lasting effect on German cinema. The major German directors such as Fritz Lang, E. A. Dupont, and F. W. Murnau had their own individual signatures and explicitly disclaimed any connection with Expressionism, even if their films—such as Murnau’s Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Nosferatu the Vampire) did exhibit the style’s characteristics. The vast bulk of German production (several hundred films a year) had much the same mix of genres and styles as the rest of European cinema, and underwent the same process of conscious “Americanization” in the latter part of the 1920s as French cinema and British cinema.

By 1926, UFA, the largest German film company, was in financial difficulties because of losses, partly owing to the expense of films such as Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (1924; The Last Laugh) and Faust (1926), and Lang’s Metropolis (1926). This led it to amalgamate with the German sections of Paramount and MGM, and when the losses mounted further, the financier Alfred Hugenburg bought control of the company.