Alienation in 1920’s Berlin to 1940’s Hollywood: A Force of Evil
Paper by Mary Anne Weiss.
Visual art movements that resonate with universal experiences carry over from one genre to another, and from one generation to another. The desire to visualize our fears and examine our fallibility is a common human condition. German Expressionism in painting and film at the start of the 20th century informed American filmmaking and painting of the 1940’s and 50’s. Its particular visual style and subject matter are clearly to be seen in the 1948 film, Force of Evil, co-written and directed by the American-born artist, Abraham Polonsky.
German Expressionism was a multi-disciplinary art movement based in Berlin beginning in the 1910’s and gaining prominence in the 1920’s. It spanned the genres of drawing, painting, poetry, and the dramatic arts. The movement dealt primarily with the expression of the darker side of human emotion, the alienation and anxiety of the individual in urban environments, and the rejection of realism. Particularly in painting and woodcuts, it accomplished these aims through certain visual stylistic conventions, including angular shapes, distortion of figures and landscapes, unnatural colors, high-contrast, and broad brushstrokes or rough carvings.
The artistic movement arose as a rejection
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’ s Antipathy Towards The Male Gaze A Momentary Examination of the Mastery of the Cinematic Style
Paper by Marian Flores.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (French: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (Sciamma, 2019) is a French historical romantic drama both written and directed by French screenwriter and film director Céline Sciamma. Portrait of a Lady on Fire “was shot in Saint-Pierre Quiberon, Morbihan, France. The interior and exterior scenes at the chateau were filmed at Château de La Chapelle-Gauthier” (Portrait of a Lady on Fire Locations).The film itself is not inherently centered around a movement, instead choosing to focus on the concept of, “The female gaze.” Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a fictional narrative story set against the backdrop of a secluded island at the turn of the 19th century. The story centers around an impassioned and forbidden romance between two women Marianne, a painter, commissioned to paint a wedding portrait of the contentious gentlewoman of the house, Héloïse. This award-winning film received several accolades and “was voted the 30th greatest film of all time in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2022” (Ginette Vincendeu BFI). Portrait of a Lady on Fire contests the traditional concept of “the