This episode brings us to the worldwide innovators and rebels of the 1920s. We have Ernst Lubitsch, who was mocking and subversive -- Billy Wilder later had a sign reading "How would Lubitsch do it?" (Wilder seems to have been influenced by everyone -- Chaplin, Hawks, Lubitsch...) Abel Gance and impressionism was the rage in France, which in turn influenced Russian cinema.
Perhaps the most well-known movement was that of German expressionism -- Robert Wiene's "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" allegedly being a metaphor for the control of the German people by the German state. It is noted for the painting of shadows and stark angles. Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and even Alfred Hitchcock's "Lodger" came from this. Most interestingly rising from German expressionism, perhaps, is "The Page of Madness", a Japanese film (what Cousins calls the second great Japanese film after "Souls on the Road", both of which are largely unknown).
This time period brought us F. W. Murnau, one of the greatest directors of all time and "Sunrise" is considered one of the best films of all time. (Working with him and Lang, but not mentioned here, was cinematography Karl Freund.) Walter Ruttmann was a rebel with animation, painting on glass. Rene Clair brought out Dada on film. Dali brought the drooping eyes to Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound". nd of course, with Luis Bunuel, we received the surreal gems "Un Chien Andalou" and "Age D'Or".
Russia brought Vertov and Eisenstein (a Jewish, bisexual, Christian, Marxist engineer), who influenced Chaplin and Disney. Oddly, the stairs of "Battleship Potemkin" influenced DePalma's "Untouchables", which in turn were parodied by "Naked Gun".
Ozu in Japan placed his camera different, lowering where people were shot (feet or knees up rather than hips up). While Hollywood in the 1920s was huge, this episode shows us that the rest of the world was busy creating and inventing, too -- in some ways beating the Americans to the punch.
