Crimson & Lemon & Black

Crimson is the dramatic accent — the deep vivid cool-red of the most emotionally intense visual moments in German Expressionist film and theater. In the most celebrated German Expressionist films — 'Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari' (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920, directed by Robert Wiene — the founding document of German Expressionist cinema), 'Nosferatu' (1922, directed by F.W. Murnau — the most celebrated vampire film), 'Der Golem' (1920, directed by Paul Wegener), and 'Metropolis' (1927, directed by Fritz Lang — the most technically ambitious and most thematically complex Expressionist film) — vivid red-to-crimson appears as the most emotionally charged warm color in the otherwise achromatic or extremely high-contrast black-and-white visual environment. The specific use of crimson in German Expressionist film: the theatrical blood of the horror sequences, the colored gels used in specific dramatic moments in the otherwise desaturated cinematography, and the vivid red of the political posters that appear in the social-commentary films (particularly the anti-war films of G.W. Pabst and the socialist-realist films of the late Weimar period). Lemon is the spotlight — the vivid pale lemon-yellow of the theatrical spotlight that is the primary artificial light source in the German Expressionist aesthetic. The specific lemon-to-pale-yellow of the arc-lamp (Bogenlampe) and early electric spotlight creates the most luminously brilliant warm light in the otherwise shadowed Expressionist environment — the spotlight beam in the darkness, creating a cone of pale lemon-yellow light against the absolute black of the background, is the most characteristic visual element of German Expressionist theater and film mise-en-scène. The UFA studios (Universum Film AG, founded 1917, the most important German film studio of the Weimar era, located in Babelsberg, outside Berlin) used a specific style of dramatic arc-lamp spotlight to create the extreme chiaroscuro lighting that distinguished Expressionist cinema from the more evenly lit American film of the same period. Black is the chiaroscuro — the absolute black of the extreme shadowed backgrounds of German Expressionist cinema. The specific Expressionist use of black: unlike the gray of standard film shadows (in conventional cinematography, shadows are never pure black), the Expressionist directors and cinematographers used lighting, set painting, and optical printing to create areas of absolute black — pure, undifferentiated darkness that creates the most dramatically intense contrast with the illuminated elements. Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' (1927) creates the most technically accomplished chiaroscuro in silent cinema history — the vast underground sequences of the worker city use absolute black backgrounds against which the pale lemon-white light of the electric machines and the crimson-to-orange light of the explosion sequences appear most brilliantly vivid.