Madrid,
If the painter, faced with a blank canvas, has to choose a compositional method, a color palette and the origin and intensity of his light, the filmmaker, when selecting his frames, decides angles, the movement of the actors, the texture of their costumes and, again, the expressiveness that the light will grant.
Both disciplines, painting and cinema, can be closely related since the emergence of the second in 1895 and perhaps especially in the first decades of its development: each shot could be read, in an exercise of prolongation, as a painting that contributes to the two dimensions of the canvases, that of time (and movement), music and voice.
From that starting point, the Canal Foundation presents the exhibition “Expressionism. An art of cinema” which, through works in various techniques linked to expressionism (paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures) and stills and film fragments, reviews the deep relationship between that avant-garde and cinema, with the collaboration of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation and the Tübingen Cultural Exchange Institute.
Inevitably the context of this exhibition is the German context of the first decades of the last century: neither Cubism, nor Fauvism or Futurism found fertile ground in that country, but an expressionism of hard forms, anchored in the tradition of its engravings, which in addition to rejecting the objective representation of reality chose to delve into the subjectivity of the individual, in an evidently turbulent time. The groups The bridge and The blue rider They emerged in the decade before the start of World War I, a time of accelerated industrialization and political and social tensions that would be reflected in paintings, graphic works (or films) that criticize bourgeois conventions or point to urban alienation.
The emotions to which they fundamentally attended were the most instinctive and susceptible to twisting through thick and sinuous brushstrokes, strong tones, forced perspectives and deformed figures, which in addition to gaining weight as aesthetic resources alluded to the air of an era.
Dr. Caligari’s office of Wiene, which premiered in 1920 in German theaters, was the result of a decade and a half of plastic and literary, sensory and psychological paths, which enveloped the spectators in evidently unreal atmospheres… which, however, connected with an oppressive environment that they knew well. Its elongated shadows became an emblem of those that had been suffered and, as Siegfried Kracauer pointed out, of those that were to come.
The route of the Canal Foundation exhibition focuses on how at this time art and cinema dealt with common issues (marginality, dehumanization, trauma and neurosis, man as a machine and woman as a suffering being) from similar aesthetics: violent lighting contrasts and oblique sets, placed at the service of hallucination. These ways of seeing ended with the seizure of power by Nazism, the consideration of a good part of the expressionist creations as degenerate art and the establishment of the New Objectivity, but later its imprint would be felt in the informalists and abstract expressionists and, in the field of screens, in filmmakers such as Lynch, Burton or Guillermo del Toro.
Three axes between the thematic and the formal structure this exhibition (Rupture/Release, Shape/Deformation and Sleep/Trauma). The first section takes us to the context in which the German defeat in the Great War ends the Prussian monarchy and begins the Weimar Republic, with promising promises (universal suffrage, freedom of the press, political pluralism, recognition of social and labor rights) and a cruel end.
Berlin became a cosmopolitan center of effervescent cultural activity, but also the main scene of evident polarization. In times of mass migration to the cities, the expressionists praised an idealized countryside (Paula Modersohn-Becker, Arthur Segal, Emil Nolde) in the face of urban saturation (Otto Dix) and the filmmakers highlighted the frenzy of the large centers and the moral corruption to which they perhaps gave rise (Dr. Mabuse: The Great Gambler, From Morning to Midnight, Nerves, The Last and, above all, Metropolis). There is no aestheticization of the street in these works, but rather spirals and twisted constructions.
The visions of the most disadvantaged and the workers who carried out the hardest jobs by Käthe Kollwitz, Conrad Felixmüller, Erich Drechsler or Magnus Zeller dialogue with those films in which these employees are humiliated and almost buried alive.
Other views are directed at the circus and traveling fairs as spaces of counterculture and symbols of human fragility and new forms of precariousness; also of resistance against the conventions of the cities where they settled. Doctor Caligari’s office places us in a traveling fair and the engravings also take us to that environment Pierrot and Mask (1920) by Max Beckmann and young clown (1920) by Erich Heckel.
Another form of interest in the exotic will lead artists and filmmakers to the East, as a “natural” setting for especially exaggerated dances and gestures: we see it in films such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) or Sumurun, a night in Arabia (1920).
The second section of the exhibition is Shape/Deformationwhich highlights how in expressionist works of art and cinematography faces, city buildings and all types of contours are deformed to reflect internal crises. In the case of cities, also to indicate its devouring power of those who populated them.
The architectures become oppressive geometry and the human figures, mere stains. In Plaza de Castilla we will see distorted urban views by Walter Dexel, Erich Drechsler and Christian Rohlfs in relation to the broken Jewish ghetto of The Golem by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese.
These works are parallel – we must remember – to the emergence of psychoanalysis, which placed dreams, the unconscious and madness in the foreground of its studies, in the background accentuated by war; We will thus understand that the techniques of expressionist cinema are close to the mechanisms of dreams and that the actors embody, at the same time, bodies and symbols.
Speaking of physical deformation in cinema, it is essential to refer to Nosferatu, a symphony of horror (1922): Max Schreck, as Count Orlok, would be the most significant figure in vampire cinema, the nightmare made flesh: the body without a soul. Also in Dr. Caligari’s office and Dr. Mabuse: The Great Gambler The deformation is, above all, psychic and not only individual, but a symptom of shared evils.
The man-machine also arises as a result of the triumph of technology over natural human life; Rudolf Belling’s sculpture embodies this living automatism. Organic shapes (Man walking)from 1921, and of course Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, with his robot María, halfway between the organic and the mechanical. These creations came to reflect the fear of dehumanization.
Finally, Sleep/Trauma reviews that dreamlike dimension of German Expressionism and its cinema in the face of the impossibility of finding support in solid certainties in the time between the wars and the belief, underlined by psychoanalysis, that psychic life does not end in the rational.
It seemed to be related to Freud’s theories. Mysteries of a soul (1926), by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, based on the irrational fear of knives of one of its characters, but to a greater or lesser extent dozens of films of the time link psychic complexity and optical complexity.
The monster, physical or psychological (usually merged), became the axis of the representation of collective fears and of the connections of expressionism with death and with the conflict between good and evil. And the exhibition also explores the image of women in these works, distinguishing three models: fragile (innocent and unstable), fatal (emancipated, desiring and alone) and madonnas (caregivers and sufferers). They embody both refuge and threat (like the Weimar Republic itself).
“Expressionism. An art of cinema”
CANAL FOUNDATION
C/ Mateo Inurria, 2
Madrid
From October 8, 2025 to January 4, 2026
