The 1920s: Films of the Deco Decade

Art deco, art nouveau, and the Viennese secession styles are all prevalent in the vibrant photography and set designs of many of the grandiose and decadent films of the 1920s. This unique combination of grand, sweeping visual gestures and, at times, delirious excesses embodies a dominate strain of the culture and, in some cases also reflects, the contradictions that were evident in both the cinema and the history of the period. This program presents four of the major films of the deco decade -- works that represent a distinctive sampling of the period's popular aesthetics and its own unique image.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden (England/Germany 1925) was a co-production between the British producer Michael Balcon and the German Erich Pommer who was one of the key figures in the development of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Hitchcock was an unknown quantity in 1925 since, prior to his direct­orial debut on The Pleasure Garden, he had worked primarily as an art director on Balcon's films. The film was made as an English production set in London and Africa and totally filmed in Pommer's studios in Munich. It was to be a challenging introduction to film making for the future "master of suspense."

The heavy German Expressionistic influence found in The Pleasure Garden is due not only to the location of the film's actual production, but also to Hitchcock's great fascination with the works of such directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Added to this was an unusual mix of set designs, ranging from the gaudy glitz of the theatre scenes to the pseudo-exotical of the English's notion of colonial Africa. The film's narrative of betrayal, madness, and miscegenation is, in part, indicative of the racial ideology that underlined British Imperial thinking. It also represents, however, a first-step in Hitchcock's recurring theme of marriage as a state of danger rather than bliss.

Hitchcock once stated that he learned how to make movies by watching repeated viewings of Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Germany 1922). This film, which was the first part of the epic-length production Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit, presented Lang's vision of a modern Germany collapsing under the weight of economic chaos, social instability, and extreme decadence. Against this backdrop, the half-mad master criminal Mabuse thrives through combined cunning and pure will as he murders and extorts his way to power. The obvious political implications of the story were developed further by Lang in his two sequels -- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1932) in which Mabuse directly prefigures the Third Reich, and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1961) in which the doctor's will power proves strong enough to transcend both death and the passage of time in order to attempt the creation of a new Germany in his own image.

Lang utilized a variety of stylistic designs in the film's photography in order to invoke the period. Sharp angles and distorted perspectives create a subtle sense of disorientation through out the film as Lang depicts a society increasingly dominated by Mabuse's paranoid megalomania.

Though he was critically considered to be one of the major filmmakers of the 1920s, Rex Ingram remains largely unknown by modern audiences. His most successful film of the period, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (USA 1921), has become mainly a footnote in movie history books, despite the fact that this production not only made Rudolph Valentino a star but also made it financially possible for M-G-M Studios to be formed. Yet the film still has a striking pictorial power that may come as a surprise for viewers unfamiliar with the expressive qualities of the silent cinema. In fact, many of the scenes in the film were based on oil paintings, especially the works of Maxfield Parrish. This, combined with Ingram1s almost obsessive quest for exotic details, gave his films a stylistic polish that helped to balance his unpredictable wavering between excessive profundity and sentimental superficiality.

Based on the popular novel of the period by Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was originally intended as an anti-war epic in which World War One is literally shown as fratricide. The film's noble aspirations, however, were presented within the context of a very American view of Europe, and upon its release, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was protested against by the English, French, and German governments. Even though it is now clearly dated, the film remains a fascinating and vivid document of its era.

If sentimentality was one of Ingram's flaws, the lack of it was worn as a virtual badge of honor by Erich von Stroheim. In his production of Foolish Wives (USA 1921), von Stroheim proceeded to scandalize the American film audience by presenting a caustic portrait of European cynicism and debauchery that would reconfirm his title as "the man you love to hate." While he was overtly flaunt­ing his self-created image of European corruption, von Stroheim was also attacking American naivete, xenophobia, and middle-class hypocrisy while simultaneously insulting the honor and privileges belonging to the alleged nobility. That an artist like von Stroheim was able to make Foolish Wives is a testament to both his skills and his special self-destructive nature.

Though at the time it was claimed to have been the first film ever to cost a million dollars, the actual production of Foolish Wives was not that expensive. Von Stroheim did, however, pursue his notion of realism to new extremes as he completely reproduced Monte Carlo as a full scale working model on Universal's back lots, including a completely operational casino. For von Stroheim, his sets had to be as authentic as possible since his artistry was based upon the massive accumulation of physical details. As with the naturalist writers of the late 19th century, von Stroheim was interested in presenting the realities of the world with all of its warts and blemishes carefully cataloged. It was in this manner, he felt, that something resembling truth could be reclaimed from the lies and illusions of society.