German cinema
Cinema of Germany When the movie industry first flowered in the period from 1900 to 1915, it took hold in Europe as well as America. ... The story of German cinema in particular began in the period following World War I, as Germany slowly recovered from the horrors of war. Movies were a popular escape into fantasy for many people, and the film industry boomed, but German filmmakers could not afford to create high-budget films. The need for low budgets, combined with a desire to move forward and embrace the future that swept most of Europe at the time, led to the rise of German expressionist films: movies that relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than stark realism to tell their stories. ... During the period of recovery following World War I, the German film industry was booming, but because of the hard economic times filmmakers found it difficult to create movies that could compare with the lush, extravagant features coming from Hollywood. The Universum Film Archiv (UFA, or Universe Film Archive) was the major commercial German film studio in the early part of the 20th century until the end of the second World War. ... The filmmakers of the German UFA studio developed a method of compensating for the lack of high budgets, by using symbolism and mise-en-scène to insert mood and deeper meaning into a movieIn film theory, Mise-en-scène [mizA~sEn] is one of the currently-dominant theories of conveying information in the cinema. ... It painted a picture on the cinema screen with wild, non-realistic sets built with overexagerrated geometry, images painted on the floors and walls to represent objects (and often light and shadow), and a story involving the dark hallucinations of an insane man. ... German authorities demanded that a prelude and a coda be added to the film so as not to hint that the police might not be upstanding citizens. ... The Expressionist movement died down during the mid-1920s, but it continued to influence cinema for years after. ... (better known as UFA) was founded by the German government before the end of World War I to produce pro-war films, though after the war ended it grew to prominence with the success of German cinema in the 1920s. ... Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick and first released on January 29, 1964, the German mad scientist Dr. Strangelove (translated from German:Merkwürdigliebe) also lacks his right hand and has replaced it with a prosthesis, which is black in color. ... The rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s sparked an abrupt change in German cinema. Several prominent German directors emigrated (or fled) to America, bringing their substantial talents to bear in Hollywood and having a substantial influence in American film as a result. The Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s were directed by German emigree filmmakers, including Tod Browning and Karl Freund, while famed director Michael Curtiz came from Germany to become a top Warner Bros. ... The flight of many talented German filmmakers, combined with a new era of censorship and control over the German film industry, has made German cinema of the Nazi era infamous for its contributions to the field of propaganda.