World War I

AFTERMATH

With the 1920s came the jazz age, providing distractions from events that for many were far from resolved. In Germany the social and psychological trauma caused by the war inspired the Expressionist movement. Contemporary anxieties were played out in the distorted, fantastical settings of films such as Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , Robert Wiene, 1920) and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922). Although this style gave German films a distinctive national aesthetic, their imagery haunted other films, as in the labyrinthine sets of Universal's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and, as portrayed by the British star Ivor Novello (1893–1951) (also the composer of the patriotic war song "Keep the Homes Fires Burning"), the "horror-haunted" protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927).

More explicit touches of the war came in King Vidor's (1894–1982) landmark 1925 epic The Big Parade . One of the film's most haunting sequences shows a group of men slowly being picked off by German rifles as they march through a French forest. Instructing a drummer to create a metronomic beat, the men pace in a "ballet of death," an effect Vidor requested that cinema managers reproduce during screenings. Although acclaimed internationally for its visual virtuosity, some British critics attacked the apparent unilateralism of the film in excluding the British "Tommy"; however, its commercial success was unprecedented. Paramount's Wings (1927) also made a big impact on audiences, who were by captivated by its realism, enhanced by sound effects blasting from behind the screen and extensive use of Magnascope. Paramount's Magnascope projection process, which effectively tripled the size of the screen at key moments, was used for other war films, including Wings , Old Ironsides (1926), the British drama The Guns of Loos (1928) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The latter, Universal's adaptation of the best-selling 1929 German novel by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), was part of a wave of antiwar narratives that appeared beginning in the late 1920s, including two of Britain's most powerful and underrated films of the early sound period, Tell England (1931) and Journey's End (1930). A war veteran himself, James Whale (1889–1957) directed the latter, both the original stage play and the film based on it, establishing what has been claimed as the missing link between the war and Universal's horror pictures. Whale made Frankenstein a year later, with its bleak landscape and the seemingly shell-shocked gait of the monster, clearly influenced by the war.

Cinema emerged from the war a mass cultural phenomenon. The studio system was consolidated in Hollywood and strengthened its grasp on world markets, war conditions having precipitated the end of French cinema's dominance and the rise of German cinema. Although stars in each country had embedded themselves as home-front personalities, an exodus of talent streamed toward America, not least from France; the French comedian Max Linder (1883–1925) left for a $5,000 weekly salary in Hollywood. Chaplin, whose comic Shoulder Arms (1918), released shortly after the Armistice, was now earning cinema's first million-dollar salary, a sign of how times had changed. Whereas isolation had supported the independence of cinema in Sweden during the war, the loss of directors Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjöström (1879–1960) to Hollywood afterward contributed to a fall in fortunes for Svenska, the leading company. War narratives would resonate during the interwar years on both an implicit and explicit level in all forms of cultural production, particularly in the 1920s, when the images of the war continued to shape cultural memory.