Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema

What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, subject and object lose their legitimacy as they start to bleed into one another. Prior to recording, your hosts agreed to focus on two pieces of writing: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets and a recent Internet post on eighties and nineties American films entitled "Neo-Expressionism: The Forgotten Studio Style." Though focused on a number of films, the conversation includes forays into the world of the visual arts, literature, and music.

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REFERENCES

comrade_yui, “neo-expressionism: the forgotten studio style”

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets

Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Weird Studies, Episode 161 on ‘From Hell’

Bram Stoker, Dracula

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art

Jean-Francois Millet, “Gleaners”

Kathe Kollwitz, “Need”

Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Arnold Schoneberg, Pierrot Lunaire

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1

Peter Yates (dir.), Krull

Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian

Weird Studies, Episode 136 on ‘The Evil Dead’

In Camera The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula

Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

Weird Studies, Episode 121 ‘Mandwagon’