ABSTRACT
The German cinema of the early 1920s, sandwiched by fIlm historians between the pioneering effort of American directors Griffith, de Mille and Chaplin in the 1910-19 era and the Soviet cinema of the late 1920s (Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov), is invariably associated with 'Expressionism'.2 Not least to advertise the turn from plebeian amusement to high modernism, this label, borrowed from the German pre-First World War avant-garde movement in literature and the fine arts became the generic term for the cinema of the period as a whole.
