Chamber feature film

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The chamber drama film is a subgenre of silent film in Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic and had its heyday between 1921 and 1925. It was finished by psychological shaping of characters and situations in realistic and naturalistic manner contrary to expressionist film .

Max Reinhardt introduced the concept of chamber play as a generic term for the psychologically precise, intimate dramas by Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg in the German cultural world. The film took over the basic intention of the chamber play to depict the inner workings of the characters, their feelings and passions; Siegfried Kracauer therefore spoke of the drive film . Chamber feature films are often set in a petty-bourgeois milieu; the protagonists often do not have proper names in order to present them as universal mediators of the problems of their class. In contrast to the pathos of Expressionist film, the actors do without exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, their play is reserved and naturalistic. The directors of the chamber feature film therefore often work with close-up and half-close shots .

The realistically depicted elements of the tangible world become symbols of psychological situations, for example the revolving door of the hotel in Murnau's The Last Man (1924) as a symbol for the destruction of the porter's life, which was believed to be safe. The use of subtitles is greatly reduced in the chamber feature films or they are completely dispensed with, as in Lupu Picks Sylvester (1923). Instead of conveying information, they only serve as a dramaturgical means to set psychological accents, such as the railroad guard's self-accusation "I am a murderer" , the only subtitle in Shards (1921).

Lupu Pick's shards is considered to be the beginning of the chamber drama film. Like most books for chamber feature films, the script was written by Carl Mayer . In his scripts, Mayer already gave precise instructions for changing settings , camera movements and lighting situations. In films such as Shards and Back Stairs (1921), the camera changes from a static observer to a mobile chronicler of the protagonists' sensitivities, culminating in Karl Freund 's Unleashed Camera in Murnau's The Last Man .

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