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.
