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The filmmakers of the German UFA studio developed a method of compensating for the lack of high budgets, by using symbolism, artistic imagery and mise-en-scene to insert mood and deeper meaning into a movie. Filmmakers in general worked more closely with established painters, musicians, and playwrights than the Americans did because the new medium appealed to the avant-garde movement that was then establishing itself.
The result was one of the major efflorescence of talent in cinema history: German Expressionism. .
Writer Carl Mayer, designer/painter Hermann Warm, Walter Roehrig, and Walter Reimann played significant roles in the movement, as did Directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, 1919), Fritz Lang (Dr.Mabuse, 1922; Metropolis, 1927), Murnau (Nosferatu, 1922; The Last Laugh, 1924), and Paul Leni (Waxworks, 1924, and in Hollywood The Cat and The Canary, 1927) .
The dada movement (a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design) was sweeping across the artistic world in the early .
1920s, and the various European cultures of the time had embraced an ethic of change, and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. .
The first Expressionist films, notably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Golem (1920), and Nosferatu(1922) were highly symbolic and deliberately surrealistic portrayals of filmed stories.
They made up for lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. .
The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films); the German name for this type of storytelling was called Kammerspielfilm.
