このレッスンの実行方法

レッスン5は6つのセクションから構成されています。各セッションでは、以下の順番で授業を受けてください。

(1) ビデオレクチャー（動画）を見てください。(2) レクチャーのテキストを読んでください。(3) 動画（映画の抜粋）を見てください。各セクションで上記のステップ（1）から（3）を繰り返してください。

Part 1, Review for Lessons 1-4

In this class I am telling you the story of how Hollywood made its early classic Horror films. It is a story…and any interesting story is a bit complicated. For example, I began our class by looking at The Phantom of the Opera and Nosferatu. I did that because the first thing I wanted you to think about was how we human beings both do and do not want to see things that fill us with horror. Seeing those films helped us to understand our own psychology better, because there are certainly times when our curiosity gets the better of us as it did with Christine, and there are also certainly times when we cannot bare to look at something as we saw in the case of Hutter hiding under the bedsheets.

We learned that Lon Chaney was the actor who first made it possible for a “monster” to be the main character of a film. Chaney “made” his monsters through his brilliant and original make-ups. Today he is regarded as the father of such special effects make-up, but…

Chaney also gave performances that revealed what was beneath the ugliness of his monsters. In Quasimodo he created a monster who was ugly, but kind-hearted, a character with whom the audience could sympathize. Erik, on the other hand, was more complex. He was both ugly and evil, but Chaney helped us to understand why Erik was evil and even made us sympathize with him to some degree because Erik actually wanted to stop being evil. This was why he demanded Christine love him. He believed love would cure his evil

So, our story is about the Horror films, but it is also about the people who made them. The most important people in our story so far are the founder and owner of Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle, his brilliant young Head of Production, Irving Thalberg , the incredible “Man of a Thousand Faces”, Lon Chaney , and the good and brave film director Tod Browning . All four of these men made essential contributions to the creation of Horror films.

But what happened to Carl Laemmle and Universal studios? The departure of Lon Chaney from Universal studios after he finished Phantom of the Opera came as a major blow to the studio because Chaney was Universal’s biggest star and Laemmle was already hoping Chaney would star in Universal’s next big picture for which he had already chosen the story. Again, Laemmle intended to use the Thalberg formula, which had been so successful in the production of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera. Again he had bought the rights to a famous novel, The Man Who Laughs, by the very same author who had penned The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo. But without Chaney as the star Laemmle put the production on hold for a year while he considered how to replace Chaney. Laemmle made an interesting decision which would eventually change the entire way Universal would produce horror films.

Laemmle decided it was simply impossible to replace Lon Chaney and instead of trying to do so he changed the Thalberg formula. He would replace the genius of Lon Chaney, not with another actor, but would instead depend on the talent of a new director to make Universal’s next giant film a success. This would be a new approach for Universal Studios which had always been known for its stars, not its directors. Carl Laemmle decided to take this approach after seeing a German film entitled Waxworks (1924). Remember that Laemmle himself was a German immigrant and he had kept in touch with the film trends in his homeland. He became aware of a type of film the Germans were calling “Expressionist”. One of these films was Waxworks .The film impressed Laemmle enormously. He was especially impressed with the work of the director, Paul Leni. Waxworks consisted of three separate stories linked together by the fact that each story is about a wax figure of a famous character on display in a carnival where the hero of the story works. We will now see brief excerpts from each of the stories in order to understand why the film so impressed Carl Laemmle.

What we have just seen in this excerpt is the young hero escaping from the guards of the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al Rashid. Two things are immediately noticeable in this scene. The first is that the sets are absolutely nothing like the sets in The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Phantom of the Opera. The sets are completely unrealistic, bizarre and dreamlike. This is exactly was Expressionism was all about. The second thing you notice is that the scene takes place at night and is very dark. This is also characteristic of Expressionism. Now let us see the second excerpt from the story of the mad Tsar of Russia, Ivan The Terrible.

This excerpt is all about the acting. German Expressionism had a very distinctive acting style which put the emotions the actor was experiencing at the center of the performance. The great German actor, Conrad Veidt, plays Ivan in this scene and we know what Ivan feels every second he is on screen because Veidt reveals the whole range of emotions on his face and through his body language. We have seen Lon Chaney communicate using facial expression and body language, but the style of acting was quite different. Where Chaney could communicate a great deal with a small gesture or subtle facial expression, Veidt quite deliberately makes his gestures and expressions “too big, or too much”. That is Expressionism. Expressionist acting style is like Kabuki.

The third excerpt from Waxworks is all about camera work and editing. German Expressionist films used bizarre camera angels and strange shooting techniques to help create the atmosphere of the film. In this brief excerpt the two main characters, the young man and young woman, are chased by no less a monster than Jack the Ripper! What we see the director, Paul Leni, doing during the scene is to use a series of strange angles but even more especially double exposures (meaning that he films one image on top of another once or even twice) in order to create a bizarre and disturbing effect.

We are told that Cyrus West, the aging millionaire, is being kept a prisoner in his own house by his many illnesses represented by the medicine bottles that surround him. In this prison he is like a canary in a cage surrounded by cats (the relatives who are waiting for him to die). Leni isn’t just creating atmosphere with his double and triple exposure shots, he is creating metaphor. A simple definition of metaphor is “a thing representative or symbolic of something else”, (e.g. the Japanese flag with its red disc on a white field is a metaphor for the rising sun)

In addition to his double and triple exposure techniques, Leni also moves his camera through his haunted house with a “dollying” shot (meaning that he has placed his camera on wheels and is actually physically moving it through space as opposed to “zooming” which is changing the focal length of his lens). Leni’s dollying shot creates an interesting illusion.

It almost makes us feel that we are a ghost moving through the house (or that we are seeing what the ghost sees as he moves through the house). This is called a “Point of View” (POV) shot and this is one of the first examples of it that we see used in a horror film.

Speaking of “horror films”, let me conclude lesson five by explaining that while today we call The Cat and The Canary a “horror film”, at the time the film was made the actual term “horror film” had not yet been created. The Germans, called these films “Expressionist”, of course. Lon Chaney had referred to his Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera as “human tragedies”. In 1927 The Cat and The Canary was actually called a “mystery” when it was released in theaters. Nevertheless, we are gradually getting closer and closer and closer to the first film to ever be called a “horror film”. In the next few lessons we are going to track it down. The hunt, as they say, is on.