Silent Film Evaluation

For this task, we chose to make a horror about two characters that each represent Innocence and Evil, showing the chase between the two until the innocent girls death, which was successfully displayed in our setting of a haunted house. The title ‘Mordhaus’ is German for ‘Murder House’, and we chose this to link to the theme of German Expressionism. We chose to have the Evil character portrayed purely through shadows, whereas the innocent girl was always clearly in shot. This made a clear distinction of opposition in our use of mise-en-scene and approved to very successfully show our narrative, but also relates to Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, from which our film was inspired.

During post-production we chose to make the piece black and white to show the internal conflict of light and dark emphasised by the chiaroscuro lighting, and is a key element of 1920’s German Expressionist silent films of the horror genre. The Evil character was shown predominantly creeping up on the Innocent character, and also their shadowed figure expanding to show their evil nature developing as they go through with the murder. This suggests that death slowly creeps up on us, and that evil nature can quickly dominate an individual. Our use of the music ‘Danse Macabre’ is played throughout and suggests that when the Innocent character is running away from the Evil, they are essentially portraying the ‘Dance of Death’. This is highlighted in long shots of her running and exaggerated movement, as dances often are - and is a key element of early German Expressionist Silent Cinema. If we had more time to edit the film, we would have improved it by altering the tone of selected clips to make them warmer or colder, contributing to the mise-en-scene of the narrative.

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Elise Booth Film Studies

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