Weimar Cinema: Images Before Fascism, taught by Matthew Ellis (Portland State University)
4 weeks, Tuesday evenings November 11-December 9th, 2025
Expressionistic light and shadow, half-mad protagonists, and machine women, caught between the ruins of rubble and towering, futuristic skyscrapers blotting out the sun as if to warn of the coming catastrophe. Few images have had a more powerful hold on our historical memory of Europe and its cinema before the Second World War. By the end of the Cold War, film scholars in newly established academic disciplines had come to regard the cinema of the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933) as a key site for the study of modernity and its contradictions. Films like Robert Wiene’s
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927) came to be seen as indexes of a society in profound economic, political, and technological transformation, all under the shadow of a brewing fascism that would come to threaten the world by the end of the 1930s.
Analogies to the Weimar Republic are everywhere these days, some more helpful than others. But they nevertheless signal for us a feeling that our own societies might be entering a similar period of crisis and transformation as the one that shook European society at its core in the years preceding the Second World War. How useful are these analogies in the postmodern, globalized digital world of 2025? Might they be little more than hazy recollections of the plot of film called History? Or can they offer us different lessons for how we remember the past, both on and off screen, and place ourselves in relation to it? This class returns to the cinema of Weimar Germany to ask a different set of questions: What did Weimar Cinema mean before the shadow of Hitler and Nazism cast it in shadow? Can we only take from this period doom and despair, or might we remember the radical possibilities that came from living through a society suddenly freed from the mantle of imperial rule? Are there films outside the usual
Metropolises and
Caligaris that can show us a different side of Weimar society? What lessons do the screens of Weimar have for our own decentralized streaming platforms and post-cinematic experimentation?
Course Structure:
We meet on Tuesday evenings over Zoom from 8-9:30 PM EDT for four weeks from
November 11 through December 9th (skipping Nov 25th). Each meeting will have optional readings and screenings available through the course’s splash page on journeywebdesigns.com, and will open with a prepared lecture and close with a period of open and moderated discussion.
Your one-time course fee of $100 gives you:
1. Access to the course’s live Zoom meetings and recordings (hosted on the cinejourneys platform).
2. Access to streaming films and selected readings for course materials.
3. A Weimar Cinema course packet prepared by yours truly, including a reading and screening list covering the period and ideas in question for further study.
4. An individual one-on-one meeting with me to develop ideas for your own interests or work.
Taught by Matthew Ellis (Portland State University)
Matthew Ellis (PhD, Brown University, 2021, Modern Culture and Media) is a writer, researcher, and artist based out of Portland, Oregon. Currently, he teaches film and media studies at Portland State University, and co-hosts the weekly cinema series,
The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast. You can follow his work at his newsletter,
Histories of the Present.
REGISTER BELOW
