Faces: Maps, masks, mirrors, masquerades in German Expressionist visual art, literature, and film

This study traces a shift in representations of the face from a premodernist physiognomic coded mapping of internal character traits to a variety of facial images in German Expressionism. The discussion first considers the code that Expressionist works challenged, and proposes a link between structural linguistics and Expressionism. Around the same time that early twentieth-century structural linguistics considered relational systems, Expressionist works also represented faces and their contexts in terms of relation. As a framework for exploring the new ways these works represent the expressive face in emotionally charged contexts, the dissertation proposes a model of Expressionist facial semiotics. Within this semiotic model, the study investigates the intensive literary and cinematic borrowing of strategies for facial representation from Expressionist visual arts. Representations of faces in selected Expressionist artworks from Die Bruke, Der Blaue Reiter and Oskar Kokoschka, narratives by Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, and Alfred Wolfenstein, and the films Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari and Metropolis suggest that they reconceptualize the face in similar ways.; By interrupting and disassembling the structural three-dimensionality of the face as a source of knowledge about a person's traits, Expressionist works reassembled the face as a more "legitimate" source of knowledge, the surface of the expressive face responding to a context. These faces no longer revealed internal qualities, but instead displayed transient emotions, not only those on the faces, but also the emotions that permeated represented or implied contextual environments. Faces in Expressionist works became expressive signifiers that exposed and reinforced emotional relationships to their contexts. The Expressionist reevaluation of the face persists throughout the twentieth century, apart from a regression to physiognomy during National Socialism.; Writers, artists, and filmmakers explored the alternative metaphors of faces as masks, mirrors, and masquerades, as cover-up of an undisclosed identity or underlying void (masks), reflection of an unconscious image of the self or an imagined integral self (mirrors), and deliberate production of an acknowledged alternative identity or gender (masquerades).