Morning (1813) Karl Friedrich Schinkel

The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau

The link between these two pictures is The Haunted Screen, 1952 a film history book by Lotte H. Eisner, which I acquired over the weekend, and which holds that “it is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique [cinematography] merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.”

A revelation to me were Eisner’s reflections on cinematic effects in pre-cinema literature in such romantic novels as Lucinde, Flegeljahre and Heinrich Von Ofterdingen.