This is very similar to my view. 'Realistic' is, besides cultural, also historical. Just as verisimilitude is an effect in which the contemporary audience find the 'natural' attitudes and the action and gestures of the actors blend seamlessly into their own immersion precisely because of the contemporaneity of those attitudes, gestures and actions in wider society, watching a once-realistic movie from another era calls attention to the irreality of the acting. People talk and walk differently in older films; the acting is more visible from today's standpoint. In another thread I argued that the apparently 'amateur dramatics' of the woodsmen is how beings from another place might well appear to our contemporary sensibilities regarding gesture and movement. Just as actors with conditions of dwarfism or giantism can be used in an expressionist way to embody beings who feel to be too far away or close up in terms of perspective, receding from view or feeling too proximate, so too can actors with unusual gaits, gestures and motility be used as an expressionistic, distancing device.Wonderful & Strange wrote:This whole season has had an intentional b-movie vibe, which we saw most clearly in Part 8, but Part 11 also was full of b-horror references. The woodsmen are meant to be campy like a Bela Lugosi film.ScarFace32 wrote:That's why I don't like the woodsmen. I honestly think it's cause they are extras either overcompensating or with little experience or somethingDeepBlueSeed wrote:
This is all part Lynch's expressionist aesthetic, where he not only pays homage to early German expressionism and its descendants, but also part of his avant garde critique of traditional realist representation. The average viewer just assumes that everything is naturally supposed to be represented a certain way, and he subverts that with a variety of other representational strategies.
The avant garde in general values the look of b-cinema exactly because it does humorously subvert "realistic" (according to a certain culture's perceptions of real) representation.
I would also agree that German Expressionism never set out to create a cosy familiarity and continuity with the fantasies of the audience about their everyday realities, but rather to show how the world looks when viewed from an estranged or alienated subject position.