The first Expressionist sci-fi film.

What is Expressionism in film? Or even generally?

Is there such a thing as Expressionism in general? Each medium, and each topic, will exhibit different Expressionist tokens. Do these have something in common?

Here, the theme is power and our ability to distribute it usefully throughout our “living spaces” and its many machines, ready-to-hand.

[[_TODO: Add bits from Palmer Living Spaces]]

, mechanical and electrical, and our wonderful

ability to channel, manipulate, and transmit it long shiny speeding metal pistons and gears so that household appliances, and even surfaces (e.g., Jetsons conveyor sidewalks) contain intelligent power branchings beneath them. Beneath—the workers’ city is beneath. The generic universal power of Romanticism is occult and known directly only through intro-ception. But when it is in the world and tamed, it looks like the trains, plane, engines, and guns of Futurism.

So what does Expressionism mean in this context? It means first that familiar objects of perception are presented non-realistically, and that this non-realism has a discernible kind, where the kind is ideal and connotes a particular combination of fantasy and feeling. Futurism, for example, connotes the sharp, shiny, mechanical, and dynamic—something propelled by super-human engine or motor driven by some concentrated power such as steam, petrol, or electricity. It shows the plasticity of matter under the power of the Natural Energy that inspired (and motivated) German and later Romanticisms.

The very idea of bending matter to the will of emotion is modern, so even olde-timey referents turn to face the domain of ideality. In the case of Calgari, ***