Background
Paul Leni was born on 8 July 1885 in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany.
Paul Leni was born on 8 July 1885 in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany.
Educated at Berlin's Academy of Fine Arts.
Leni was a painter, a set designer, and an art director before and after he became a director: Das Panzergewolbe (14, Joe May); Die Geierwally (21, E. A. Dupont); Kinder der Finsternis (21, Dupont); Tragödie der Liebe (23, May); and Der Tänzer meiner Frau (25, Alexander Korda). While his contribution to Expressionism is based chiefly on his visual sense. Wax-works and The Cat and the Cananj are major items in the history of the horror film.
He had worked with both Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner in the theatre and he was art director on Hintertreppe—Lotte Eisner argues that the film might have profited if Leni had had greater control of the direction. Certainly, Wax-works is an advance, employing an overall pattern of design—in sets, grouping, and costume that is as effective an evocation of nightmare as Calipah. One of the three figures in that film was Ivan the Terrible (played by Conrad Yeidt), and its influence on Eisenstein is clear.
Leni was a theorist, and in 1924 he wrote of using sets to transcend photographic reality.
It is remarkable that so lucid and self-conscious a director should have moved so easily to Carl Laemmles Universal studios. But The Cal and the Cananj was a classic haunted house movie in which Leni's overall visual design seemed just as complete and in which he had acquired new narrative urgency. In The Man Who Laughs he was reunited with Conrad Yeidt, who played the man whose face has been set in a ghastlv permanent smile. The Last Warning was another skillful manufacture of fear in a semi-Gothic interior— this time a theatre where a murder was once committed. It reaffirmed Leni’s preference for the atmosphere of menace, rather than the actual manifestation of horror.
Quotations: “For my film Waxworks I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no ideas of reality. ... It is not extreme reality- that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event, which is more profound, effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes.”