Expressionist discourse of wax figures in the history of cinema

In this article, the author examines the influence of expressionism on the film industry in the period 1933-2005. Through the prism of the "donated" expressionist cinema art of the 1920s. stories about wax figures, one can detect the development of the cultural demands of society in the above period. The most significant conclusions of the study: a) after the masterpiece of Paul Leni in 1924, cinema art returns to what it tried to get away from - to “the stories of a mentally ill person, left alone with a hostile world trying to break him”; b) if earlier plots were built around "dolls", the mystery of which is in their visual identity to people, then over time the fantasy of scriptwriters and directors began to demand their more complete identification - this is reflected in the tendency to deepen the demonization of the plot in the "man-doll" paradigm. And if at first a doll was made from a dead person, then in the 2000s it was made from a living person, thereby increasing the tendency towards sadism and cruelty on the screen; c) in almost every film there are codes of expressionism: the antinomy of "us-them", "light-darkness", "chronotope of the loop", a farce (fair, brothel), the motive of all-consuming fire; d) in every decade, the aesthetics, the philosophy of expressionism and the realities contemporary to directors are mutually enriched. The trend towards mutual enrichment also occurs at the level of genres (the sum of expressionist techniques in cinema - and slasher).