In the 1920s, German Expressionist films used every part of the mise-en-scene, from the set to the make-up to the lighting, to create a mood that gave the audience a small peek through the eyes of the characters. In the past year, many foreign films have channeled those same flavors of expressionism to convey the effect that weighty subject matters have on the individual.

The internal world of a character is difficult to express with a photographic medium like film. Most directors rely on voice-over or the implications of a facial expression to convey what a character is feeling. But recent films like Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly use techniques founded in German Expressionism to make the external mirror the internal.

According to the Random House Dictionary, expressionism is “characterized chiefly by heavy, often black lines that define forms, sharply contrasting often vivid colors, and subjective or symbolic treatment of thematic material.”

The sets of the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were not created with the intention of reflecting reality. Instead, the filmmakers used stark, hand-painted canvases stretched behind the actors. German Expressionism is associated with the crisis of faith during World War I, created by the cleft between culture and society. While German civilians created beautiful works of art, the German government inflicted atrocities on its own people. It is no accident that German Expressionist films were mostly horror films. The genre perfectly symbolized a reality so horrible that it seemed anything but.

“When the German directors and cameramen fled Hitler and immigrated to the Hollywood during World War II, they brought the Expressionistic filmmaking techniques they developed with him,” said Eric Red, writer/director of horror films such as The Hitcher and Body Parts.  “They applied the black-and-white, light and shadow, extreme subjective angle visual vocabulary to [their] films.”

Persepolis is an animated French film released in 2007 and based on an autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, who grew up in revolutionary Iran during the 1980s. Throughout the narrative of Marjane’s memories, the background art slips seamlessly from reality to abstract emotional expression.

At times, the splotchy environments and gnarled trees look like the set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, giving a nightmarish feel to the war-torn country. When people die, the harsh animation lets the bodies fall like drops of water. But the most visually powerful moment is the first time Marjane sees a dead man. She stares at his mutilated hand, her face distorted in an imitation of another expressionist artwork: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.

Before he was an award-winning director of films like Before Night Falls and Basquiat, Julian Schnabel was a neo-expressionist painter. In an interview with AP writer Jake Coyle, Schnabel said, “Art is a utilitarian thing, not a decorative thing.”

His Oscar-nominated film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, also released in 2007, uses art to give a voice to a man with “locked-in syndrome,” a condition in which almost every part of a person’s body is paralyzed while their mind remains intact. In Jean-Dominique Bauby’s case, he can only blink one eye. But in the film, the audience can hear his thoughts and see from his eyes, making the beautiful tragedy of Jean-Do even more heartrending because we experience it with him.

Waltz with Bashir, currently in theaters (May DVD release date), uses new technologies like Flash in the same way that artists painted the sets of Caligari to express something beyond sensory reality and into the realm of gut responses and knee-jerk reactions. Like Persepolis, the film blends memory and surreal images in its animation to show the horrors of war, in this case the Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s.

“My inspirations didn’t come from comics or graphic novels, but from different sources, like German Expressionism,” said director David Polonsky, in an interview with The Times. “But no matter what you’re drawing, and how much fun it is, everything has to come back to the central issue of the massacre and the very real atrocities of war.”

Although German Expressionism was a moment in time, expressionism as an artistic style never died. Where The Cabinet of Caligari used painting, Persepolis uses graphic art, Waltz with Bashir uses Flash, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly uses camera work and voice-over. In their cases, film images are more than shadows on a screen; they are a light into the human mind.

“German Expressionistic influences have never really gone out of style in moviemaking,” said Red. “They’ve just been absorbed.”