Kammerspielfilm is a type of German film

Cinema of Germany

Cinema in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema has made major technical and artistic contributions to film.Unlike any other national cinemas, which developed in the context of relatively continuous and stable political systems, Germany witnesses major changes to its...

 that offers an intimate, cinematic

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 portrait of lower middle class

Middle class

The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....

 life. Kammerspielfilme (the plural form) formed a German film movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 of the 1920s silent film

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 period that was developed around the same time as the more commonly known Expressionist movement in cinema. The Kammerspielfilm was known as the "chamber drama" as a result of the influence from the theatrical form of the chamber play

Chamber play

A chamber play is play of usually three acts which can be performed with a small cast and practically no sets or costumes in a small space. The form became popular in the early 20th century, with leading exponents being Max Reinhardt and August Strindberg., first it was adapted to cinema in 1920s,...

. It is characterised by its focus on character psychology and its lack of intricate set design. Also, unlike Expressionist films, Kammerspielfilme seldom used intertitles to narrate the story.

Prominent figures of the Kammerspielfilm movement include:

• F.W. Murnau
• Carl Mayer
  Carl Mayer
  Carl Mayer was an Austrian screenplay writer who wrote or co-wrote the screenplays to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , The Haunted Castle , Der Letzte Mann , Tartuffe , Sunrise and 4 Devils , the last five being films directed by F. W...
  
  
• Georg Wilhelm Pabst
  Georg Wilhelm Pabst
  -Biography:Pabst was born in Raudnitz, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary , the son of a railroad employee.Returning from the United States, he was in France when World War I began...
  
  

Sources

• Bordwell, David
  David Bordwell
  David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
  
  , and Kristin Thompson
  Kristin Thompson
  Kristin Thompson is an American film theorist and author whose research interests include the close formal analysis of films, the history of film styles, and "quality television", a genre akin to art film. She wrote two scholarly books in the 1980s which used an analytical technique called...
  
  . 1997. Film Art: An Introduction. 5th, international ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0071140737.
• Parkinson, David. 1995. History of Film. World of Art ser. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0500202777.