Every Man Loves A Little Makeup

            Even though a black and white film does not show large contrasts in color, nor does it allow you to understand the full context of a conversation, the film does have the ability to over exaggerate facial expressions on characters faces.  Without the use of words, the makeup artists must be able to describe characters feelings through visual effects that make up for the lack of emotion through conversation.  This will then give us context to what the characters are feeling and what their overall demeanor is. 

            Taking a closer look at the main character’s father, Joh Fredersen, the attribute that stuck out the most to me were his eyes and eyebrows.  Normal eyebrows do not appear so low on a man’s forehead, but to accentuate how focused and stern Joh is, the make up artist darkened them most likely using a dark brown or black eye shadow to give them a furrowed look.  Also, to push his eyebrows even more forward and his eyes back, they darkened his eyes to look shadowed and very deep into his face.  As the movie continued to progress, Joh’s eyes grew farther and father away from his eyebrows, becoming more dark and sinister as it went along.  His emotions were clearly worn through his makeup even though his emotions were heard in his voice.  One was able to notice that he grew more worrisome about the lower city and about a possible uprising. 

            Another character that had large amounts of make up on was Rotwang the Inventor.  His makeup was not the only key factor in his emotions but his hair as well.  In order to give him a crazed, lonely, partially insane look, he was given messy, disheveled hair.  Apart from his wacko hair, his eyebrows, much like Joh’s, were extremely darkened and enhanced.  From scene to scene, his eyebrows change from furrowed for when he was in deep thought to very raised and highly accentuated for when he was excited.  The makeup artist created the eyebrows to be not only dark but also extremely pointed at the top and long to come all the way across the face.  Rotwang also had very accentuated eyes, his eyes were also dark and heavy, but they were describing a whole different emotion than Joh’s eyes.  His eyes had large amounts of eyeliner around them and dark rings beneath them to give the appearance of not craziness, but exhaustion.  Since he is a scientist, we can assume that he is constantly working and discovering different technologies for his robot causing him not to sleep or care about bodily functions, rather living for the robot.

            Much of the artist’s techniques may appear the same from character to character, but the reasoning’s behind why each one is done gives the audience hints at to what the character is feeling.  Eyebrows were a huge telling point to what the characters felt.  Since they did not have words, eyebrows can show much emotion by just lengthening them, shrinking them or making them thicker or skinnier.  One thing that was consistent through many characters was the size of their eyebrows.  The artists elongated each character’s eyebrows to over exaggerate all emotions coming from them.  If they kept them at a normal size and color, they may have been to light to show up on the black and white screen or too small to really notice any large emotion changes or expressions they have that are vital to the movie.  Overall, the makeup and hair became a large roll in this movie, helping dictate the mood of the movie as well as the mood of the characters.