German Expressionism

German Expressionism was developed in Germany during the 1920s. This filmmaking style focus on expressing the internal feeling of actors through the setting. Forexample, a disorganized apartment being used to reflect the disorganization in a character's thought. By using this technique, German filmmakers try to make a new approach to the movie which help to add mood and deeper feeling.

Some famous Expressionist films are The Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920) and Nosferatu (1922).

Nosferatu

The plot of Expressionism films mainly about intellectual topics such as madness, insanity. So, they have a different kind of viewers compared with traditional Hollywood films (with contents about love, action or Chinese kungfu) created for only entertaining purposes.

Expressionism then became an inspiration for other genres especially the film noir in 1940s-1950s. This genre often uses harsh light which creates a highly contrast between light and darkness, black and white. This use of light also appears in some horror movies later such as Alfred Hitchcock films.

The Big Combo(1955), a notable example of film noir

A scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Expressionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%281960_film%29

Military Art

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier - Relief after the battle.

Military art is a kind of art which use battles as its main topic. These kind of pictures often express the courage of solidiers on the battle fields and the fierceness of war. Artists of this genre (known as war artists or combat artists) capture real battles in an artistic manner and use them as their inspiration for their work. I will show about some information about a notable war artist - Edward Bawden.

Edward Bawden

He was a British painter which served as an official war artist in Britain during WWII.

View from the enemy H.Q, 1941
His pictures were mostly painted by water color. From the above picture, we can see that Edward Bawden mainly focus on the landscape. He tried to capture the whole battle field in his paintings. With the usage of dark colour tone, he created a gloomy atmosphere in his paintings and I think it is the way he used to express the sadness of war.

Sébastien Chervel's website

I've just found this website on the Internet. It is belong to the guy named Sébastien Chervel who is a programmer and designer for interactive media. He has created a lot of interactive Flash movies and Japa applets to create online and offline experiences.

http://www.seb.cc/graffiti/index.html
This above picture is a Java applet of him. He created it based on the idea of collage. This application allows users to freely draw a collage based on 3 given pictures.

http://www.seb.cc/particles/index.html

This one simulate the attraction and repulsion forces between particles.

http://www.seb.cc/chaos/index.html

This one is called Chaotic Patterns. It have 8 defined patterns which are constructed based on 8 rules. The purpose of this application is to create the 9th patterns from the combination of the 8 previous ones.

Reference:
Sebastien Chervel's website, http://www.seb.cc/