The doors that turn: a discursive study about the degradation of the body in The last laugh

The German expressionism in cinema flourished as a cycle of films that had as one of its goals to reveal the conflicting and psychological experience of characters involved in social dictates with a profusion of elements that propagated the chaotic tone of their unconscious. One of the recurring themes of that film was social degradation, both physical and moral. The Expressionist film discourse is constructed, in some cases, based on figurativization of bodies close to human collapse and ruin, which further emphasizes this degradation that runs throughout the plot. From the perspective of French semiotics, emphasizing the discursive theory that deals with the themes and figures of discourses, and without forgetting the recurrent work of figurative isotopies, we intend to observe closely how such a recurring theme was engendered in the structure of one the most outstanding films of the German Expressionist cinema, The Last Laugh (1924), by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Expressionism; Cinema; Body; Discourse; Isotopy