A surreal installation design by Amy Murphy and Michael Maltzan makes an exhibition of 1920s German cinema at LACMA come wonderfully alive. (Museum Associates / LACMA)

Movies can be great. Art can be great. But put them together in a museum exhibition, and the combination can be not-so-great. In fact, it can be downright tedious: acres of wall space jammed with photos and film posters, all punctuated by dim projection rooms displaying bits of film. Enter the screening areas and you often find yourself groping around in pitch darkness. Leave them, and you're blinded by the glare of museum lighting.

The LACMA show explores German Expressionist cinema through four themes. One of them - madness and magic - included footage, photography and concept design sketches from 1920 film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" on a sloping wall. (Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

A new exhibition of early 20th-century cinema at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), however, rethinks that equation. Certainly, "Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s" features all the standard-issue bits: photography, concept sketches and film clips from some of the most iconic films ever made, from early horror movies like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" to the industrial sci-fi of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis."

But it does so in a meticulously designed architectural installation that evokes the feeling of entering the gritty, surreal universe of the German Expressionist movies, complete with sloping walls, jagged forms and geometric cone structures that descend from the ceiling.....Continue Reading

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