7. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Germany 71m Silent BW (tinted)
Director: Robert Wiene
Producer: Rudolf Meinert, Erich Pommer
Screenplay: Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer
Photography: Willy Hameister
Music: Alfredo Antonini, Giuseppe Becce, Timothy Brock, Richard Marriott, Peter Schirmann
Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Rudolf Lettinger
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the keystone of a strain of bizarre, fantastical cinema that flourished in Germany in the 1920s and was linked, somewhat spuriously, with the Expressionist art movement. If much of the development of the movies in the medium’s first two decades was directed towards the Lumiere-style “window on the world”, with fictional or documentary stories presented in an emotionally stirring manner designed to make audiences forget they were watching a film, Caligari returns to the mode of Georges Melies by constantly presenting stylised, magical, theatrical effects that exaggerate or caricature reality. In this film, officials perch on ridiculously high stools, shadows are painted on walls and faces, jagged cutout shapes predominate in all the sets, exteriors are obviously painted, and unrealistic backdrops and performances are stylized to the point of hysteria.
Writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz conceived the film as taking place in its own out-of-joint world, and director Robert Wiene and set designers Hermann Warm, Walter Roehrig, and Walter Reimann put a twist on every scene and even intertitle to insist on this. Controversially, Fritz Lang-at an early stage attached as director-suggested that the radical style of Caligari would be too much for audiences to take without some “explanation”. Lang devised a frame story in which hero Francis (Friedrich Feher) recounts the story-of sinister mesmerist charlatan Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), his zombie-like somnambulist slave Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and a series of murders in the rickety small town of Holstenwall-and is finally revealed to be an asylum inmate who, in The Wizard of Oz style, has imagined a narrative that incorporates various people in his daily life. This undercuts the anti authoritarian tone of the film as Dr. Caligari, in the main story an asylum director who has become demented, is revealed to be a genuinely decent man out to help the hero. However, the asylum set in the frame story is exactly the same “unreal” one seen in the flashback, making the whole film and not just Francis’s bracketed story somehow unreliable. Indeed, by revealing its expressionist vision to be that of a madman, the film could even appeal to conservatives who deemed all modernist art as demented.
Wiene, less innovative than most of his collaborators, makes surprisingly little use of cinematic technique, with the exception of the flashback-within-a-flashback as Krauss is driven mad by superimposed instructions that “he must become Caligari”. The film relies entirely on theatrical devices, the camera fixed center stage as the sets are displayed and the actors (especially Veidt) providing any movement or impact. Lang’s input did serve to make the movie a strange species of amphibian: It plays as an art movie to the high-class crowds who appreciate its innovations, but it’s also a horror movie with a gimmick. With its sideshow ambience, hypnotic mad scientist villain, and leotard-clad, heroine-abducting monster, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a major early entry in the horror genre, introducing images, themes, characters, and expressions that became fundamental to the likes of Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein (both 1931).
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Information
Internet Movie Database (IMdb)
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RapidShare Links
http://rapidshare.com/files/27284450/TCoDC.part1.rar
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This article was written by Kim Newman and is included in the book “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” (Ed. S. J. Schneider)
Copyright © 2006 Quintet Publishing Ltd
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