Enormously influential product of the post-WWI Expressionist movement in Germany: an asylum inmate tells a bizarre tale about a charlatan who preys on unsuspecting villages with a murderous “somnambulist” he keeps locked in a coffin.

Time has not dulled the edge on this early cinematic experiment in portraying subjective states of mind, the vanguard work of film Expressionism, which became one of the most influential visual styles of the medium in the 20^th century. Made in the cultural vacuum of Weimar Germany, which had declared a moratorium on film product from outside its borders, Caligari’s makers had very little money and they knew virtually nothing of American developments in film editing that were taking place at the time, and so the film may look static to modern eyes. But they knew plenty about production design and they used their skills in perspective and composition (a.k.a. mise-en-scene) to fashion a striking journey into madness, making a claustrophobic world of twisted settings and chiaroscuro slashes of light and shadow, where human perception itself is called into question and made nonsense. The tendency of filmmakers, and audiences, the world over has always been to take the inherent realism of the photographic image for granted, but director Weine and his crew understood the absolute illusion of all motion pictures and exploited it beautifully. More than eighty years later, Caligari retains the power to undercut our basic assumptions about what a movie can and/or should be, the grandfather of psychological horror films.

Originally a scathing critique of the authoritarian impulse, Weine hastily attached the framing story about an insane asylum, largely to “explain” the incredible visual style he had chosen, and in the process, totally subverting the intentions of his source material. Like many a filmmaker before and after him, Weine showed a callous disregard for his literary collaborators. But his movie became more important to film history than it ever would have as a straight thriller with polemical undertones. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an international box-office hit for the German film industry, the dynamic beginning of an artistic wave that influenced such diverse greats as Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Most of the unsettling look and attitudes of film noir can be traced to Expressionism, and much of Expressionism had its cinematic beginnings in Caligari.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari; 1919, German)

directed by Robert Weine; screenplay by Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz; director of photography, Willy Hameister

with: Werner Krauss (Dr. Caligari), Conrad Veidt (Cesare), Lil Dagover (Jane)

1 hr., 9 m.; studio

NOTES:

Caligari is a great general introduction to the art of silent films, a medium that flourished without sound for two decades, both as a purely visual language and as big business. Many elements of present day moviegoing that we take for granted — the star system, the blockbuster hit, sex and violence as promotional tools, even the town of Hollywood as the locus of production — all developed rapidly during the early silent era.

BOOK: The Haunted Screen by Lotte Eisner (1974, University of California Press) is a seminal work in film studies about the cultural forces at work in German Expressionism.

Cf: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), M (1930), and others; Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Sunrise (1927).

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