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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Directed by Robert Wiene, many consider Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to be “a horror film that surpasses all others.” It is certainly one of the earliest, most influential and celebrated German expressionist films. It was spooky enough to make it into a Rob Zombie video and has been noted among the origins of gothic horror in film.
Set in the German mountain village of Holstenwall, the film opens with a story related by Francis about his fiancée Jane his friend Alan, beginning when Francis and Alan met Dr. Caligari at a carnival. Caligari’s exhibit at this carnival, a prophetic somnambulist, Cesare, predicts Alan’s death. Caligari orders Ceasare to kill Jane but he is captivated by her beauty and cannot harm her. Instead, he abducts her.
As the prime suspect in Alan’s murder, Cesare flees the pursuing villagers, finally falling to his death. Caligari leaves a dummy in Cesare’s place and disappears as well. It is up to Francis to track Caligari down and we learn that Dr. Caligari may not have been a travelling magician afterall, for he works as the director of a mental asylum from which he hypnotized Cesare to commit murders.
With the help of one of Caligari’s colleagues, Francis learns that the doctor harbours an obsession with the life of a former Doctor Caligari that used a sleep-walking killer as part of his travelling act. Confronted with the death of his own Cesare, Caligari has an emotional and mental breakdown, during which he confesses his manic obsession and goes from running the asylum to imprisonment therein.
The film ends with a twist that suggests Francis’ story may have been his fancy. Cesare is alive and Caligari is Francis’ doctor, who after hearing about this delusion, suggests a cure. The script was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, who based the story on their recollections of a notorious Hamburg sex murder and an unsympathetic military psychiatrist. The unmasking of Caligari can therefore be read as anti-authoritarian, although there have been varied interpretations of this film.
In Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, we have one of the earliest examples of a "frame story" in film. In other words, Francis’ retelling of the story frames the main plot, it is a story within a story. Yet, framing the story this way posed its own controversy. The producer, Erich Pommer took a lot of interest in the film, and after missing his chance to have Fritz Lang direct it, gave directorial duties to Wiene. Originally the story made it obvious that Caligari and Cesare were responsible for multiple murders. However, Pommer insisted that the original ending was too macabre and wanted Wiene to make everything appear like a delusion. The filming took place between December 1919 and January 1920, with the premiere at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is a perfect example of German expressionism as it emerged in the 1920s, relying on mood and symbolism to compete with the flashy Hollywood films of the day. Each scene of the film has been very carefully constructed. The result: abundant praise from film critics and endless inspiration for future filmmakers and television series, including Alfred Hitchcock. Rob Zombie even went so far as to restage several scenes with himself in the role of Caligari for his 1998 video “Living Dead Girl,” which also made liberal use of the 1920s film era’s sepia, aqua, and violet tinting": The film itself has also been set to new music again and again. Notably, jazz musicians Mark Dresser and Denman Maroney released their score in 1994; Geoff Smith produced a new soundtrack on the hammered dulcimer in 2002; and the Peruvian rock group Kinder performed their 2006 soundtrack live at a screening in the film club district of Barranco.
Among all the artistic praise, Wiene and Caligari have also generated some serious academic debate. In 1947, journalist, sociologist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer interpreted the film as an allegory on social attitudes in Germany during the period before the Second World War. Kracauer suggests that Caligari represents a tyrannical figure, whose only alternative lies in the social chaos the fairground represents. Kracauer wrote during and immediately after the war and his work has been refuted by some contemporary scholars. Thomas Elsaesser, for one, describes the legacy of Kracauer's work as a "historical imaginary".
According to Elsaesser, the image of Weimar cinema is largely the product of two accounts that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, including Kracauer's, which reads films as products of a national collective unconscious, vulnerable in its “preoccupation with authority and a desire for submission that foreshadows the willingness of Germans to submit to real-life dictator Adolf Hitler.” Alternatively,. Elsaesser suggests, along with many of his contemporaries, that German filmmakers adopted expressionism in film to differentiate their product from the American films that were flooding the market.
“Over the years considerable attention has been devoted to the political, psychological and artistic importance to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but only recently has its perhaps most obvious importance - as horror film - been more fully appreciated. For whatever else it was, the film also represented the latest manifestation of German Romanticism with a pedigree stretching back to the novelist E.T.A. Hoffman, the folklorists Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the dramatist-poet Schiller. It is from these roots that the themes of death, tyranny, fate and disorder, and the subjects of haunted students, mad doctors, ghosts, mummies, vampires and somnambulists spring.” – Lenin Imports
To see some examples of Dr. Caligari today, here are The Red Hot Chili Peppers and their video "Otherside" from 1999 ...
