The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film)

• Release Date: 1920
• Director(s): Robert Wiene
• Writer(s): Hans Janowitz; Carl Mayer
• Principal Actors and Roles: Lil Dagover (Jane Olsen); Werner Krauss (Francis); Conrad Veidt (Cesare)

Released in 1920, the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari broke new ground in so many ways that is arguably one of the absolute must-see movies for any student of film. The classic movie is an important landmark in the development of film as an art form. The visual design and its close relationship to the plot are truly radical. The viewer is immediately jangled by the movie’s styling, which is filled with sharp angles and tilted landscapes, a hostile, otherworldly depiction of a small German town. The nightmarish sets are designed to reflect the psychological and emotional conditions of the main characters, and they are so unsettling that even more than ninety years later the movie is still a very effective horror film.

Uniquely for the time, the movie uses a frame story. A prologue and epilogue establish that the tale is told in flashback, but a twist in the end reveals the entire film to have been the delusion of an inmate/patient at an insane asylum. It was written by Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz as a reaction to World War I. The movie uses the relatively new medium of film to artistically attack authority and unquestioning obedience to it. The simple story of an insane traveling performer/hypnotist who uses a somnambulist, or sleepwalker, to commit murders creates the metaphor.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is typically described as a German Expressionist masterpiece. It pays visual homage to the Expressionist paintings that were produced in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. In Expressionism, the artist attempts to visually reflect psychological impulse in an effort to generate an emotional reaction in the viewer.

Plot

A prologue establishes the main narrative as a flashback. It opens with Francis sitting with an older man as a dazed-looking woman passes. Francis says the woman is Jane, his fiancée, and they have suffered a terrible experience. The rest of the story is a flashback of their ordeal, which occurs in a small, eerie town called Holstenwall.

Francis and his friend Alan visit the Holstenwall fair where Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist, Cesare, are performing. Cesare is released from a coffin-like box to answer questions. Alan asks, "How long will I live?" Cesare’s chilling answer is, "Until dawn!" That night Alan is stabbed to death by a shadowy figure.

Investigations follow, with Francis spying on Dr. Caligari and what appears to be Cesare while the real Cesare creeps into Jane’s room. He enters through a bizarre window shaped like a trapezoid and instead of stabbing her carries her off. Cesare dies after being pursued by a mob. Dr. Caligari manages to escape, but Francis follows him to a mental hospital. There Francis discovers that Caligari is the asylum’s director. Francis learns that Caligari is imitating an earlier mystic from Italy. As the police confront Caligari, he goes mad an ends up an inmate in his own asylum.

At this point the story returns to the present. However, there is a twist when the whole story is revealed to be a delusion. Francis is actually an asylum patient, as are Jane and Cesare. The man Francis calls Dr. Caligari is the hospital’s director.

Significance

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari contains at least five things that had never been done before in film, and in the process it launched the most durably profitable movie genre of them all.

First, its visual style was unlike any other movie of the time. The film features two-dimensional sets painted on canvas in fantastic, unpleasant styles. Trees and houses are like knives on hillsides. The nightmarish images are completely unlike the naturalistic style that dominates movies from the early days of cinema. Shafts of light and shadows are painted directly on the sets, and painted backdrops add to the unreal and horrifying tone of the story. Settings are distorted like the minds of the characters. Nothing like it had ever been done before.

The styling is not only startling and daring but crafted with artistic care. For example, the knife-like blades of grass are echoed in the sharp angles of the rays of light painted on a floor. In turn, these stylized shapes are replicated even in the eye makeup of Cesare when he is suddenly revealed. In addition to enhancing the emotional impact of the script and performances, the scenic design also pushes the audience off balance and sets viewers up for the shift of perspective at the end of the film, when the villain is revealed to be the actual doctor and the "hero" is exposed as the actual madman.

Second, it is the first film extension of the interwar art movement called German Expressionism. The design and themes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are, like most Expressionist art, out of synch, disturbed, distrustful, and adrift. The sense of angst that fills German Expressionism in the period between the world wars pervades the movie. Some critics have even linked the imagery of the movie to the rise of Hitler, not as a cause but as an expression of the psychological undercurrents in the German nation that led to his rise and ultimately to the Holocaust.

Third, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used what was called a Rahmenerzählung, or frame story. The prologue and epilogue both let the audience know that the story is flashback, which was unique in 1920. The movie established a new style of storytelling in film.

Fourth, critics at the time considered it the first actual work of art that was produced for film audiences. In this respect it can be argued that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari convinced the world that film is an art form.

Fifth, as film critic Roger Ebert has argued, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari may be considered the first true horror movie. No other genre is as reliably audience pleasing (and thus money making) as horror. Only film noir approaches the staying power of the horror genre.

Bibliography

Adkinson, R. V. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari": A Film by Robert Wiene, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz (English Translation and Description of Action). New York: F. Ungar, 1984. Print.

Barsam, Richard and Dave Morraham. Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.

Briggs, Joe Bob. Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History! New York: Universe, 2003. Print.

Hill, Steven Warren. Silver Scream: 40 Classic Horror Movies. London: Telos, 2008. Print.

Klepper, Robert K. and Frank Coghlan. Silent Films, 1877–1996: A Critical Guide to 646 Movies. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. Print.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. 1947. Princeton: Princeton U, 2004. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2006. Print.