Date Seen: 7/5/17
Score: 5/5
DIRECTOR: Robert Wiene
PRODUCERS: Rudolph Meinert & Erich Pommer
STUDIO: Decla-Bioscop
SCREENPLAY: Hans Janowitz & Carl Mayer
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Willy Hameister
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| Conrad Veidt |
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| Friedrich Feher |
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| Werner Krauss |
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| Hans Heinrich von Twardowski |
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| Lili Dagover |
The film is perhaps best known for its unique, groundbreaking visual style, an absurdist distortion of reality that makes the viewer feel as though she is watching a nightmare. The obvious backdrops, painted with sharp lines and deep shadows, are simply the most obvious example of the film's rejection of realism, and attempt to delve as deeply into the heart of surrealist Expressionism as possible. In 1950, prior to the takeoff of film theory and a time in which the cinema was not regularly understood as a form of high art, Jerome Ashmore wrote that The Cabinet of Caligari "has characteristics usually associated with only the most orthodox fine art. It imitates a dramatic action, it affords a satisfaction of a desire through the imagination and it reveals profound principles of eternal truth. It does all these in the manner of a typical artistic expression." Ashmore is, in his essay, making one of the first attempts to interpret film as high art- by analyzing how this particular European silent film was able to critique society and psychology in a purely visual way, and through a method of contemporary art that sought to reject the notions of social harmony and uproot the injustices of authority.
Again likening it to high art, Ashmore writes of the film, "As a piece of art increases in greatness, its symbolic meanings increase in number... In symbolic meaning The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari rises to a high rank. One person could not provide an account that would exhaust the symbolic meanings of this film." In my opinion, Caligari's success as a psychological minefield is only part of its fascinating charm; the other enticing factor is that it's genuinely creepy. I like to think that part of the reason why I find the film so scary is because it triggers something in my subconscious about society and makes me understand more clearly my own existential dread. Yet I'm more convinced that I find The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so terrifying because- well- look at it. It's creepy! You've got men with questionable ethics and intentions wearing scary makeup and costumes and attacking people! The main settings of the film are 1). a spooky old village, 2). a traveling circus, 3). an insane asylum, and 4). the woods. What could be more sketchy and/or likely to be featured in an episode of Scooby Doo? Surely this sort of visually terrifying distortion of reality expressed through the mise-en-scène is a key aspect of an expressionist work.
I guess it's worth getting into some sort of discussion of the film's deeper meanings, beyond its superficial scariness. To reaffirm what our pal Ashmore says, it's basically impossible and pointless to get into every possible meaning of the film, because it's very complex and full of possibilities. To me, that vagueness in interpretation is another expressionist quality. Personally, I favor a loose Freudian reading of the film, as well as a contextualization that puts it in its place in history and thereby shows its sociopolitical meaning in terms of the reality it was produced in.
Since Siegfried Kracauer's landmark 1947 study of cinema during the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler, scholars have found a hobby in reading the film as a social allegory, both as an expression of hostile anxiety following World War I and as an uncanny anticipation of the rise of the Third Reich. Without doing any previous research I found it very easy to make this connection; beyond the simple themes of blind obedience and being at the will of your subconscious, there is a more explicit scene in which Cesare the somnambulist walks rigidly with his arm outstretched in a heil salute. Though the action was obviously not a reference to Hitler, who at that time was still a little more than a decade away from power, it's nearly impossible to watch this shot and not connect the sleepwalker's total loyalty to his master as eerily reminiscent of what was still to come. This "expression of cultural anxiety" plays a key role in defining the Expressionist movement and its goals.
In a broader context, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari belongs to the group of stories telling of master manipulators, spanning back to ancient times. There is the evil puppet master, the Pied Piper, the enchantress with her spells- and there is Caligari, or at least the malicious man who exists as Caligari during the inner narrative frame of the film. As the ending reveals the film as having had an unreliable narrator throughout the story, the viewer must suddenly come to the conclusion that, like the doctor was obsessed with becoming the Caligari of lore, the narrator Francis was obsessed with convincing himself of his own delusion. That is, of course, if we are to believe what we see. One of the most frightening aspects of the film is the viewer's loss of control when it comes to the chain of events- she feels as though she has power over her understanding throughout the movie, until the very end, at which she is thrown off balance and left troublingly unresolved.
Julia Walker's thoroughly-researched, excellent essay "In the Grip of an Obsession: Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," describes the Freudian undertones of the film and discusses the influence of Enlightenment-era philosophy on the film. In one of her key points, she asserts that the film may be given "a Freudian reading wherein the split self of the conscious subject and its unconscious may be seen in the relationship between Caligari and Cesare as well as that between Francis and Caligari/Cesare." She quotes Dietrich Scheunemann:
"Dr. Caligari is a Doppelgänger, an offspring of a gothic tale, a late descendant of those split personalities of nineteenth-century Romantic literature who are haunted by their shadows and alter egos, form dangerous alliances with magic forces, create artificial beings who eventually escape their control, and usually end in self-destruction."
In its use of the Freudian doppelgänger in particular, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari set the precedent for hundreds of important psychological films after it, particularly the kind of explicit relationships between manipulator and controlled in the films of Hitchcock. Like Strangers on a Train (1951), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari depicts an evil force controlling a pawn whose services are to act out the dark fantasies and desires of the manipulator- the id controlling the ego.
In its exploration of the dark acts committed by humans on behalf of their unconscious desires, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari once again defines a key ingredient of an Expressionist work.
As mentioned before and before that, there are far too many possible interpretations of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to discuss here. I find this film absolutely fascinating and dazzling- as a horror film, as a social allegory, and as not only a work of Expressionism, but as a key definer of what an Expressionist work stands for. This is a film that raises many questions- questions about human nature, loss of control, paranoia, anguish, authority, psychology, psychoanalysis, blind obedience, fantasy, duplicity, the power of dreams, and absurdism. Surely, if not for any other reason, it is these features that make it such a powerful film to watch, even 97 years after its release.
Sources Used:
"'In the Grip of an Obsession': Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" by Julia A. Walker, published in Theatre Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec., 2006)
"Expressionism and Cinema: Reflections on a Phantasmagoria of Film History" by Sabine Hake, from the book A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 2005.
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as Fine Art" by Jerome Ashmore, published in College Art Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer, 1950)
Film Theory for Beginners by Richard Osborne (2014)
All photos and Gifs sourced from FilmGrab.com, Giphy.com, Pinterest, and Google Images.
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