DAS KABINETT DES DR. CALIGARI, 1919 progenitor of expressionist cinema of Germany's Weimar Period, is a thematically dark, visually bizarre and engrossing silent film that echoes the modernist preoccupation with the passions and feelings of the individual.
It traces the story of a young student, Francis, who along with a companion is drawn into the sideshow tent of Dr. Caligari. Inside the tent, within Caligari's cabinet, lies Cesare, the somnambulist. Francis later suspects that Cesare, hypnotically controlled by Dr. Caligari, is responsible for the murder of his friend. The Cesare in a murderous trance fails to abduct Jane, the woman whom Francis loves.
Francis in his desperate search for the Caligari, the man pulling the strings of Cesare, inquires at an insane asylum, assuming he is a patient. Caligari, however, is the man who runs the asylum. In an attempt to expose the doctor's murderous deeds, Francis has Cesare's corpse brought to the asylum, only to incite a fit of madness from Caligari, who is restrained by his colleagues, becoming finally a mental patient in his own institution.
Though it might be sufficiently provocative to end the story here, Francis, narrating his story to another man, rises from his seat in the asylum and directs the man's attention Jane and Cesare, both mentally disturbed patients. It is revealed that Francis is, in fact, the real mental patient, and his dark tale, filmed with nightmarishly warped sets and moody contrasts of chiaroscuro, was merely a delusion.
Or perhaps not. As smartly dressed and benevolent as the good doctor treating Francis appears, he gazes into the camera with such a smug look of triumph that he invites paranoia. Do those eyes reveal the deranged mind of Caligari, a mind that has manipulated the minds of his patients and orchestrated the grandest delusion of all?
CALIGARI, with dramatic make-up, morbid themes, and haunting scenery that embodies the suffering mind of the narrator, broke new ground in cinema. As an expressionist work, CALIGARI suggested to later film makers the possibility of rendering the unnatural and subjective through the apparently objective medium of cinematic photography. Its exploration of brooding and morbid psychology laid the groundwork for "Nosferatu" (the first vampire film), and with its haunted atmosphere CALIGARI can be regarded as the eldest forefather of the Universal Horror movies of the 1930s.
While its conventions of design and story do recall the aesthetics of Tim Burton (viz., Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Nightmare Before Christmas), CALIGARI is a unique and special movie in its own right, deserving more than mere scholarly attention. It is, after all, more than a cultural artifact; it is a film with a good story, a story all the more impressive when you consider its place in time. In the wake of the unsettling losses and revelations of WWI, CALIGARI screams for answers, and history can only reply with nightmares, illusions of its own.
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