The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Directed by: Robert Wiene
Written by: Hans Janowit, Carl Mayer
Starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover
It being the spooky season, I decided to pick up The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the classic German Expressionist horror film from the 1920s. (I’d studied German Expressionism a little bit in college, especially the work of Georg Kaiser.) It’s pretty much a must-watch for serious students of film history. For the more casual viewer, you have to ask yourself: How much are you willing to put up with a slow, creaky silent 1920s German melodrama to get to the weird stuff, and how much do you like strange sets?
Because the story of a carnival mesmerist whose casket-dwelling sideshow attraction seems to commit murders between shows just isn’t that interesting until the Usual Suspects-esque conceptual twist at the end. But those sets! Every single set in the main story is filled with distorted lines meeting at weird angles.
Here’s a couple of examples:
If you want to spend some 70 odd minutes looking at those sets (dozens of them, all weird and twisted; if many living in CaligariWorld weren’t already mad, trying to sit on those conical chairs would certainly drive you around the bend in short order), you’ll have a grand old time. If not, there may not be enough here to hold your attention. Cinema hadn’t yet developed the language all of us in the glorious world of the 21st Century all take for granted, so they hadn’t learned to do things like jump cuts; all the scene changes are done by irising the lens shutter. Neither German Expressionism nor silent melodrama were known for their restraint, so the acting is exaggerated.
There’s nothing in here really remotely scary, but a few scenes do manage to remain unnerving all these years. And it may very well be the first “screw-with-your-head” conceptual shift ending in cinema. Something for the serious cinephile, or the Howard Waldrop fan who wants to get a little more out of “Occam’s Ducks”.