The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

January 31, 2007

calligari The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is now available to download via the Internet Archive. The film tells the story of the deranged Doctor Caligari and his faithful sleepwalking Cesare and their connection to a string of murders in a German mountain village, Holstenwall. Caligari presents one of the earliest examples of a motion picture “frame story” in which the body of the plot is presented as a flashback, as told by Francis.

Synopsis
A man named Francis relates a story about his best friend Alan and his fiancée Jane. Alan takes him to a fair where they meet Dr. Caligari, who exhibits a somnambulist, Cesare, that can predict the future.

When Alan asks how long he has to live, Cesare says he has until dawn. The prophecy comes to pass, as Alan is murdered, and Cesare is a prime suspect.

Cesare creeps into Jane’s bedroom and abducts her, running from the townspeople and finally dying of exhaustion. Meanwhile, the police discover a dummy in Cesare’s cabinet, while Caligari flees.
Francis tracks Caligari to a mental asylum. He is the director! Or is he?

cal2 Critics worldwide have praised the film for its Expressionist style, complete with wild, distorted set design—a striking use of mise en scène. Caligari has been cited as an influence on films noir and horror films; it is also often seen as one of the first horror films, a model for directors for many decades (including Alfred Hitchcock).

Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler postulates that the film can be read as an allegory for German social attitudes in the period preceding the Second World War. He argues that the character of Caligari represents a tyrannical figure, to whom the only alternative is social chaos (represented by the fairground). However, Kracauer’s work has been largely discredited by contemporary scholars of German cinema, for example by Thomas Elsaesser in Weimar Cinema and After, who describes the legacy of Kracauer’s work as a “historical imaginary”.

Elsaesser claims that Kracauer studied too few films to make his thesis about the social mindset of Germany legitimate and that the discovery and publication of the original screenplay of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari undermines his argument about the revolutionary intent of its writers. Elsaesser’s alternative thesis is that the filmmakers adopted an Expressionist style as a method of product differentiation, establishing a distinct national product against the increasing import of American films.

Dietrich Scheunemann, somewhat in defense of Kracauer, noted that he didn’t have, “the full range of materials at (his) disposal,” however, that that fact, “has clearly and adversely affected the discussion of the film,” referencing that the script wasn’t rediscovered until 1977 and that Kracauer hadn’t seen the film in around 20 years when he wrote the work.