The Cabinet of Dr Caligari [Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari]

Robert Weine, Germany, 1920, 67 minutes

The carnival comes to the sleepy town of Holstenwall, bringing with it the mysterious Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) and his somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt). Francis, a student, visits the carnival with his friend Alan, whom Cesare prophesies will die that night. This indeed comes to pass, but is everything as it seems?

One of the most important films ever made, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari represents, with its tale of doubles, monsters and damsels in distress, the founding text of the horror film and the 1920s German Expressionist movement which sought, in a nutshell, to express internal psychological states through subjective distortion of the external world.

If this was not already enough reason to see it, it later emerged as a key film for film critics and theorists interested in descriptive and prescriptive accounts of their medium. The enormously influential thesis of Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, suggests that the film's retreat from the external, objective world into expressionism and its treatment of themes of tyranny versus disorder, most notably via the notoriously ambiguous mise-en-abyme framing narrative, provided social-psychological insights into the collective unconscious of the German population of the time, or the path "From Caligari to Hitler".

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, then, is a film, then, which anyone with an interest in the cinema owes it to themself to see.

Review by Michel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2006

One of the most influential films of all time, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari initiated the German Expressionist style of cinema, often known as "Caligarism" and, if film theorist Siegfried Kracauer is to be believed (in his famous study "From Caligari to Hitler"), significantly contributed to the rise of Nazism by fatally distracting the German populace from socio-political realities with an `empty artistic formalism'. Phew!

Whatever, this all makes The Cabinet of Dr Caligari a must see film for anyone with an interest in cinema. Can you afford to miss this fountainhead film of both the horror genre and, in many ways, the film noir movement? Of course not!

Caligari's story tells of a series of murders committed in a small German town, coinciding with the arrival of Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) at the local fair. Caligari's cabinet contains the sonambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who can apparently predict the future. Two friends, Alan and Francis, and their mutual beloved Jane (Lil Dagover) visit the fair, and Alan has Cesare predict his future. He is told he will die that night. Sure enough, during the night he is murdered. Suspicion naturally falls on Caligari and his sleepwalking henchman...

I don't want to give away any more of the story. Suffice to say that the differences between screenwriter's Janowitz and Mayer's original story and the form Caligari eventually took on under director Weine have been hotly debated by film scholars over the decades for the sociopsychological insights they may contain into Weimar Germany.

Clearly, there was something special about Caligari. You need only look at Lang's Metropolis or Murnau's Nosferatu - also in our 1997/98 season - to see the sort of influence it would exert over much of German cinema in the next decade: Dramatic play of light and darkness, distorted and exaggerated settings, stylised performances seeking to express the inner psyches of the characters...

Weine never made another film with the same impact as Caligari, though he tried. The paths of stars Krauss and Veidt diverged interestingly in the Nazi era: Veidt left Germany and was largely typecast into playing sinister villains, most famously the Nazi Strasser in Casablanca. Krauss remained in Germany, (in)famously to play the title role in the notorious, anti-Semitic propaganda piece, Jud Suss.

Caligari (Werner Krauss) is a fairground showman who hypnotizes his servant (Conrad Veidt) and persuades him into committing horrific crimes in the nearby town. However, the whole story seems to be just a figment of a madman's imagination...

The most cherished film of German Expressionism The Cabinet of Dr Caligari amazes both with the psychological ramifications of the story and with its grotesquely beautiful visuals. As a horror film it stands side by side with Dreyer's Vampyr and Murnau's Nosferatu as the most astounding examples of the genre. Its roots lie in the aftermath of WWI and the tormented world of the German national consciousness at that time. The film conveys through its story and aesthetics a world of chaos and disorder where the individual existence  is overshadowed by fear of its own past experience and the hostile powers embodied within  the establishment.

To achieve this portrayal of a nightmarish world of guilt Wiene and his photographer Willy Hameister placed the story within the context of angular structures and decors - most notably, the town, the forest and the asylum - rendering the "paranoid" individual captive of a claustrophobic society.

The central performances are terrific - especially Veidt's somnambulist - and despite the fact that look dated, it is psychologically ingenious, and few will resist the power of its visual authenticity.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94