The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

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This article is about the 1920 film. For other uses, see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (disambiguation).
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Directed by Robert Wiene
Produced by Rudolf Meinert
Erich Pommer
Written by Hans Janowitz
Carl Mayer
Starring Werner Krauss
Conrad Veidt
Friedrich Fehér
Lil Dagover
Hans Twardowski
Music by Giuseppe Becce
Cinematography Willy Hameister
Distributed by Goldwyn Distributing Company
Release date(s) Germany February 26, 1920
USA March 19, 1921
Japan May 14, 1921
Running time 71 min.
Language Silent film
German intertitles
Budget DEM 20,000 (estimated)
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (original title: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 silent film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the earliest, most influential and most artistically acclaimed German Expressionist films.

Contents

[edit] Plot overview

Still from the film.
Still from the film.

The film tells the story of the deranged Dr. 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.

The narrator, Francis, and his friend Alan visit a carnival in the village where they see Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare, whom the doctor is displaying as an attraction. Caligari brags that Cesare can answer any question he is asked. When Alan asks Cesare how long he has to live, Cesare tells Alan that he will die tomorrow at dawn—a prophecy which turns out to be fulfilled.

Francis, along with his girlfriend Jane, investigate Caligari and Cesare, which eventually leads to Cesare kidnapping Jane. Caligari orders Cesare to kill Jane, but the hypnotized slave refuses after her beauty captivates him. He carries Jane out of her house, leading the townsfolk on a lengthy chase. Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the head of the local insane asylum, and with the help of his colleagues discovers that he is obsessed with the story of a medieval Dr. Caligari, who used a somnambulist to murder people as a traveling act.

Cesare falls to his death during the pursuit and the townsfolk discover that Caligari had created a dummy to distract Francis. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari breaks down and reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum. The influential twist ending reveals that Francis' flashback is actually his fantasy: The man he says is Caligari is his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the source of his patient's delusion, says he is able to cure Francis.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Uncredited

[edit] History

Writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer met each other in Berlin following World War I. The two saw the then-new film medium as a revolutionary form of artistic expression – visual storytelling that necessitated collaboration between writers and painters, cameramen, actors, directors. They felt that film was the ideal medium through which to both call attention to the emerging pacifism in postwar Germany and exhibit the radical anti-bourgeois art.[1]

Although neither had connections to any Berlin film company, they decided to develop a plot. As both were enthusiastic about Paul Wegener's works, they chose to write a horror film. The duo drew from past experiences – Janowitz had disturbing memories of a night in 1913, in Hamburg: After leaving a fair he had walked into a park bordering the Holstenwall and glimpsed a stranger as he disappeared into the shadows after having mysteriously emerged from the bushes. The next morning, a young woman's ravaged body was found. Mayer was still embittered about his sessions during the war with an autocratic, highly ranked, military psychiatrist.[1]

At night, Janowitz and Mayer would often go to a nearby fair. One evening, they saw a sideshow titled "Man and Machine", in which a man did feats of strength and forecast the future while supposedly in a hypnotic trance. Inspired by this, Janowitz and Mayer devised their story that night and wrote it in the following six weeks. The name "Caligari" came from a book Mayer read, in which an officer named Caligari was mentioned.[1]

When the duo approached producer Erich Pommer about the story, Pommer tried to have them thrown out of his small Decla studio. But when they insisted on telling him their film story, Pommer was so impressed that he bought it on the spot, and agreed to have the film produced in expressionistic style, partly as a concession to his studio only having a limited quota of power and light.[1]

[edit] Production

Pommer put Caligari in the hands of designer Hermann Warm and painters Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, whom he had met as a soldier painting sets for a German military theater. When Pommer began to have second thoughts about how the film should be designed, they had to convince him that it made sense to paint lights and shadows directly on set walls and floors and background canvases, and to place flat sets behind the actors.[1]

Pommer first approached Fritz Lang to direct this film, but he was committed to work on Die Spinnen (The Spiders),[1] so Pommer gave directorial duties to Robert Wiene. Wiene filmed a test scene to prove Warm, Reimann, and Röhrig's theories, and it was so impressive that Pommer gave his artists free rein. Janowitz, Mayer, and Wiene would later use the same artistic methods on another production, Genuine, which was less successful commercially and critically.[1]

The producers, who wanted a less macabre ending, imposed upon the director the idea that everything turns out to be Francis' delusion. The original story made it clear that Caligari and Cesare were real and were responsible for a number of deaths.

Filming took place in December 1919 and January 1920. The film premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920.[2]

[edit] Responses

Critics worldwide have praised the film for its Expressionist style, complete with wild, distorted set design. Caligari has been cited as an influence on film noir, one of the earliest horror films, and a model for directors for many decades.

Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler (1947) postulates that the film can be read as an allegory for German social attitudes in the period preceding World War II. He argues that the character of Caligari represents a tyrannical figure, to whom the only alternative is social chaos (represented by the fairground).[3] However, Kracauer's work has been largely discredited by contemporary scholars of German cinema, including Thomas Elsaesser in Weimar Cinema and After, who describes the legacy of Kracauer's work as a "historical imaginary".[4] 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 fact "has clearly and adversely affected the discussion of the film", referring to the fact that the script of Caligari wasn't rediscovered until 1977 and that Kracauer hadn't seen the film in around 20 years when he wrote the work.[5]

[edit] Adaptations and musical works inspired by the film

The film was adapted into an opera in 1997 by composer John Moran. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Robert McGrath.[6]

Numerous musicians have composed new musical scores to accompany the film. In 1994, jazz bassist Mark Dresser led pianist Denman Maroney and trumpeter Dave Douglas in his compositions for the film, which they performed live at the Knitting Factory and released on CD in 1994. The British electronica band In The Nursery created an ambient soundtrack for the film, released on CD in 1996. In 2002, British musician and composer Geoff Smith composed a new soundtrack to the film for the hammered dulcimer, which he performed live as an accompaniment to the film.

In 2006, Peruvian rock group Kinder composed a soundtrack to the film, performing it live during the screenings. The venue was "El Cinematógrafo", a film club in the district of Barranco.

A radio version is published by Blackstone Audio featuring John de Lancie, written and produced by Yuri Rasovsky.

In 2005, the Chicago-based Redmoon Theater performed a Bunraku adaptation of the film. The only dialogue throughout the 80 minute production was the thoughts of Cesare as played through a Victor Talking Machine at the base of the stage. The stage was made up of many small stages with a dominant large stage, each being a drawer or cupboard in a large cabinet.

A movie with a very similar title, The Cabinet of Caligari, written by Robert Bloch, was made in 1962, claiming to be inspired by the original film.

A sound remake was released in 2005 and won several awards at horror film festivals. It attempted to reproduce the look of the original film as closely as possible.

[edit] Comic books

Jean-Marc Lofficier wrote Superman's Metropolis, a trilogy of graphic novels for DC Comics illustrated by Ted McKeever, the second of which was entitled Batman: Nosferatu, most of the plot derived from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Caligari himself appears as a member of Die Zwielichthelden (The Twilight Heroes), a German mercenary group in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. The group (which includes Dr. Mabuse and Rotwang) will be featured in the forthcoming fourth volume, Century, to be published in 2008 by Top Shelf Productions.

[edit] Musical references

The band named "Das Kabinette" had it's name inspired by this film and in 1983 they released their E.P. called "The Cabinet" in which the lyrics actually tell the story of the movie.

The name 'Caligari' has been used extensively in popular music. There is a Spanish pop/rock band called Gabinete Caligari, as well a Japanese rock band called Cali Gari. A Los Angeles-based heavy metal band called Caligari was formed in 2006 featuring former members of Five Finger Death Punch and Tryptycon. However, no album has yet been released. Ghost of Maine, a band from Indiana, recorded a song called "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". The band Janitor's Jacket has a song called "Dr. Caligari", and Pere Ubu has a song entitled "Caligari's Mirror".

Suede used clips from the movie as the background for their song "Heroine" as seen in the live "Introducing the Band" dvd. The 1998 music video for Rob Zombie single "Living Dead Girl" restaged several scenes from the film, with Zombie in the role of Caligari beckoning to the fair attendees. In addition to artificially imitating the poor image quality of aged film, the video also made use of the expressionistic sepia, aqua, and violet tinting used in Caligari. The film also inspired imagery in the video for "Forsaken" (2002), from the soundtrack for the motion picture Queen of the Damned.

The goth group Bauhaus used a still of Cesare from the film on early t-shirts for their popular single "Bela Lugosi's Dead".

Heavy Rock group Rainbow used the film as inspiration for the music video to "Can't Let You Go", a single from their 1983 album Bent Out Of Shape, vocalist Joe Lynn Turner being made up as Cesare. The director was Dominic Orlando.

[edit] References

  • Mayer, Carl (1995). Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Drehbuch von Carl Mayer und Hans Janowitz zu Robert Wienes Film von 1919/20. München: Ed. Text und Kritik. ISBN 3-88377-484-7. (German)
  1. ^ a b c d e f g Peary, Danny (1988). Cult Movies 3. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., Pages 48-51. ISBN 0-671-64810-1. 
  2. ^ Robinson, David (1997). Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. British Film Institute, 47. 
  3. ^ Kracauer, Siegfried (2004 edition; 1947, original English translation). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press. 
  4. ^ Elsaesser, Thomas (2000). Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. Routledge. 
  5. ^ (2003) in Scheunemann, Dietrich: Expressionist Films: New Perspectives. Routledge, 128. 
  6. ^ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari multimedia theatre piece.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Cinema of Germany