Click image to purchase

Germany German Expressionism Serial Killers

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is probably the most famous German Expressionist film that was made. It's the film that made Conrad Veidt's name a household word. It's definitely a strange film and it's been made even stranger by time. This is silent and relatively ancient and has some of the most bizarre sets that have ever made their way into any film anywhere.

This begins with the camera irising out on a couple of men sitting on a park bench. The older man explains to the younger that: "there are spirits all around us". Shortly after he says this, a ghostly woman, dressed all in white, wanders down the path and past the two men. The younger man whispers "my betrothed" to the older and goes on to tell us their story: "In Holstenwall, a fair came to town. Traveling with this fair was a mountebank.". While the man talks, the camera cuts back and forth to scenes that illustrate this.

The story continues: "My friend Alan" and the camera cuts to Alan {Hans Heinrich von Twardowski} as he wanders around a very strange and distorted room, reading poetry "aloud". After a few minutes of this, Alan decides to go to the fair and we're shown a screen featuring one of the fair's flyers. Cut to a short scene where Alan walks through the city to call on his friend Francis {Friedrich Feher} and beg him to accompany him to the fair.

Cut to our friend, Caligari, the mountebank, {Werner Krauss} as he wanders through the streets to the city clerk's office where he applies for a permit for a somnambulists booth at the fair. Cut to the fair and, eventually, to the booth where the old man hangs out his sign, rings a very large bell and begins hawking customers. A crowd forms immediately, somnabulists, apparently, having been a popular form of entertainment at the turn of the last century in Germany.

That night the town-clerk is murdered. Cut to Alan and Francis as they finally arrive at the fair. Cesare, the somnambulist, has been sleeping for the past twenty five years and has chosen this very moment at this very fair to awake from his slumbers so that he can put on a show for the fair folk of Holstenwall. Not able to resist an event of this magnitude, Alan and Francis, of course, go to the show. The next scene is entitled "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and involves the old man opening a box containing Cesare and waking him up.

Cesare {Conrad Veidt} looks a little tired after his nap but manages to make it out of his box and to predict Alan's future. Alan, apparently, will be dying in the morning so Cesare doesn't really have much to tell him. This places something of a damper on Alan's day at the fair but they run into Jane {Lil Dagover}, Francis' bethrothed, on the way out of the fair so, things lighten up just a little. As they're walking home, we discover that Alan and Francis are both in love with the same woman. That night, Alan is murdered so it all becomes a moot point anyway.

By the end of the film, we discover who the serial killer is and just who Caligari actually is and everything gets pretty well resolved; though Francis, and everyone else in the film, do have a pretty difficult time of things before it's all over. He even spends some time in a very weird hospital. The plot does get to be pretty convoluted.

This is severely silent so the performances are all overstated and may come off as a little silly, though the part of Cesare is generally recognized as an early film classic. "The betrothed" is actually pretty attractive. The sets are wonderful.

The reasoning behind the distorted, painting-like sets is an attempt to deal with the same sorts of conventions that were popular in fine art and design at the time. The conventions in place were cubism, expressionism, the Blaue Reiter and similar movements that dealt with exploring ways of eking every little bit of meaning out of something by showing the world from {and in} altered and multiple perspectives as well as endowing images with emotion by means of distortion. It works really well here and certainly makes for interesting visuals. Personally, I'd love to see things treated in a similar fashion today. I love this sort of artwork and I'm sure that with today's technology, filmmakers could come up with some pretty impressive stuff. Maybe people could use CG for something interesting for a change.

This has a nice soundtrack that works really well with the footage and is probably just weird enough to interest a lot of people other than film fans and students. Caligari is a classic film that easilly fits into the category of "most important films ever made". If you can get past the fact that the thing's silent and uses technology that was still in its infancy, you may find that you really enjoy this. I think this is a wonderful film but I realize that I probably watch movies from a slightly different perspective than a lot of people. If you're wanting something that offers all that modern film's capable of, look elsewhere. If you're up for experimentation and willing to look at things from a radically different perspective, this is pretty great.

There is a re-make {actually, several} of this that's a bit better in the film quality department; at least it's color and newer and not quite so deteriorated. I've seen it a couple of times. It's extremely strange, incorporates a more surrealist viewpoint and has a few scenes that will make your skin crawl. It's one of those eighties films that drew a bit from the new wave {musical} scene. It doesn't have the heart that this one does and it wasn't extremely successful but it's worth a look if the concept appeals to you.