DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI): 1920, 74mins. Director: Robert Wiene, Cast: Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), Cesare (Conrad Veidt), Jane (Lil Dagover), Franzis (Friedrich Feher)
Hyperbolic
or not, bestowing the title of “the first horror movie” on The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari somehow sells it short. To what degree it is even a horror
film or, more accurately, what sort of horror it is, largely depends on how
much faith we put in Franzis (Friedrich Feher) as a narrator. We first see him
a forlorn man telling a companion the tale of murders that took place in his
hometown of Holstenwall some years earlier when a mysterious showman by the
name of Caligari (Werner Krauss) wandered into the village with his travelling
sideshow, a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt). At face value, Franzis
was witness to the terror brought on by the sinister Caligari and his
accomplice. But in the end, none of this may have happened outside of the
narrator’s mind.
The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari
succeeds where so many other films have failed attempting the same mental flip largely
because the chilling atmosphere is sustained regardless of which truth we
accept, even if it’s only a man’s dissent into madness.
Indeed,
the much-celebrated look of the film, depicting the abstraction of a Bavarian
village using sharp jagged edges, crooked alleyways and spiraling rooftops, has
earned it a place in the retrospectives of German Expressionism. Set designer
Hermann Warm would recall, “We spent a whole day and part of the night reading
through this very curious script. We realized that a subject like this needed
something out of the ordinary in the way of sets. Reimann, whose painting in
those days had Expressionist tendencies, suggested doing the sets
Expressionistically. We immediately set to work roughing up designs in that
style.”
But, as
some film historians have pointed out, apart from the superficial backdrops,
the film bears little resemblance to the nature of Expressionism. In The
Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max
Reinhardt, Lotte H. Eisner argued, “A lack of continuity is apparent
between the Expressionistic sets and the utterly bourgeois furniture-the
chintzy armchairs in Lil Dagover’s sitting-room or the leather armchair in the
madhouse yard. The break in style is fatal. Similarly, the façade of the asylum
is not distorted, yet the end of the film is seen in the same weird décor. It
is hard to say which is the more responsible for this: the Expressionist
tendencies of the designers, or the parsimony of the producer.
The
stylization of the acting is dictated by the sets. Yet Werner Krauss in the
part of the satanic Dr. Caligari and Conrad Veidt in that of the sinister
somnambulist are the only actors who really adapt themselves to it, and-in Kurtz’s words-achieve a
‘dynamic synthesis of their being’, by concentrating their movements and facial
expressions. Through a reduction of gesture they attain movements which are
almost linear and which-despite a few curves that slip in-remain brusque, like
the broken angles of the sets; and their movements from point to point never go
beyond the limits of a given geometrical plane. The other actors, on the other
hand, remain locked in a naturalistic style, though, owing to the old-fashioned
way in which they are dressed (cloaks, top hats, morning-coats), their outlines
do achieve an element of the fantastic.
The
characters of Caligari and Cesare conform to Expressionist conception: the
somnambulist, detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all
individuality, an abstract creature, kills without motive or logic. And his
master, the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who lacks the merest shadow of human
scruple, acts with the criminal insensibility and defiance of morality which
the Expressionists exalted.”
Ah, but
this misses the larger point. This bizarre view of the houses, streets and even
offices reflects a literally distorted view of the world as seen by Franzis.
This is his homeland, rendered unrecognizable by the literal and psychological
ruin brought on by the war.
As Anton Kaels wrote in his essay on the film for Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, “The film’s historical unconsciousness-what the film does not or cannot say-is the war, or more precisely, the traumatic memory of the war. The film itself serves as a flashback to the period that had hardly passed; it invites the audience to recover the memory, as discomfiting and contradictory as it may appear. The film’s disregard for temporal linearity blurs the boundaries between past and present, fantasy and experience, dream and delusion. A detective story on its surface-who is the monster in our midst?-the film conceals as it reveals, it deceives as it uncovers, it represses as it remembers.”
But
Franzis also speaks on behalf of the writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer,
pacifists whose view of life and home was shattered by the war, to them a
diversion for the powerful at the expense of the sleepy citizens they send off
to battle.
For the
rest of his life Janowitz stood by his account that the frame narrative,
ultimately revealing Franzis to be a patient in an asylum, was added at the
insistence of the producers in an attempt to restore faith in authorities,
accomplished by revealing the director of the asylum to be the real-life
counterpart of Caligari, still played by Krauss, now seen as simply a man of
medicine running an institution.
In his
1947 From Caligari to Hitler, once considered a seminal essay on the
film but now marred by discoveries made since, Siegfried Kracauer, accepting this
version of events, commented, “Janowitz and Mayer knew why they raged against
the framing story, it perverted, if not reversed their intrinsic
intentions. While the original story
exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene’s Caligari glorified
authority and convicted its antagonist of madness. A revolutionary film was thus turned into a
conformist one—following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome
individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum”
Eisner,
in The Haunted Screen, repeated the same version of events in, “We know
from the comments of one of the authors of the scenario-quoted by Kracauer in From
Caligari to Hitler-that the prologue and epilogue were added as an
afterthought in the face of objections from both authors. The result of these
modifications was to falsify the action and ultimately to reduce it to the
ravings of a madman. The film’s authors, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, had had
the very different intention of unmasking the absurdity of asocial authority,
represented by Dr. Caligari, the superintendent of a lunatic asylum and
proprietor of a fairground side-show.”
Janowitz’s
account was substantially discredited in 1995, however, when the original
screenplay surfaced with the frame narrative already intact (though in a significantly
different form). It remains unclear, then, if Janowitz was speaking out of
displeasure in how the frame narrative was ultimately rewritten rather
than in the idea of a frame narrative being written at all. A more probing
question is whether Janowitz was blaming the producers due to faulty memory or,
more likely, a misplaced anger with himself and his cowriter for their failure
to write a direct attack on authoritarianism.
It’s
intriguing how similar the questions we ask about Franzis are. Is there a grain
of truth in his story or is he, like his writer, subconsciously blocking
memories he would rather not reckon with? Was he, for instance, the real
murderer of his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) with whom he held a
gentleman’s competition for the heart of Jane? Did he then opportunistically
blame Cesare (or did he fabricate the monster himself), until remorse drove him
to madness? Franzis himself remains a blank but the film offers a clue. Almost
every player of his story (from Jane to Cesare to Dr. Caligari himself), is
based on inmates and staff of the asylum.
In the end, no matter what the truth, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari depicts a world in which nothing looks or feels right. If the core of the film is a window into Franzi’s mental state, however, the film itself says much about the moods of Janowitz and Mayer even in unexpected places. Jane, for instance, was based on Gilda Langer, an actress who inspired the two writers and encouraged their work. Mayer fell for her, but Langer became engaged to rising Hungarian director Paul Czinner and then, tragically, died of a lung infection at the age of 23 about a month before the release of the film she helped inspire.
As
David Kalat explained, “She didn't miss out on Caligari because she was
dead. She was actually alive during the entire production. Torn between Mayer
and Janowitz, Gilda Langer took the chance to trade up from a pair of starving
writers in favor of an up-and-coming director and producer named Paul Czinner.
By marrying Czinner, Gilda effectively left their orbit.”
Tellingly,
Jane (played by Lil Dagover) is the only intended victim Cesare cannot bring
himself to kill. Instead, he runs off with her but doesn’t get far before she
is rescued by her father and a pose. Perhaps this was Mayer’s wish fulfillment,
rescuing Langer both from the man who took her away and her untimely death. But
Jane was only Langer’s avatar and her escape a mere fantasy of the screen. But
the stark reality also creeps in for Franzis in the end when we discover Jane
was based on a woman living in the mental hospital.
Further
evidence of a dream in which the world, including the officials in charge,
works as it should is in how easily Franzis recruits help. For all of the film’s
alleged anti-authoritarianism, both the police and the orderlies in the asylum
are easily convinced and eager to help when Franzis warns them of the somnambulist’s
deeds.
But
this only makes the bleakness of the ending hit harder. The real Jane (if that’s
even her name) is as far from Franzis’s grasp as Gilda Langer was from Mayer’s
and Germany itself was headed for darker times despite the initial hope of a
compassionate and ethical state.
As Kaes
wrote, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari marks a bold beginning in
Weimar’s engagement with the trauma of the war. Implicitly participating in the
debates at the time about war psychiatry and shell shock, the film is concerned
with saving a memory of the war experience that runs counter to the official,
harmonizing commemoration practices that began in 1920. Instead, in the spirit
of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the Berlin Dadaists who portrayed a scathing
picture of the German professional classes in 1919-1920, Caligari offers
an equally aggressive and grotesque image of bureaucracy and the medical
establishment. It also critiques traditional filmic realism by adopting a
highly abstract and provocatively primitive form that mimics the physical and
mental desert the first technological war had left behind. By extending the
concept of shell shock into the very form of the film, we realize to what
extent trauma has fractured and shattered both narration and mise en scene.
Caligari is a film in which the liminal experience of the front-its
hallucinatory, ineffable, and disorienting effect-is preserved more
authentically than in most naturalistic war movies.”
If a
single philosophy, then, were to be settled on for a film as complex as Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, nihilism and existentialism are the likeliest candidates. If
neither a story of a murderous fiend or the ravings of a lunatic, Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari is more clearly the story of Germany rising from the ashes of
war only to step into a darker future. Cesare predicts the death of Alan early
in the film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was also prophetic in a way Janowitz,
Mayer and director Robert Wiene could not have guessed.
