The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a cinematic masterpiece that stands alone at the very pinnacle of filmmaking. The fact that it’s a silent film, with no dialogue or music to enhance or support the story in any way, makes the achievement even greater.

The story is a flashback as told by Franzis (played by Friedrich Feger), who is sitting in a park, next to an older man. Franzis recalls his nightmarish encounter with Dr. Caligari (played by Werner Krauss) and Cesare (played by Conrad Veidt), a young man who is a somnambulist (a sleep walker), and under the control of the mysterious doctor.

One day Franzis takes his friend Alan (played by Hans-Heinz von Twardowski), to go visit the local fairground, where Dr. Caligari is presenting 23 year old Cesare who, according to Dr. Caligai, has been asleep for the entirety of his 23 years. Caligari announces to the crowd that he will attempt to wake Cesare, and this event is the catalyst that propels the rest of the story forward.

The film is divided into six acts of about 10-15 minutes each. The total runtime is about 74 minutes.

The plot and character development are actually very good, especially considering there is no audio, but what we do have in its place are periodic title cards that give the audience some context via written dialogue and descriptions of what is happening on screen (while the original German version has German language title cards, the English version has English language title cards).

The story is so interesting that I actually think that the film would stand on it’s own quite well, even if it had a more mundane visual style. Thankfully, it has one of the most wonderful and visually distinct styles in cinema history.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari uses a visual style that is now known as German Expressionism, which has influenced filmmakers and artists all over the world for the last century.

Expressionism is a style that started in Northern Europe at the beginning the 20th Century, but was mostly popular in Weimar Germany. It was found mainly in poetry and paintings, and depicted the subjective, emotional viewpoint of the artist, instead of an objective, realistic viewpoint. Paintings and movies during this period depicted landscapes, buildings and just about everything else in an elongated, pointy or curved style.

Expressionism can be difficult to accurately define, as it overlaps with other artistic forms such as Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism and others. It was influenced by the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, (mostly by his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra), Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, and Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, just to name a few.

The Expressionist movement was started in 1905 in Dresden, Germany by four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who formed a group calling itself Die Brucke, (or the Bridge in English).

Due to the fact that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is considered an Expressionist film, all of the backgrounds, furniture, and other aspects of the set design are made with elongated, curved shapes, pointy ends and nothing is in proportion, and everything feels a little bit claustrophobic.

The small size of the sets had more to do with the physical limitations of the studio than any deliberate artistic intent of the filmmakers. The studio was only about 6m/20ft in both length and width. Most of the backgrounds were painted canvas, and the light and shadow was actually physically painted onto the sets, which just adds to the very surreal look and feel of the film.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some of the most imaginative and visually stunning sets I’ve ever seen, and it just goes to show that a good imagination can beat millions of dollars worth of CGI every time.

The acting by all involved was excellent, especially Werner Krauss as Dr. Caligari. The overall look of Dr. Caligari is said to have been based on portraits of German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (I say “is said to have been”, because, as we shall see later on in this review, actual facts about just about anything to do with the film are quite scarce). The addition of a top hat, cape and walking stick with an ivory handle were added by Krauss, in order for the look of Caligari to better match the Expressionist style of the film.

The script was written in the winter of 1918-1919, over a six week period by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and was filmed between December 1919 and January 1920. It was directed by Robert Wiene.

There is quite a lot of dispute about the film. Nearly everything said about it has been contradicted by someone else. This includes the writers, directors and the production crew. Everyone has said something different about who did what, when, where and how.

There have also been many interpretations of what the film represents, what the themes and ideas are, and how filmgoers should approach the material.

However all of this has been retroactively applied to the film decades after it was made. No statements as to what the themes or ideas were supposed to be, were made by anyone involved with the production (including the writers) while it was being written or filmed.

What we do know is that Janowitz served as an officer in the German military during World War 1, and that Mayer pretended to have mental illness in order to get out of having to do any military service during the war. Mayer underwent intense examinations from a military psychiatrist.

We also know that the two men visited a circus sideshow in Berlin called “Man or Machine?” that featured a hypnotised man performing various feats of strength.

Janowitz was encouraged by an actress that he was in love with, Gilda Langer (who became the inspiration for the character of Jane) to visit a fortune teller. The fortune teller said that Janowitz would survive the war, but Langer would die. Langer died in 1920 at the age of 23.

Everything else, it would seem, is debatable.

Due to the amount of time that has passed since the making of the film (over a hundred years), we will probably never know the truth.

At the end of the day, does it really matter who did what, when, where or how?

As for the themes and ideas, each person, in my opinion, should interpret the film in their own way.

I don’t like the idea of writers, directors or any other members of any production team making statements about the films they are involved with, and telling the audience how to interpret what they have seen, especially before they’ve even seen it.

It’s entirely up to each individual audience member to decide for themselves what a film (or any other piece of art, for that matter) means to them.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is simply one of the greatest films ever made.

I highly recommend it.