In the years following World War I and prior to World War II, Germany was in a bit of a rut. The treaty they had signed was very, very clear on the subject of war reparations, and some countries (mostly France) were very keen on taking advantage of the now Kaiser-less nation. The economy completely tanked, partially due to the most industrious parts of their country having been taken away by the victorious powers, and inflation became so bad that a wheelbarrow full of deutschmarks was almost enough to get you a single loaf of bread, which doesn’t do much for that whole ‘paying off that massive war debt’. It’s hard to say whether World War II, Hitler’s rise to power and all that other heinous shit would have happened if the Allies hadn’t pushed the reparations thing as hard as they did, or if the German people were just primed for fascism either way. A question best left for Harry Turtledove, I suppose.
As bad as that era of history was for Germany (then run by what is known as the Weimar Republic), it managed to produce some great works of art, including an influential genre of film known as German Expressionism. Though relatively short-lived in the grand scheme of things, it was already gone by the time talking and Nazis entered the picture, the echoes of G.E. have persisted in filmmaking decades after its peak. The surrealistic landscapes populated by deformed buildings, the manipulation of lighting and shadows, everyone that ever tried to make a dark and creepy movie, from Todd Browning to Tim Burton and David Lynch (although Lynch has stated he never watched an Expressionist films prior to the release of Eraserhead, I believe)owes F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and the rest of those filmmakers a debt of gratitude. You can’t build arthouse cinema with a good foundation.
Such is the case with the film we’re discussing today, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt (who also starred in The Laughing Man, notable for being the design influence for DC’s The Joker). The film,in six acts, centers around Francis, who at the start of the film is sitting in a garden talking with an older gentleman. On a whim, Francis decides to tell the story of how things ended up the way they are. A story which centers around the annual village fair, the vile Dr. Caligari and his corpse like servant known as Cesare, and a series of mysterious murders that draws Francis into a life of death and madness.
Much like it is with Nosferatu and most other silent movies, there’s nothing all that complex going on with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, aside from a pretty worthwhile climax. It has a story it wants to tell, and it tells the story quickly and efficiently. Part of that could be attributed to the fact that Caligari has lost some footage over the years, so the cut that we see has lost its ability to pad things out, but it’s also part of a fundamental difference in filmmaking in that era. After all, there wasn’t really the technology available to attempt anything too complicated, and the bar for film hadn’t really been set much higher than farce or melodrama. Which was pretty much what it was competing against, theater still being the biggest form of mass entertainment at that time.
The major appeal of Caligari isn’t in the story itself, however, it’s the aesthetic. The deathly pale faces, doors and buildings set at strange, unnatural angles, one cannot help but feel a vague of dread and uneasiness (if not fear) that builds from scene to scene. I believe I used the descriptor word ‘surrealistic’ earlier, and watching Caligari the notion of being dreamlike, or nightmarish, does seem to be exactly what it is attempting. In that way it succeeds, to the point that it is so far removed from the normal frame of reference that it seems almost alien. Much like Metropolis, the thought that people sat down in movie theaters and watched this, when there were less movies in existence than there are pokemon today, is something that I can’t fathom. Did high-minded folks in that day watch this movie and throw around words like ‘surrealistic’? Did they make copious name drops to novels and plays to try to categorize it. Did your average movie goer even attempt to watch this, or did they ignore the critics and go see the new Buster Keaton flick instead? In a world of almost infinite variety, where everyone laments that everything has already been done, I can’t even conceive of being able to explore completely unknown territory, of being on the ground floor of reinventing a wheel that had barely even begun rolling yet.
So as a piece of cinema history, I’d say The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is definitely worth seeing if you haven’t already. For those not interested in cinema history, I’d say it’s weird and entertaining enough to be worth a watch, with a short enough runtime that you won’t feel bogged down. If you’re one of those people who hate movies that are in black & white and can’t conceive of an entertaining film without people talking, then you might want to stick with the Transformers movies instead. Or anything that doesn’t make you confront ideas and directions that could actually challenge you and help to make you a deeper, more well-rounded person I guess.
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