How can a silent film seem such a modern conception?  Kino reissues the 2014 restoration of Robert Weine’s horror landmark in 4K Ultra HD, with a choice of music soundtracks. The sleepwalking Cesare’s hypnotic abduction of Lil Dagover is still a grabber, and the nightmarish images don’t diminish in impact. It’s an incredible kickoff to a decade of mind-blowing expressionist German cinema — and still plays like a champ, 104 years later.  Conrad Veidt rules!

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Kino Lorber Kino Classics Kino Repertory
1920 / B&W / 1:33 Silent Ap. / 77 min. / Street Date October 22, 2024 / Das cabinet des Dr. Caligari / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Fehér, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Rudolf Lettinger, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.
Cinematography: Willy Hameister
Production Designers: Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, Walter Röhrig
Costume design: Walter Reimann
Assistant Director: Rochus Gliese
Screenplay Written by Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz
Produced by Erich Pommer
Directed by Robert Weine

Some of the happiest surprises to come out of Kino Lorber have been their imports of German restorations by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation (Stiftung) — sensational archival reconstructions of classics like  Die Nibelungen,  Faust,  Metropolis, and much-appreciated remasterings of the more titles like  Gold and  The Woman One Longs For.

Is this the first Murnau Stiftung show to be upgraded to 4K Ultra HD?  The 2014 restoration of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a visual revelation so dramatic that everything seen before looked like fragments of a poor photocopy. The restoration also restored the film’s original frame rate. Robert Weine’s expressionist masterpiece no longer plays like a creaky fossil, and is in fact more sophisticated than many modern mysteries. Its narrative twists still deliver a jolt.

Get ready for a conflict between objective and subjective realities.

The deceptively straightforward story is set in the hamlet of Holstenwall. A sinister mountebank called Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) obtains city permission to exhibit his somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) at a fun fair. Artists and poets Francis and Alan (Friedrich Feher & Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) attend. Caligari exhibits the zombie-like Cesare in an upright box resembling a coffin. Caligari tells Alan that he won’t live until dawn, and sure enough, Alan is found stabbed to death in his bed. Francis tells his sweetheart Jane (Lil Dagover of  Destiny) about the murder and asks a doctor to investigate if the weird Cesare could be the killer. Jane visits the fair to look for Francis and finds her way to Caligari’s show tent. Will she be the Doctor’s next victim?

Practically a film art movement unto itself, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a commerical hit and had a lasting influence on movies worldwide. It’s a centerpiece for most studies of movie history. Ideas from Germany’s flourishing art world found root in the cinema: the filmmakers ran wild with the notion that the way a movie looked, could reflect how the characters feel. The Decla Company’s designed ‘insane’ scenery to represent the world of an insane narrator. Fritz Lang was not part of the production but is said to have been in on the decision to add a ‘sane’ framing story, to better contrast with the ‘insane’ main narrative.

The movie has no discussion of psychology or Freud yet is strikingly complex. That most of the narrative is perceived as the vision of a disturbed man makes sense of the strange visuals and weird characters. Authors Mayer and Janowitz illustrate the basic idea behind Edgar Allan Poe’s story  The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather, but go several steps beyond Poe’s one surprise twist. The murder scenario is a delusion, and then Francis’s investigation is a second delusion. Buried within that fantasy is the idea that a good doctor can ‘will’ himself to be possessed by a madman he has read about:

Francis imagines the kindly asylum director taken over by a maniac, a psychic possession like that in Guy de Maupassant’s story  The Horla. Fritz Lang would later revive the idea of a dead madman possessing a doctor as a way to ‘revive’ his  Dr. Mabuse character.

Flashbacks and narrative games with time structures were not new to film in 1920, but the flashback in Caligari expresses an altered psychological reality. Everything looks like stage scenery painted by an Expressionist artist. The world is fragmented, splintered, twisted; there are no straight lines and the law of perspective has been repealed. This kind of stylization has been back in vogue for years, often just for the pictorial effect, divorced from expressionism’s original artistic/political intent.

Audiences are wary of expressionist effects that come off as pretentious. But the idea of warping reality to express psychological states persists in many movies with avant-garde ambitions:  The Night of the Hunter,  Dementia,  Track of the Cat, the  ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ musical number in  The Gold Diggers of 1935.

The film is of course one of the first fully developed horror movies. Cabinet’s Cesare is the filmic precursor of every humanoid movie monster we’ve got, an honor shared with Paul Wegener’s  The Golem, another silent German classic. Cesare is the zombie, the ghoul, the animated corpse — but also a victimized human, living in some kind of induced trance or half-conscious nightmare. The film depicts reality as perceived by its main character Francis, but what would it look like if it instead chose to ‘express’ the perceptions of the somnambulist criminal Cesare?  The lumbering sleepwalker is an equally tragic figure, a monster who falls in love with his appointed victim and dies trying to carry her away.

We eventually learn that the murderous Cesare is really an invention of Francis’s deranged mind. Does that mean that Francis secretly wants to abduct and ravage Jane himself, and is transposing his shameful desire to a subtitute?  Francis has quite an imagination. He thinks one fellow patient is a killer and another a queen. He has decided that the director a murderous puppet master. A question — did the gentle, frightened Alan really exist? Or is he a part of Francis’s fractured personality as well?

An artwork as powerful as Caligari cannot help but inspire radical interpretations. The Hardy Encyclopedia of Horror raises questions about the film’s relationship to World War One. Francis represents art and freedom and liberalism, and Caligari and his asylum are the traditionally regimented German society. In Hardy’s view Francis’s unmasking of the fake authority figure corresponds to the revelation that the Germany’s militaristic ambitions were a fraud, proved by the catastrophe of WW1. But the subsequent narrative twist returns power to the reactionary establishment. The authoritarians will arrest and cure those wild artists and radicals, and return the country to a sane path. The ‘benevolent’ Caligari gives the camera one last, rather unsettling, stare during the final iris-out.

A new generation of critics will surely reinterpret films like Caligari, but hopefully will not just put them through a screen of modern values, PC, conservative or otherwise. Back in 1969 Lewis Jacobs complained that Caligari was mainly being studied for its relationship to art history. With our limited knowledge of art, we still note the use of perspective in the film’s much-studied design. Several angles play games with depth. The key shot of Cesare carrying Jane over a bridge has a dreamlike ‘reverse forced perspective’ effect: the bridge looks foreshortened, but Cesare does indeed grow in size as he crosses toward the camera.  →  American designer William Cameron Menzies seems to have picked up on this idea for the curiously disturbing ‘sand hill’ setting in his film  Invaders from Mars.

Art students have always been open to cinema from a different time, informed by older ideas. Getting younger people interested in films from a hundred years ago is not easy. Caligari was once a tough sell in ragged old videos. This restoration plays well without apologies or disclaimers. Invite some friends, brew up some espresso with your Halloween candy, and the bizarre story of the murderous sleepwalker will energize the room.

Actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, the luckless ‘first victim’ in Holstenwall, was in silent German movies by Fritz Lang. He mostly landed small roles in American movies, but we all have seen him in  Casablanca, along with Conrad Veidt, of course. Twardowski is the German officer who accompanies Yvonne to Rick’s Cafe Americaine, the boor who almost gets into a fight. That appearance might slip by, but the von Twardowski role nobody forgets is his one-scene cameo as Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Fritz Lang’s fierce anti-Nazi picture  Hangmen Also Die!  Lang pushes the Production Code to the limit by having Twardowski play Heydrich as a luridly swishy, lipstick-wearing ‘sexual deviant.’  Anything for the war effort…

The Kino Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4K is a surprise addition to this year’s crop of Halloween releases. The 104 year-old movie of course cannot look as if it were filmed yesterday, but it comes much closer than one might think possible.

Disc collectors will just want an answer to the question ‘is there really an improvement in the 4K encoding?’  The fully honest answer is that on my high-end LG monitor I was only really aware of a slightly enhanced contrast ratio. The images will impress viewers that haven’t seen silent films in good quality — but they still look their age,. I doubt most holders of the 2014 Blu-ray will see a dramatic difference without a high-end video delivery system. Still, we’d definitely tell anyone who hasn’t seen the 2014 restoration to go for it.

As explained in the film’s prologue, an original negative (!) was accessed for restoration, with the exception of the first reel, the inter-titles and a shot or two here and there. The first reel actually looks quite good. When prime source materials pop in, Caligari is transformed. We can see more detail in the theatrical makeups, with the effect that the actors also seem like painted works of art. The scenery resembles charcoal drawings folded into shapes like origami. Where before blacks were clogged with contrast, we can now see light smudges on Cesare’s sleeves. Lil Dagover’s appearance is softer, slightly more natural.

A restoration comparison shows that quite a bit of dirt and damage had to be cleaned up. There is no longer a dark line marring the top of many images. This restoration appears to reveal more of the original film frame. In the scene at the bridge, the top seems only a little tight, rather than chopped off. Another major improvement is in basic image stability. Older transfers were marred by a constant jitter. With the frame locked down the artificial settings look more like solid spaces.

The best negative copies found did not have original German inter-titles, so these were cleaned up from existing prints. Each intertitle is a unique piece of artwork in itself, so it’s right that they were retained, and English subtitles (removable) put in place.

The extras on this new 4K – Blu-ray combo diverge from Kino’s 2014 disc. The 2014 orchestral score by ‘Hochschule für Musik Freiburg,’ has returned, this time accompanied by a new score by composer Jeff Beal, who has also composed a score for Murnau’s Sunrise. On the Blu-ray only is another music track by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.

Jeff Beal also contributes an audio commentary, mainly describing his music score and commenting on things in the film that impressed and influenced him.

Retained from the older Blu-ray is a restoration demonstration, and Rüdiger Suchland’s rather good hourlong documentary Caligari: How Horror Came to the Cinema. It could well carry the title ‘Everything You Need to Know about German Expressionism.’  Good film clips and historical newsreels help Suchland define Expressionism as an art-movement revolt against the forces of conservative order. By the time Expressionism was applied to film, painting had already moved on to different schools of thought. Later Weimar cinema returned to more realistic forms.

The documentary also adds context to the film’s original advertising slogan,  “You Must Become Caligari!”  It echoes with the mysterious questions posed to create excitement for Feuillade’s  Les Vampires  (“Qui? Quoi? Quand? Ou…”) and Lang’s  Dr. Mabuse  (“Who is behind these crimes?”).

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Music scores:
by Jeff Beal (4KUHD & Blu-ray, 5.1 Surround and 2.0 stereo)
by Hochschule für Musik Freiburg (4KUHD & Blu-ray, 2.0 stereo)
by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky (Blu-ray, 2.0 stereo)
Audio commentary by Jeff Beal (4K UHD & Blu-ray)
Featurette Caligari: How Horror Came to the Cinema (Blu-ray, 52 min.)
Restoration Demonstration (Blu-ray)
Audio description for the vision-impaired (4K UHD & Blu-ray).
Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 13, 2024
(7212cali)

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