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:
“You Must Become Caligari.”
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.
Or maybe we are all Cesare … ?
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?
Political art criticism is not a new development.
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…
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