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Source: Filmphest The-artifice
Dr. Caligari and his mysterious slave
- the black and white phantom who lives in a cabinet and goes forth in his
sleep to do his master's bidding. the weirdest characters ever seen on the
screen and the most daringly different picture ever seen.
Plot Summary
A young man named Francis recounts a fantastic story taking place
in a North German town where a number of brutal murders have been occuring.
Francis and his friend, Alan, visit a traveling fair where one of the acts is a
certain Dr. Caligari's presentation of a hypnotized sleepwalker named Cesare
who can tell the future. Cesare predicts Alan will be dead by the next morning,
and he is in fact murdered in the night. Franics becomes suspicious of Caligari
and Cesare, but another man is incorrectly blamed with the crimes. However,
Cesare later abducts Francis's fiancee Jane, and it becomes evident that
Caligari was commanding the sleepwalker to carry out the murders. Francis
chases Caligari into an insane asylum where it turns out Caligari is the
director who has himself gone mad. Dr. Caligari is captured and incarcerated in
his own institution. The flashback ends, and it turns out Francis is actually a
patient in the asylum, as are Jane and Cesare. The benevolent Dr. Caligari is
the director, and he states that Francis suffers from peculiar delusions.
Caligari and Expressionism
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is often hailed as a
masterpiece of German expressionism. Kasimir Edschmid defines
expressionism as “a reaction against the atom-splitting of Impressionism, which
reflects the iridescent ambiguities, disquieting diversity, and ephemeral hues
of nature." To the expressionist, it would be absurd to reproduce the world as purely and
simply as it is ; instead, the artist focuses on feelings and
perceptions, which reflect expressionism’s relationship to modernism.
Expressionist artists commit themselves
to impulses, which results in the desire to express emotion through extreme
visuals. Often, aesthetic value is exchanged for emotional power, and
though expressionist artwork may not be the most pleasing to the eye, it
nonetheless elicits an emotional response from its viewer. This is
achieved in Caligari through its unique set design.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has become synonymous with
cinematic expressionism. The visuals in the film pay homage to the expressionism in painting as
practiced in the 1900s and 1910s . Reality is reproduced as if
it were reflected in a fun house mirror. The distortions, however, do not
obscure the objects but instead render them in distorted shapes.
Elongated shadows are painted onto set walls, and the streets wind crookedly
past houses that are equally crooked.
Context of Caligari
The nation of Germany was
devastated after its defeat in World War I. Its imperial government replaced by
a democratic system known as the Weimar Republic, Germany faced strict economic
sanctions from the victorious Allied nations and massive resource shortages.
700,000 Germans died of hunger in the postwar period. For the citizens still
alive, though, the war continued to take a toll. While the nation’s exterior
shined of industrialized modernity, the “double wound of war and defeat
festered beneath the glittering surface.” The morale and spirits of German
civilians were shattered to the point where many were looking for a sense of
escape from the realities around them. This effect was even more sharply felt
by veterans of the war, though. Hans Janowitz, one of the writers of The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was an officer during the conflict, and became a
pacifist afterward after witnessing the horrors of war. Janowitz and fellow
pacifist Carl Mayer were both so affected by the war that they wrote The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a response to the unchecked governmental
authority that the war was both born of and nourished by. All told, the effects
of World War I profoundly impacted the lives of German citizens, causing many of
them to dejectedly turn inward.
The postwar period was also the
breeding ground for many artistic endeavors, however. Many of these
developments are vital in deconstructing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and
its relationship to the context in which it is made. A key movement that arose
in Germany during this period was Expressionism. Emphasizing distorted
landscapes and subjects, the movement intended to give expression to things
which were beyond words. Expressionists sought to “emphasize subjects suggestive
of interior states,” and to reflect on inward identity. The expressionist
movement is thus related to postwar Germany because it reflects Kracauer’s
assertion that civilians were eager to “withdraw from a harsh outer world into
the intangible realm of the soul.” Expressionism manifested itself in film
through the use of distorted sets and exaggerated performances, aiming to
create a subjective experience – a goal that was in line with the movement as a
whole.
Expressionism was just one major
artistic advance that led to the uniqueness of The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari. Closely related to the movement’s prominence in film during the
early postwar period was the expansion of the German filmmaking industry. Due
to high inflation rates, German companies were able to make movies and expand
their business with much lower costs than in other countries. The fiscal ease
with which studios could make lavish, elaborately-designed films coincided with
the building of more movie theaters, creating a larger market for an audience
that wanted to spend their money before inflation rendered it useless. This
ability to construct sets that could faithfully capture the spirit of
expressionism was crucial to the movement’s transition to film. Indeed, when
the economy began to recover and more constraints were applied to film
production, markedly fewer Expressionist films were made.