The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The 1920s 9 Is cinema an art form? The answer to this question might appear quite obvious nowadays, but in the early 1900s German intellectuals were fervently debating it. Produced right after World War I, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) offers its own solution to the problem by bringing various expressionistic techniques to the screen. Co-written by Carl Mayer, an important figure of the German film industry in the 1920s, the film relies upon an aesthetic of fragmentation that manifests itself first through the use of a framed narrative. Francis (Feher) tells the story of an old man named Caligari (Krauss) who holds a show at the local fair: he presents Cesare (Veidt), a cadaverous somnambulist who can supposedly predict the future. Meanwhile, a series of seemingly random murders—as well as an attempted kidnapping— occurs in town and everything leads to Caligari, but, as we go back to Francis, we learn that things aren’t always that clearcut. In fact, as the story unfolds, the spectators soon realize that each and every shot is conceived as a unity. Some of the most striking visuals in cinema history largely compensate for a THE CABINET oF DR. CAlIgARI 1920 (GErMany)