The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Essay Example

understand the qualities of the style, which are exemplified in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

This film features all of the primary elements we associate with German Expressionist films. The character at the heart of this story of madness, paranoia and obsession, is Dr. Caligari, an evil anti-hero. He hypnotizes his somnambulist Cesare to commit the nightly murders of his enemies, which thus forces the exploration of the criminal underworld.

The film is set on a fairground overlooking rooftops and in an insane asylum, in short: typical urban settings. The story is creepy, and deals with murders and monsters in the human form. It deals with the idea of being insane, and of living in an insane world. However, the most striking element is how the production design of the film portrays this insanity. Stairways, railings, windows, doors and mirrors are strangely and starkly angular, and jut out into scenes, resulting in an unsettling effect.

These architectural elements were often painted on flats, by the designers Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig. Frames are skewed and compositions are unbalanced. Foreboding shadows and silhouettes, created by chiaroscuro lighting or actual painting, have a presence of their own in the film, and produce an uneasy tension throughout the film. The acting is expressionist, meaning that the outer reflects the inner (Louw 2008). Make-up and costumes are exaggerated – particularly of the two “evil” characters, Dr. Caligari and Cesare.

The film is cut with intertitles, creating a splintered atmosphere (Louw 2008). These extremely stylized aspects of the film are justified by the fact that the story is told from a subjective point of view. It is as if the mise-en-scene comes from the

mind of a raging mad-man. This distorted perspective reflects the state of the human psychic condition, and the haunted world of the protagonist. Film noir came about in the 1940s, and is categorized as starting with the 1941 film by John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, and lasting a golden age until Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, made in 1958 (Dirks 2008). Film noir is a French term, literally meaning “black cinema”.

It refers to the dark nature of films which fall into this style, which is the defining characteristic of film noir, and was highly influenced by German Expressionism and the above-mentioned aspects of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In “The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir”, Foster Hirsch states that “in visual design, noir recalls the stark night world transformations of German Expressionism” (p. 23). This can refer to film noir’s use of expressionistic devices, such as black and white film, chiaroscuro lighting, skewed framing, shadows, silhouettes, oblique lighting and unbalanced compositions. All these filmic attributes can be found, as mentioned above, in German Expressionist films, particularly The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Film noir also makes use of the character of the anti-hero, for example, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941). This is also an important element of German Expressionist films. It is also important to note that both German Expressionism and film noir refer to periods of time after a World War. This leads both styles of film to reflect the preoccupation with tensions, paranoia, crime, mistrust, despair and alienation of the “dark days” of those time periods.

As is pointed out by Paul Coates in “The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and

the Image of Horror”: “The rooms crosshatched with light and shadow by blinds, the flashing neon, indicative of a preoccupation with light effects and the elusiveness of reality in a treacherous world.This preoccupation is one with the vulnerability and intermittence of the individual…” (p. 170. ) One can see how The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and other German Expressionist films, have influenced film noir. However, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s influence reaches even further, to the depths of the horror film. A Welsh film student from Coleg Glan Hafren, known only as “d00gl” on www.everything2.com, wrote: “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was also the first ever Horror movie and as such paved the way filmmakers to come. German Expressionist cinema can be seen as the roots of the horror genre, being the first to show the darker sides of humanity and society in general.”

The demonic fun fair, the sinister, amoral authoritarian dual-figure of Dr. Caligari, the sadly deranged character of Francis (whose insanity the audience sees in the set) , and the frightening “alive-but-not-awake” monster, Cesare, who bids his masters murderous duties, are all motifs which have been used and adapted for horror films since 1921. Hypnosis, human experimentation, the anti-hero’s crippled walk are also well used in modern horror films. Expressionistic devices used in both German Expressionism and film noir, such as chiaroscuro lighting, shadows, skewed frames and unbalanced compositions, serve the horror genre well, in creating suspense. In Caligari’s Children, Prawer explores, in detail, the influence of the figure of Dr. Caligari.

Firstly, Caligari is a “piece of scene-design”. Without Caligari’s part in the visual pattern of the film, the film would not be

nearly as successful. The contribution of the aesthetics of the anti-hero in horror films has since been recognized as extremely important. Secondly, Caligari is a “showman”, who, for the benefit of the fairground’s audience’s interest, is deliberately exaggerated. This, in part, reveals to the film’s audience why they are interested in the watching film. This technique foreshadows horror films like ¬The Mark of the Vampire, Mad Love and Peeping Tom, which also use this technique.

Thirdly, Caligari is a multiple personality whose faces are shown through the marked costume and make-up.He is both a menacing fairground showman, and a respectable director of a mental home. This foreshadows the Jekyll and Hyde type films. Finally, Caligari is the victim of some type of demonic possession.

He becomes obsessed with becoming the 18th century mystic character of the original Caligari. This echoes many horror films, such as The Exorcist and The Haunted. It is clear that the influence of German Expressionism, and more particularly Robert Wiene’s 1921 production of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, reaches ahead of its time in film history. To name a few direct influences: Karloff’s “Caligari-like” make-up in Young’s The Bells (1926) and his “Cesar-like” stance in Whale’s Frankenstein, The “Caligarized” Paris of Florey’s Murders in the rue Morgue (1932), the studio skies and the eerily lit, angular attic-scenes in Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), the shadow-and-light play in films by Karl Freund, the “Gothic” camera-work of George Robinson, and Mario Bava’s “frank acknowledgements of the painted nature of some of his sets” (Prawer p.167. ) Obliviously, film audiences have and continue to be confronted by images that originate from Robert Wiene’s magical

work.