Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari
1919/GER 71m Dir: Robert Wiene
Original Screenplay
A fair comes to the town of Holstenwell and one of the exhibits is Dr. Caligari with his somnambulist, a man called Cesare who has been asleep for the entire 23 years of his life yet Caligari can control his actions. Frankly I would be somewhat skeptical to say the least. When best friends Alan and Francis visit the exhibit though Cesare predicts Alan will die the next dawn and is then brutally murdered, Francis sets out to find the culprit and his suspicions lie with Caligari and Cesare.
In many ways this does exactly what I would expect a silent horror film to do. There are very few horror scenes in the film and those that appear are not in any way graphic. The murder of Alan is shown in shadows and therefore the horror feels very tame by modern standards. It's the music though that does all the heavy lifting here and the tone of every scene is given through the music from the fun of the fair to the horror of the murder. The soundtrack sets the atmosphere and it makes the film far more unsettling then it would otherwise be.
The film has a great twist at the end when it transpires that the story is actually all in Francis' mind and he is a patient at the asylum. I've seen similar endings to plenty of other horror stories but this must surely be one of the earliest of it's type. The film plays around with mental states with most of the characters being depicted as mentally ill at one point or another.
There are perhaps clues in the design of the film that Francis' mind is not quite normal- either that or Holstenwell has a particularly ambitious architect. There are hardly any right angles in the film with every straight line being jagged and doors, gates and buildings all being irregular quadrilaterals. Every structure and landscape leans and twists in an unusual way and the shadows and streaks of light are painted onto the sets in jagged shapes. The intertitles use stylized, misshapen lettering. Even objects like chairs and books are placed randomly in rooms in a way no-one would ever do intentionally. It's a spiky, off-kilter world which makes sense if this is the image Francis has in his head.
I didn't completely love the story but the twist works well and the expressionist styling is incredible. Very few films go with an unusual style yet a nearly hundred year old film shows us how effective it can be when done well.
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