The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and the expressionist nightmare
Painted sets, somnambulism and madness: the history and meaning of Robert Wiene's 1920 film, the manifesto of German expressionist cinema.
Slanting streets, blade-shaped windows, shadows painted directly onto the backdrops: anyone seeing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari for the first time feels they are entering a painting rather than a film. Directed by Robert Wiene and released in Berlin in February 1920, the film became the symbol of German expressionist cinema and one of the first great examples of a cinema in which the visible world reflects the state of the soul.
A tale of hypnosis and the fairground
The screenplay was the work of Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz and was produced by Erich Pommer's Decla. At its centre is a fairground showman, Dr Caligari, played by Werner Krauss, who exhibits a somnambulist called Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt. The figure of the sleepwalker governed by another's will drew on a subject much debated at the time: hypnosis, the animal magnetism inherited from Mesmer, and the fear that a mind could be led to commit acts against its own nature.
The film also introduces a framing story that alters the meaning of the whole tale and leaves the viewer uncertain about what is real. According to Janowitz's later testimony, this frame was not part of the original project and was added during production; the question is still debated by historians, not least because the authors' recollections were written down many years later.
Sets as states of mind
The sets were created by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, painters and architects connected with Berlin artistic circles. Instead of building realistic settings, they painted light and shadow on canvas, along with impossible perspectives and bending walls. The choice also had practical reasons, at a time of post-war electricity shortages, but it became a language: the landscape turned into an expression of the characters' fear and alienation.
The actors' bodies share in this vision too. Veidt moves along the walls like a living shadow, his face pale and his eyes ringed; Krauss, hunched and in a top hat, seems to have stepped out of a Romantic print. Heavy make-up, slowed gestures and intertitles decorated with irregular lettering complete a work in which every element is stylised.
Readings and legacy
In 1947 the critic Siegfried Kracauer, in his book From Caligari to Hitler, interpreted the film as the reflection of a German society inclined to submit to authoritarian figures. Lotte Eisner, in her study L'écran démoniaque of 1952, placed it instead within the long German Romantic tradition of the double, the fantastic and the demonic, from E. T. A. Hoffmann onwards. Both readings shaped the way the film was seen throughout the twentieth century.
Dr Caligari is also a modern image of the magician: no longer the alchemist in his laboratory, but the charlatan scientist who uses another person's mind as his instrument. In him the fairground conjuror meets the psychiatrist, the quack meets authority. This is why the film still speaks to those who study the relationship between art and esotericism: it shows how the ancient fears of possession and occult control migrated, at the start of the century, into the language of psychology and cinema.