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Silent 101Film 4 of 20
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
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Robert Wiene's 1920 Decla film is the one people mean when they say German Expressionism. A carnival doctor exhibits Cesare, a somnambulist who can tell you the hour of your death. Conrad Veidt plays the sleepwalker. Werner Krauss is Caligari. Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig painted the town: crooked streets, shadows inked on the floor, rooms that refuse a right angle. Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz wrote the script. There is a frame story. What you do with it is the argument the film has been having since the premiere.
In three programmes
The camera is inside a mind. The sets are painted crooked, the shadows are painted on, and the frame story asks whose mind it is. Every later film that used a set to say what a character feels starts here.
Start here because the argument starts here: a town painted crooked, and a frame story that asks whether the crookedness belongs to the world or to the man telling you about it. Everything else in this collection is a reply.
The Supernatural and the Occult
The sets are a mind. Painted shadows, streets that lean, a sleepwalker who tells you the hour of your death. Nothing in the frame is supernatural except the frame. The uncanny here is a set designer's decision, and it never needed a ghost.
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