The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Not rated, but this movie is about a serial murderer who walks in his sleep.  It's more creepy than it is outright scary.  But I would put it more intense than some of the Universal Monster movies. That's an entirely subjective take, by the way.  I just find this movie more upsetting than stuff like Frankenstein or Dracula.

DIRECTOR: Robert Wiene

I'm shocked that I don't have this on here either.  Okay, shocked is a strong word.  I know that I kinda / sorta watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari two years ago.  And also, Chris Jordan, I'm not going to watch Dr. Caligari from the '90s.  I know you love it.  I know you think it is genius.  I'm good.  For anyone who is not Chris Jordan, I show this movie with my unit on German Expressionism.  For some reason, I used to show M, but the ultimate example of Expressionism comes from Caligari.  The funny thing is, this was more an experiment on how varying groups of audiences are.  When I showed this movie two years ago to my last film class, they could not be more bored.  This film class couldn't get enough of it.  I had kids who said they couldn't do silent film and then 180'd when it came to this one.

Sure, it helps that it is about a serial murderer who kills in his sleep.  Sure, it also helps that Cesare is creepy as heck juxtaposed to a nightmare set behind him.  But I love how polarizing this movie is.  Do I acknowledge that silent film requires a bit of investment?  Sure.  Even I have to psych myself up for silent film from time to time.  But of all the silent film out there, expressionism is the way to go.  Part of that comes down to the fact that silent film has to be a visual thing.  It seems a little obvious and only movies with subtitles really get us to think this way, but you need to actively watch a silent film.  I'm good about throwing my phone out of reach during movies.  Sometimes, I go crawling back if the movie isn't keeping my attention.  Also, I'm old and we have to watch TV with the lights off so the baby falls asleep.  But you know who else is good at falling asleep when the lights are off?  This guy.  So asking people to watch silent film is daunting.  But I would argue that Dr. Caligari is one of those movies that really is enhanced by total darkness.

The philosophy of expressionism involved the notion that film should be dreams come to light.  Wiene stresses this with his sets, which are distortions of reality to the extreme.  I mean, Tim Burton wishes he had the freedom of Robert Wiene.  But even more than the set is the use of darkness. Wiene is aware of the lighting that other films of the era are doing.  Sure, the Germans pioneered the use of lighting in cinema.  But with Caligari, it seems like he's taking the constraints of the medium and using it to his advantage. There's the reveal of the somnambulist's face (also, if nothing else, you learn the technical term for "sleepwalker"!), an iris of light directly on him.  It creates an unholy halo around the killers face, accentuated by almost silly makeup under his eyes.  I say "silly" because at no moment do you question whether or not that is makeup. But for some reason, it really works.  I'm going to be an advocate for this movie because I like it and I got excited that my students liked it, but I will have to raise some questions that might be a little harsh.  I wonder if the absurd makeup and the surrealists sets work because we're giving them a little bit of a pass. Like, I love it.  Aesthetically, Dr. Caligari works for me.  But, I don't know if we can pull that card today. My brain is constantly running the script, "Well, it's German and old. That makes it cool."

It might be why I refuse to give the '90s Caligari a try.  (I watched a trailer, Chris.  Everything in my brain and body screamed "Nope" a thousand times.  I couldn't even get through the whole trailer.) Wiene's Caligari feels bold and earnest.  The Germans were obsessed with psychology and the mind during this time period.  These were pre-Nazi Germans.  Think Cabaret era Germans.  Just because I want to imbue the movie with my meaning, I'm going to.  I know that there's tons of analysis on Caligari.  Some I've read, most I haven't.  But it feels like Wiene is commenting on the concept of culpability.  This is post-Great War.  The country is in decline (as Nationalism slowly starts brewing) and Europe is scrapped. Wiene is the representative of this liminal Germany.  They used to be this land of plenty and a leader on the global scale.  Then they started trench warfare and mountains were flattened.  Fundamentally, this has to be a crisis of identity.  As a guy who might be living in a similar liminal stage in the United States with the threat of Trump returning, I get it.

Caligari is the danger of potential.  He's older in this in a place of power. He is the big fish in the little pond that is the mental institution.  His age reflects the generation of leaders who have the mentality of "could" rather than "should."  The fact that Cesare is a young man, emaciated with a shock of black hair (sorry, I'm also teaching Lord of the Flies right now), he is the younger generation.  He is the one that they sent off to war.  Caligari doesn't get his hands dirty.  The killing is almost a thought experiment to him.  The fact that Caligari got his name and this entire plan from hundreds of years ago reflects the notion that Germany wanted to go back to the old ways.  Cesare, despite the fact that the killing is all done by his hand, ultimately has no control over the killing.  He's repulsed by the notion of killing when he meets beauty, but he is still unable to make choices on his own.  The psychological need to say that someone out there is pulling all of our strings, yet we are the killers kind of works historically.  (I say "we" as if I was a German youth.)  That chaos of the background reflects the chaos of war.  Even returning to Berlin after the decimation abroad, everything has a skewed version of itself.

Like, we get that the mental institution is a mental institution, despite the concaving doors.  I actually kind of like that the most normal looking set in the entire movie is the ballroom of the mental institution.  The one place where things make a bit of sense are in that mental institution.  It's the world outside that is insane.  Listen, I don't think you can get too heady with the expressionists, so I'm going to push a little harder.  Again, that's the great thing about analysis.  As long as you can back it up, you probably aren't outright wrong. (Okay, there's Wiene's intention, but any English teacher worth his salt acknowledges that the intention doesn't matter once something is published.) If the world of Caligari is the expressionist nightmare come to life and the ballroom of the mental institution is the only thing that almost resembles reality, is the absurd thing that people are trying to act normal in the face of insanity.  The real reason that I think the expressionist design works so well is that everyone is treating it like it is normal.  (Versus the trailer I saw for the '90s version, which had the performances mirror the insanity of the set design).  Pretending that life is normal after a war is insanity in itself.  People shouldn't be "life is normal."  

I spiraled after the American response to Covid.  It got bad.  When the Black Lives Matter protesters got fired upon by pepper spray and tear gas, I nearly lost my mind how calm everyone was.  Caligari and Cesare are definitely the villains of the piece, but they're insanity matches the horrors of the world around them.  (Again, cannot stress enough that people should not model behavior after these characters post collective trauma.)  But the fact that there is almost no acknowledgment of the horrors of Germany may reflect what is going on.  People are trying to act as if the world around them is normal and nothing in this is normal.  That disconnect is very real.  Sure, I'm doing the deep dive here.  But movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari allow you to do that.  I hate what I'm about to write, but A24 is modelled after the kind of horror that Wiene created.  You know that there's an entertainment valuie in the horror you are watching.  But the craftsmanship and the seriousness of the piece as a whole lends itself up for interpretation beyond the text.  (Almost like some kind of...subtext?)

The plot is insane and I still have a hard time making heads or tails of Acts V and VI.  But each time I watch this movie, I get a little stronger appreciation for the movie.  It's incredibly solid.  It might be my favorite silent movie.  Mind you, I have to do some rewatches to guarantee that.  Also, there's movies out there that I should have seen.  But as I have previously stated, it takes a little bit of determination and courage to tackle these films.