The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (U)

Event Reviews

• Richard Edmonds

  Conceived during the rise of Nazism in Germany, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" was initially described as
  "horrible" "terrifying" " a cinematic monstrosity" and also " enigmatic" "strangely moving" and so on.
  But most importantly this remarkably haunting masterpiece of early German Gothic film was viewed quite rightly as deeply influential,
  and its value in that context which includes "film noir", "horror shockers" etc..has affected film makers right up to today.
  A small German town is waving its flags, setting up booths for entertainments and sideshows and vending cheap food,
  and for its citizens.excitement is in the air, since it is clearly carnival time.
  Switch to a local government office where a heavily-built man with bulging eyes, pebble lens glasses, shaggy white hair and an
  overcoat to his ankles, is pestering the town clerk for permission to set up his side-show. The town clerk is resistant, the white-haired showman
  is not to be refused permission and finally wins.
  Remember the film was made during the last decade of the silent era, so the miming which gets the story across is several times life size.
  Yet you are caught up immediately and speech would somehow be an irrelevance.
  We move back to the fair, now armed with a certificate giving him permission to present his show, Dr. Caligari begins to work
  the crowd with the promise of a sommnambulist who has been asleep for 22 years. Meanwhile we learn the townsfolk are bedevilled with a serial killer
  who murders at night.
  Caligari reveals to the awe-struck crowd a sinister coffin. Inside is a tall figure with the face and shagged out expression of Boris Karloff ( who came later, and whose movie persona of monstrous horror, could well--and probably was---taken from Caligari's sommnambulis)t.
  The eerie value of this movie is oddly affecting, since the mise-en-scene is based upon Expressionism, an art form where what you feel in your nerve endings is
  what you paint. And so the views of the town roofs and streets resemble art book illustration of the time, shadowy, vaguely erotic and strangely worrying.Harry Clarke comes to mind
  The young Conrad Veidt played the killer sommnambulist with an amazing facility for shaping up horror. His eyes alone, opening like pools of darkness, would stop your heart beating. tAt one point he slides into his victtim's bedroom at night,admires her then kills her, throws her over his shoulder like a sack of vegetables, and finally disposes of the corpse somwhere in this unreal town, and all of it carried out in a hypnotic state under Dr. Caligari's commands, the man behind the murders.
  Veidt learned his role well. He left Germany with the rise of Hitler and Jewish persecution and appeared as Von Strasser, the Nazi officer in the Hollywood film "Casablanca", eventually playing the chilling Vizier who could turn humans into dogs in the stupendous 1938 Korda movie "The Thief of Bagdad" with Sabu and John Justin--the finest Arabian Nights movie ever filmed.

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