The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

 Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"

Robert Wiene, a German film director during the silent years of cinema, directed one of the most important pieces of art ever put to screen. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is considered a masterpiece of visual expression and psychological horror. The film is an examination on authority, fear, and the blurred lines of perception between sanity and insanity. This haunting piece would go on to inspire the German Expressionist movement of the 1920s, and would forever be associated with the fear and disorder of the Weimar Republic.

The film was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, who both experienced a distrust of authority during the first World War. Janowitz served as an officer, which left him embittered and a pacifist. Mayer, during the war, feigned insanity to avoid military service, leading to an intense examination from a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist served as the template for the character of Dr. Caligari. The writing pair first conceived the story when visiting  a circus sideshow in Berlin. The sideshow, called "Man or Machine?" showcased a man performing various stunts and feats of strength after being hypnotized. Janowitz and Mayer used this notion of hypnotized individuals and combined it with their experiences of deranged authority figures to construct a premise in which power over the conscious mind becomes questioned. 

The film begins with a man named Francis sitting on a bench complaining to an older man that spirits have driven him away from his family and home. Just then, a dazed woman passes them, as in a ghostly trance. Francis explains that the woman is his fiance who has suffered a great ordeal. The rest of the film is a flashback, bringing the recollections of Francis to life. Francis and his friend Alan are competing for the affection of Jane, so they take her to a town fair. There, they see a sideshow presented by a man named Dr. Caligari, as he introduces a 'sleepwalker' named Cesare. He tells the crowd that Cesare, once awakened, will perform his every command. Not only this, Cesare can see past and future. After awakening Cesare, Alan walks up and asks him when he will die, to which Cesare responds, "You will die at dawn!" This premonition ends up being true, as the police find Alan's dead body murdered in his home. Believing that Caligari or Cesare had something to do with Alan's death, Francis spies on them throughout the night. However, Caligari keeps a doll of Cesare as a prop, while the real Cesare goes out and tries to kill Lucy. The murder gets botched, as Cesare runs off, chased by an angry mob, and then dies. Francis learns of Caligari's deception and chases him to a nearby insane asylum, only to learn that Caligari is the asylum's director. Francis and the other doctors confront Caligari, only for him to go mad and have to be restrained. Caligari then becomes a patient in his own asylum. Once we return back to Francis in the present, we learn that Francis is actually a patient in the asylum, believing that Caligari has lured and trapped him there. 

Hermann Warm, the designer of the film's sets, believed that naturalism was wrong for the film's subject. He instead recommended a graphic, fantastical style, in which the images would be visionary, nightmarish, and out of the ordinary. He envisioned an expressionist style, like that of a painting. He also felt that painting forms and shadows directly onto sets would ensure a dark and unreal look. Wiene accepted these visual aesthetics, not for any artistic reasons, but because Expressionism was a fashionable artform at the time, which he believed would add to the commercial viability of the film. Not only this, the painted canvases as scenery, with paper as its construction material proved enormously inexpensive. This was very important for production, as inflation and currency devaluation forced German film studios to find inexpensive projects. 

The film was shot entirely in studio without any exterior shots. This was considered unusual for the time, but Wiene felt this enabled the film's expressionist visual style. The relatively small size of the studio required sets not to exceed six meters in width and diameter. Because of this, the camerawork is fairly simple, alternating between medium shots and straight-on angles, with the occasional abrupt close-up to create a sense of shock. There is also a sparing use of editing, as most scenes follow others without intercutting. This gives the film more of a theatrical vibe, rather than a cinematic one. Heavy lighting is also used sparingly, which amplifies the darkness in the frames. Lighting is, however, used to create visual distortions and to cast shadows.

The visual style of the film creates a dark, radical expression of the unsettling themes. The deliberate distortions in perspective, form, dimension, and scale creates a topsy-turvy and unbalanced appearance. The sets are full of sharp, pointed forms that extend from curving lines, full of both narrow and spiraling streets. This, as well as the landscapes that balance in unusual angles gives the impression of a paradoxical and disordered world, always on the verge of collapse. Black paint was painted on large canvases , rather than constructing an actual set. They also held shadows and streaks of light that were painted directly onto the set, which created a further distortion in perception and dimension. There are also real world objects that are intentionally distorted, like windows with uneven frames, doors that are not rectangular, chairs that are too tall, and trees that have twisting branches. This distorted reality enhances a sense of anxiety and terror in the viewer. This vision is that of a nightmare world, transformed by evil. Once it is revealed in the end that our story is the mental breakdown of an unreliable and unstable narrator, the deranged reality becomes figments of an internal landscape. With this comes the birth of Expressionist Cinema. The visual style of Expressionism, beginning with "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," reflects an emotional state, rather than an objective reality.

Many believed the film to be a representation of Germany during the war. It is understood that the character of Caligari represents the tyrannical German government, while Cesare represents the "common man of conditional obedience." Just like with soldiers in the war, Caligari instructs the sleepwalking Cesare to "kill or be killed," and enact his ultimate whim. The control Caligari yields over Cesare and others creates this sense of moral perversion. In his book, "From Caligari to Hitler," Siegfried Kracauer argues that the existence of the characters represents Germany's "collective soul." He feels that Caligari and Cesare are premonitions of Adolf Hitler's rule over Germany, and that his control over the weak-willed, puppet-like somnambulist prefigures aspects of the mentality that allowed the Nazi party to rise. He calls Caligari's use of hypnotism to impose his will foreshadows Hitler's "manipulation of the soul." Kracauer described the film as an example to Germany's obedience to authority and failure or unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority, and reflects a "general retreat" into a shell that occurred in post-war Germany. Cesare represents this collective retreat into a sleepwalking state, enacting out weak-willed obedience. Like Caligari, the film is full of tyrannical control. Authorities sit atop high perches above the people they deal with and hold offices out of sight at the end of long, foreboding stairways. There are other authority figures like authoritarian police and bureaucrats. These characters represent rigid control. Chaos, on the other hand, is represented through the crowds of people, like at the town fair, or the paranoid crowds full of fear over the murders as they inhabit this nightmare world. Kracauer argues that there is no middle ground between the two extremes of control and chaos in the film, forcing the characters and the viewer to embrace either insanity or authoritarianism, leaving no room for actual human freedom. As he writes, "[The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari' exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos, and facing a desperate situation: any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of confusion." 

With the final scene, the film itself represents ultimate authority, as it informs the viewer that what it just witnessed with their own eyes was a delusion. It presents to us the fallacy of our own human perceptions. Like Caligari using the unconscious mind of the sleepwalker, the film treats us the same. It tells us that the images we're associating with may be utterly false. Like Francis's perceptions of what really happened, our own perceptions get called into question. Are we really the sleepwalkers? After all, an authoritative figure (the film) provided a seemingly truthful reality, which led our perceptions to assume a state of objective truth. However, the final twist questions that truth all together, leading us to question the authority that provided it. The film demonstrates how easily corruptible our own subjectivity is, and how easily it can be manipulated. Like the sleepwalker, we too have come under a hypnotic spell, led to believe a fabricated reality. 

Because of this intentional confusion at the end, it is hard to know who exactly is insane or trustworthy. Is Francis an unreliable narrator? Or is he correct in thinking that Caligari has orchestrated his doomed fate, placed under his ultimate control? Because of this ambiguity in what is real or who is insane, we begin to question the nature of the truth in reality itself. As historian Stephen Brockman puts it, "In the end, the film is not just about one unfortunate madman, it is about an entire world that is possibly out of balance." 

Vincent LoBrutto writes that the film can be seen as a social or political analogy of "the moral and physical breakdown of Germany at the time." This breakdown of moral safety and notions about one's own sanity contributed to Cesare-like sleepwalking effects on citizens. The collective fear and trauma of a nation would develop into what Sigmund Freud would later refer to as the longing for protection by a tyrannical father figure, or what Kracauer characterized as "asocial authority." This, on top of the film's ability to demonstrate the manipulations of our own perceptions, created a piece of art that has had a lasting impact. In retrospect, many consider "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" to be the first horror film, showcasing the human desire for instilled conditioning to combat chaos and confusion. This instilled conditioning creates a sleepwalking puppet - an individual willing to sink to the depth of moral corruption as an antidote to disorder and death.