Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, Metropolis and Nosferatu—names from Germany’s pre-Nazi cinema familiar to anyone with a passing interest in film history. They are included in the documentary From Caligari to Hitler along with a host of less familiar Weimar Republic directors and films that also deserve recognition. The documentary tries to take in Germany filmmaking from that era through a wide lens.
The title is taken from Siegfried Krakauer’s influential 1947 book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, and the documentary’s director, Rudiger Suchsland, puts that seminal study in context. Kraukauer was a sociologist as well as a film critic, a public intellectual who was, after fleeing the rise of Hitler, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation to write a book that would help explain the psyche of the German public through the popular culture they produced and consumed.
An associate of Theodor Adorno, Krakauer can be described as a Freudian Marxist and as such, he endeavored to fit the complexity of reality into a tidy enclosed system of his own device. That was his weakness. The strength of his book was its web of intriguing associations, its thesis that film (inadvertently or not) captures the texture of everyday reality more clearly than other art forms—and that those quotidian details can tell us more about a culture and a nation than the grand pronouncements of politicians, pundits and philosophers. From Caligari to Hitler was a journey into the unconscious of 1920s Germany as revealed through film; analyzing his subject, Krakauer found the rise of Nazism foreshadowed.
Suchsland’s documentary ponders many of the same questions, perhaps more open-endedly than Krakauer in our postmodern epoch when grand theories no longer hold sway. In the films he examines, Suchsland finds modernity and myth, laughter and terror, an embrace of chaos and a yearning for order. “What does cinema know that we don’t know?” he asks.
Unlike Krakauer, who followed German filmmaking into the Third Reich, Suchsland stops with Hitler’s ascent in 1933, bracketing his documentary with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). Tellingly, both concern murderous madmen who assume the shape of authority figures.
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