Public Domain
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was not the first horror film, but it is the first in the genre that continues to demand our attention. With its violent contrasts in light and shadow, the German production is also the first memorable film derived from the work of Expressionist playwrights and painters. Even the fonts of the credits and intertitles drip with anxiety.
Milwaukee will have the rare opportunity to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on a big screen at the Oriental Theatre as part of this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival. Caligari has become the canvas for contemporary musicians, composing and performing original music commenting on the film’s uncanny drama. The Anvil Orchestra (with Roger Miller of the postpunk band Mission of Burma) will perform at Caligari’s Oriental screening.
Public Domain
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari poster
The film’s screenwriters, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, may have intended the film as a metaphor on social control and the machinations of the powerful. Caligari’s titular character is a sinister figure in top hat, cane and long black coat, wearing an evil frown and wielding a walking stick. He’s the proprietor of a fairground sideshow starring Cesare, a somnambulant who lives inside a wooden box but when loosed at night by his master, creeps alongside buildings like a cat, perpetrating a series of killings. Turns out Caligari has a double identity. He’s not only a huckster playing to the fairground crowds but the director of an insane asylum. But during the production, the film’s director, Robert Wiene, felt compelled to frame the story with a prologue and an epilogue, indicating that the tale is the raving of an asylum inmate.
The writers were angered that Wiene softened their metaphorical denunciation of the European rulers who led the sleepwalking citizenry through the mass murders of World War I. Even so, Dr. Caligari continues to captivate for its visualizations, many of them painted on canvas. Everything on set is off kilter with walls assuming crazy angles and houses leaning impossibly over twisted streets. The world inhabited by Dr. Caligari’s characters is patently unreal for the film’s audience, but not for the characters who tramp around, unaware, in an artificial and false existence (The Matrix 80 years early?).
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was finally fully restored early this century, including the color tints of eerie green, unsettling yellow and shadowy blue-greys. Note to classic Hollywood fans: Conrad Veidt, starring as Cesare, fled Germany with the rise of Hitler and made a career out of playing Nazis, memorably Major Strasser in Casablanca.
7:30 p.m., April 25 at the Oriental Theatre. For tickets, https://mkefilm.org/mff24
