Shape

Style and content in Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari

The aim of this academic essay is to explain how the style and content of Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari are representative of its time and place of production. I wish to present the findings of the relevant research in an objective manner. As the subject of the research I chose the film Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari. One of the most important reasons for research is to broaden my critical and historical awareness of cinema as an art form and as social institution. When I started this essay I had several questions in my mind such as – ‘What is style (form)? What is theme (content)? How do they work in film? How do they work in my chosen film?’. Practical ways of filmmaking, construction and visualisation of stories, graphical representation of moods, feelings and psychological states are of my interest.

I first read about this film in the book Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel, who writes ‘this extraordinary work - in terms of impact, one of the most important films ever made – is a metaphysical construct disguised as a melodramatic thriller’ (Vogel, 2005, p.53). After watching the film while taking notes of my thoughts related to it, the starting point of my research was the college library where related books are available to be read. The Cinema Book by Pam Cook was suggested in the essential reading list of the brief as it is a good source of information for any film related research. In fact, it contains essays on German cinema, German Expressionism, art cinema and on Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari. The film was produced in Germany, 1919. Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari is considered the first and most important film of German Expressionist cinema, which lasted a decade. It is a black and white silent film with the runtime of 78 minutes. It is a good example for analysing form and content. It requires a general understanding of the concept of expressionism, which is a rather deep subject.

The content of the film mainly comes from its two scriptwriters Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer who first imagined their story on screen. Their story is about a somnambulist hypnotised by a mad scientist that makes him commit murders in a small town. According to Siegfried Kracauer, they wished to express their feelings toward the system they lived in. The Czech Janowitz ‘settled in Berlin, met Carl Mayer there, and soon found out that this eccentric young man , who had never before written a line, shared his revolutionary moods and views. Why not express them on screen?’ (Kracauer, 1974, p.63). They saw connotations in this story for their situation at the time in post war Germany. The mad scientist Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare represented the relationship of authority and the individual, where there is a lust for domination and violation of human rights. (Kracauer, 1974, p.65). ‘According to the pacifist minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dim design of portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compulsory military service, is drilled to kill and to be killed’ (Kracauer, 1974, p.65). By the time it reached production – in the Decla studio - the initial story was framed with a framing story where Janowitz and Mayer’s idea is a hallucination of a deranged person while Caligari is sane. The framing story was against the writers’ intentions and created controversy. The theme of the film was conventional and typical of the detective films produced at the time. The original script, which was lost and then recently found, adds to debates regarding the form of the film. Robinson writes that ‘There is no inherent Expressionist content in the original scenario’ (Robinson, 1997, p.39).

The Expressionist style, which breaks with convention, was added as a dressing of the content. A number of factors contribute to the final outlook, which is the work of a group of people rather than a single author. There were discussions regarding the style of the film. To achieve success and to impress the audience of the time the designers of Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari decided on using an expressionist outlook, which was currently fashionable on stage. Painters Hermann Warm, Walter Rohrig and Walter Reimann were hired to design the settings for the film. Production leader Rudolph Meinert ‘wanted the style and production to appear crazy… as crazy as could be. The film would then be a success as a sensation, regardless of whether the press turned out negative or positive, whether the critics killed it or praised it as art – either way the experiment would be in profit’ Warm (cited in Robinson, 1997, p.22). The designers studied recent stage settings in theatre, especially those of Max Reinhardt. Apart from the designers, decisions of the producer, work of the director, authors comments, audience expectations, recent artistic fashions and budget were affecting production. After pre-production, initial sketches and plans ‘shooting began at the end of December 1919 and lasted till the end of January 1920’ (Robinson, 1997, p.24).

What is the Expressionist style? In Robinson’s book I found a description by John Willett that highlights the broadness of the term:

Expressionism is normally:

1.     a family characteristic of modern art, literature, music and theatre, from the term of the century to the present day

2.     a particular modern German movement which lasted roughly between 1910 and 1922

3.     a quality of expressive emphasis and distortion which may be found in works of art of any people or period (cited in Robinson, 1997, p35)

Expressionist literature and painting was concerned with the visual realisation of emotion and the images in the mind. Dark psychological subjects such as paranoia, anxiety, or the fear of cities, authority and machines were often depicted. Expressionist painters in the beginning of the 20^th century opposed Impressionism and opposed realism. Painting was used to communicate more subjective experiences of the world rather than to create principally correct images. Photographs were already able to capture visual correctness. Expression of emotions, moods, psychological states were in the centre of expressionist art. Comparing paintings from the two different perspectives highlight important differences. The Origin of the World by Gustave Corbet from 1866 is an almost photographic representation of a nude, in which the main attention is on the technical aspects and on the principal correctness of the creation process. Kirchner’s Nude in Orange and Yellow shows no respect to classic principles, uses unrealistic colours and the emphasis is not on the technical aspects anymore. Colours and shapes become symbolic and represent an inner point of view of their creator. By the time of producing Caligari, Expressionism in Germany became commonly accepted. ‘Far from being a strange, frightening challenge for the public, then, expressionism seems to have offered a positive attraction at the moment when Meinert and Wiene adopted the proposal of Warm, Reimann and Rohrig to do Caligari in Expressionist style’ (Robinson, 1997, p.38).

By analysing a scene I wish to reflect on possible perspectives I found in different writings on the film’s mise en scene (decor and scenery, lighting, acting, filmic attributes etc.). The scene starts with the text ‘Night Again’ at about 39 minutes and lasts until 44. There are no people at the fair, the protagonist sneaks silently up to Caligari’s house where the doctor and the somnambulist are both asleep. Then (at the same time in the story) we see the somnambulist walking down an empty street making his way to his next victim. It is an unearthly situation, plays with the mind, the viewer wonders how is it possible for the somnambulist to be in two places at the same time. The scenery reminds me of watching a theatre play on stage. Background environments (streets, city landscape, windows etc.) are painted on in an unusual way, which is not following the rules of reality. It seems to be an expanded view of stage performance with closer viewpoints. The shots were made in studio environments with constructed props. Acting is again unrealistic, body gestures are exaggerated, characters have heavy make-up. It is ‘robot-like, as if the false curves and movements of the decor being duplicated by the protagonists’ (Vogel, 1974, p.53). There is a certain rhythm to the scene. At times characters move very slowly and then suddenly speed up. The rhythm changes according to the narrative. Characters interacting with the painted backgrounds create in the viewer a sense of looking at living drawings. The somnambulist carries his victim up drawn buildings as if moving deeper inside a three-dimensional drawing. ‘The abstraction and total distortion of the Caligari sets are seen at their most extreme in the vision of the prison-cell, with its verticals narrowing as they rise like arrow-heads’ (Eisner, 1973, p.24). Colour seems to have importance in a symbolic way. The bedroom scene with the sleeping woman is divided into two separate areas of colour: one black, and another white (dark and light). The innocent female victim sleeps unconsciously in the white space, covered in white clothes. The somnambulist dressed in black enters the scene through the dark area and slowly penetrates the opposite side. Aspects of the scene can translate into different meanings and analysing the scene from different perspectives provide food for thought. The contrast of the white dagger with the dark background creates an impressive effect. What is the meaning of that moment? For instance, one translation could be that the white knife matches the lightness of the sleeping woman hence unable to harm her. It could also be treated as a mere compositional element, which looks visually impressive or one that contributes to the graphic communication of the story. The camera is still and ‘largely immobile (except for a few tracking shots), in middle distance; there is barely any editing; camera angles are conventional. The only concession to film technique is the use of a circular or diamond shaped iris device…’ (Vogel, 1974, p.53). Diamond shape and circular frames are unusual in film history. There is still, today, a solid convention of using rectangular format frame when compositing films. The scene uses close-ups in a tabloid manner, where the close-up is an enlargement of the actual scene. The camera occasionally cuts away to parallel happenings in the storyline. We see people waking up in another room upon hearing the screaming of the attacked woman. The editing uses fade-ins and fade-outs to change between scenes.

Although the kind of painted backgrounds the film featured were rarely adapted in future movies in the exact same way (Bergfelder in Cook, 2007, p.210), the expressionist style and storytelling immensely influenced filmmaking. The character of a manipulative Caligari is a main subject of German Expressionist cinema and recurs, for instance, in Murnau’s Nosferatu or in Lang’s Metropolis. The murderous somnambulist resembles Norman Bates, or Peeping Tom. The entertaining shock and fear effect of the film was emphasised and influenced a sea of horror while the techniques of German Expressionism were often used in Film Noir. Amos Vogel lists films along with Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari under the label ‘Expressionism: The Cinema of Unrest’ such as Death by Hanging, The Cremator or Viva La Muerte. He also considers expressionism, along surrealism and dada, a ‘most subversive tendency of our century’ (Vogel, 2005, p.45). Arrabal’s Viva La Muerte leads to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who takes filmic expressionism to its extreme and is obsessed with visualising subjective content that comes from unconscious levels of the mind. Realism and expressionism can go hand in hand as one can see in films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone where a dream scene is used to symbolise certain meanings. Federico Fellini filmed in studio systems and constructed his memories in a highly subjective approach. Budget enabled his films to give realistic representations of his imagination as it is seen in Satyricon, Casanova or in a rather cheerful Amarcord. Representation of ‘images of the mind’ (Eisner, 1973, p24) on screen was experimented with endlessly and the process still goes on.

Bibliography

Cook, P. (2007) The Cinema Book. 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute.

Eisner, L. H. (1973) The Haunted Screen. California: University of California Press.

Kracauer, S. (1974) From Caligari to Hitler. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Rees, A. L. (1999) A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute.

Robinson, D. (1997) Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari. London: British Film Institue.

Vogel, A. (2005) Film as a Subversive Art. C. T. Editions Ltd.

Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari (1929) Directed by Robert Wiene. Weimar: Decla-Bioscop [Video: DVD]