Somehow, a silent film managed to include a false framing device that serves to mislead the viewer and set up a twist ending straight out of a modern movie, a love triangle, a flashback within a flashback, multiple murders, a murder investigation with a falsely accused suspect, an abduction, and more.
Over a century after the invention of cinema, today’s filmmakers have no shortage of conventions to rely upon to tell their stories, narrative devices that audiences will be familiar with and respond to accordingly. These devices come in forms both large and small. From dozens of genres and subgenres that define certain aspects of the story and characters like slasher films or romantic comedies, to techniques that establish almost every element of a scene such as point of view shots or reverse shots. These conventions are so pervasive at this point, it’s not an exaggeration to say that in some cases at least, we watch a movie knowing almost everything that will happen beforehand. Whether we are watching a horror film that ends with some kind of final heroine running for her life from an implacable killer or a couple who appears incompatible at the start of the film ultimately realizing they are soulmates, walking off into the sunset together, we enjoy these movies at least partially because the creators follow the agreed upon formula and refuse to deviate from the proverbial script too much. In this view, a movie is about the journey – a thrill ride, a joy ride, an emotional ride – rather than the destination given we already know where we’re going in advance. Conversely, it’s also fair to say that many filmmakers who are considered creative or daring are so specifically because they break from these conventions. Rather than relying upon them in the agreed upon fashion, they use them to change direction on us suddenly, fashioning the unexpected out of the expected. If the romantic comedy ends with the lovers separated or no one survives the alien invasion, we are prone to question why. Why did the creators make the choice to defy convention and upend our expectations? Chances are, if the reason is meaningful in some sense, we will consider the film a success. If it’s not, we will wonder what they were thinking and consider it a failure, or at least an experiment gone wrong. In this view, these films are about both the journey and the destination. We are supposed to enjoy the journey, but likely find ourselves more interested in the unexpected destination. In fact, these techniques are so advanced in the modern era that film scholars and critics frequently refer to a language of cinema, that is “the methods and conventions of cinema that are used to communicate with the audience. This is often also referred to as visual storytelling, although this is only one part of cinematic language. Emotions and ideas are expressed in cinema visually through all types of techniques such as lighting, performance, mise-en-scéne, cinematography, editing and more.”
While this might seem obvious today, barely worth mentioning outside of a film studies class, it wasn’t always the case. Cinema is, afterall, an invented medium and in the grand scheme of art history, it was invented a very short period of time ago at that. When William Shakespeare revolutionized the theater, he was doing so within a tradition that dated back to the Ancient Greeks, giving him some 2,000 years of history to build upon. Filmmaking, however, is much, much younger, not even 150 years old. The Story of the Kelly Gang, what is considered by many to be the first major feature length film released in the theaters, was produced in 1906. The Birth of a Nation, considered the first Hollywood style-blockbuster because of its technical virtuosity at the time, followed in 1915, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the subject of this post, followed in 1920, what can in hindsight rightly be seen as the first horror film, one that introduced a wide variety of new conventions and set the stage for the entire future of the genre. On the surface, Dr. Caligari tells a story many of us have seen before. A strange doctor appears at a local carnival and stuns the crowd by claiming he has kept a person sleeping inside a coffin for years, known as a somnambulist, and when he chooses to wake this person up, he can see the future. A member of the audience, Alan, plays along, asking the somnambulist, Cesare, “How long shall I live?” only to be stunned when he responds, “Until dawn tomorrow.” Perhaps needless to say, an unknown figure breaks into the man’s house before dawn and stabs him to death, nor is that the only strange murder since the carnival has come to town. The night before, a clerk who had been rude to Dr. Caligari was also killed. From there, the man from the carnival’s friend, Franzis, begins to investigate the murder which brings him back to Dr. Caligari and Cesare. If this weren’t enough for a silent film that uses only a few stylized title cards to aid in telling the story, the filmmakers also introduce a framing device, believed to be the first of its kind in cinema history. Rather than jumping straight into the story, the movie opens with Franzis sitting in a park, telling an older man that spirits have driven him from his family and home. During this conversation, a confused, almost semi-catatonic woman walks by without stopping. Franzis declares that she was his fiancée, Jane, before they suffered a terrible tragedy, leading the viewer to believe that the events which unfold afterwards are actually told in flashback.
While Franzis is investigating Alan’s murder, Cesare abducts Jane, adding another twist to the story, one compounded by their being a second murder suspect who is ruled out because he could not have abducted Jane in the first place. Franzis ultimately follows Dr. Caligari to an insane asylum, where he is shocked to learn that the man is supposedly the director. Reading his private manuscripts, he also learns that Dr. Caligari was obsessed with an 18th century mystic who used a somnambulist to commit similar murders in Italy. There is a flashback within a flashback, where the director screams, “I must become Caligari” followed by Dr. Caligari as the director attacking one of his own staff only to be straightjacketed and locked in a cell. We return to what we believe is the present, where Franzis completes his story, but the film’s story doesn’t end there. In a final twist, Franzis was actually a patient at the asylum along with Jane and Cesare the entire time, making the film a delusion, a fantasy, a hallucination. After this reveal, he is placed in a straightjacket himself, put in Caligari’s own cell, and the film ends with the asylum director claiming he understands the nature of Franzis’ delusion and can finally cure him now. Thus, a silent film that was made long before cinematic conventions were fully established somehow managed to include a false framing device that serves to mislead the viewer and set up a twist ending straight out of a modern movie, a love triangle (before Franzis and Alan attend the carnival, we meet them at a beer hall and learn they are politically competing for Jane’s affections), a flashback within a flashback, multiple murders, a murder investigation with a falsely accused suspect, an abduction, and more, and it manages to do so in a way that doesn’t confuse the audience, making it easy for them to follow along with the various twists and turns despite having no dialogue. Further, long before there were genres, we can reasonably say that Dr. Caligari managed to seamlessly blend two or even three. There are the horror elements: A strange sleeper in a coffin, a seemingly deranged doctor, grisly, hard to explain murders, and something close to a monster abduction (the Frankenstein monster was said to be based at least partially on Cesare). There is a mystery angle complete with the requisite red-herring suspect. There is also something of a film noir, where the mysteries continue throughout the movie as bodies pile up and narratives collide, all of which yield only more mysteries.
Nor were Dr. Caligari’s filmmaking advancements limited to storytelling alone. The film’s sets and overall cinematography are considered breakthrough examples of the German Expressionist style, what we might call surreal and stylized today. The overall effect has been described as dark, twisted, and bizarre as the creators manipulate almost every aspect of the frame, making it unable for the viewer to trust such niceties as perspective and dimensions. Buildings lean on top of one another at impossible angles, connected together in ways that simply could not be built, stairways go up and down to nowhere, doors are not merely square or rectangular, people stand in shadows that are part of the sets, drawn not real, plants are rendered as sharp and dangerous. It was though we were stuck inside an MC Escher painting, except the revered graphic artist was only 22 years old at the time and the world hadn’t heard of him yet. While the film is in black and white, the creators tinted the stock, using blues and oranges to give each scene a unique feel, making it seem even more alien today. Roger Ebert summed it up as “a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives.” They experimented with cropping the frame as well; not all of the shots are in the traditional rectangular proportions; some are diamond shaped, accentuating a close up or some other object of interest, all combining to create an unsettling, anxious feel, one where anything can happen next. Because these effects were achieved by painting the backgrounds on canvas, there is an overwhelming closeness to it, as if the town itself was pressing down upon the characters, threatening to collapse and swallow them up forever. Thematically, this advances the story in two ways. When we believe we are observing events that truly occurred some time in the past, told by Franzis to another person, it heightens the horror elements, as though Dr. Caligari was exerting some strange force on his memories or his mere presence tainted the entire town. Once we realize that Franzis has been in an insane asylum the entire time, the warped perspective makes even more sense, as if we were peeking into his deluded mind. The German film professor, Anton Kaes claimed “The style of German Expressionism allowed the filmmakers to experiment with filmic technology and special effects and to explore the twisted realm of repressed desires, unconscious fears, and deranged fixations” while Stephen Brockman put it this way, “there is no access to a natural world beyond the realm of the tortured human psyche.”
Perhaps not surprisingly given the film industry was in its infancy at the time, the development process wasn’t exactly linear, but a collaboration between many different talents and much of the details remain in dispute. The film was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, two pacifists in the wake of the horrors of World War I. While Jankowitz served in the war itself, Mayer feigned madness, leading to intense interrogations by a military psychologist which ultimately informed the Dr. Caligari character. Though neither had any film experience, they were introduced by an actor friend, Ernst Deutsch and encouraged to write a script by an actress that Mayer was in love with, Gilda Langer. Bizarrely, Langer encouraged Janowitz to visit a fortune teller at some point during the war, who told him that he would survive, but Langer would die – which came true in 1920, when she was only 23 years old, a tragedy that made it into the film both as the Jane character and the prediction of Alan’s death at the fair. According to Janowitz, he was “the father [of the script] who planted the seed, and Mayer the mother who conceived and ripened it,” and though the two were intensely distrustful of authority the entire time, Janowitz claimed that it was only years later that the subtext was read into the final film, that they were exposing the “authoritative power of an inhuman state.”
Interestingly, the film might never have been made if it weren’t for a more legendary filmmaker from the era, Fritz Lang, whose Metropolis serves as the basis for most science fiction to this day. He introduced the writers to Erich Pommer, the head of production for a German film studio. Pommer claimed he wasn’t interested and tried to get rid of them both, but Mayer forced the issue and read the script out loud. Pommer and his assistant Julius Stenheim were impressed enough that they signed a contract on the spot, though not entirely for artistic reasons. As Pommer put it, “They saw in the script an ‘experiment.’ I saw a relatively cheap film.” Interestingly, the origin of the frame story remains in dispute. In the original script, there is a variation of the opening scene, taking place at a party twenty years later instead of a park, but not the ending, meaning that no one really knows where the final twist came from. Regardless, production was delayed for almost six months as they sought the ideal director. Originally, Pommer chose Fritz Lang himself, but he was committed to filming another movie and they turned to Robert Wiene, who was previously a lawyer before moving into the theater world in Vienna. Wiene’s father was a theater actor himself and was said to have “gone slightly mad when he could no longer appear on the stage,” giving him a unique perspective on the material to say the least. It was Herman Warm, however, who ultimately conceived of the Expressionist sets, a man who believed that the films should be drawings come to life. He engaged two artists, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig, who convinced the producers to make the backgrounds as “crazy” and “eccentrically” as possible. Amazingly by today’s standards, they completed all the sets, costumes, and props in two weeks while shooting was just as swift, taking barely two months. Whether or not Janowitz or Mayer participated in the filming process is also unknown. Janowitz insisted they would allow no changes to the script and Pommer says Mayer was there every day to make sure while Warm claims neither ever showed up.
The film premiered in Berlin less than a month after production ended on February 20, 1920, but would not appear in America until April 2021 at the Capitol Theatre in New York City. The American version was slightly different, however. A character named Cranford, who claims to be the old man from the opening introduces the movie and appears at the end to insist Franzis was completely cured somehow. In Los Angeles, however, protestors concerned about German film imports taking profits from the American film industry, blocked its release, and to this day, no one has any idea whether or not it was a success or a failure. The initial critical reception was just as murky with some claiming it was hailed as the first piece of art on screen and others saying it was not all that good, little more than a filmed play. German critic Helmut Grosse derided it as a “cartoon and [a] reproduction of designs rather than from what actually took place on stage.” Herbert Ihering didn’t like the painted sets either, claiming “If actors are acting without energy and are playing within landscapes and rooms which are formally ‘excessive,’ the continuity of the principle is missing.” American critics seemed to be more favorable from the start. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, said it “occupies the position of unique artistic merit,” and said it made American films of the era look like they were put together by “a group of defective adults at the nine-year-old level.” As was the case with many of these early films, the reputation only grew over time. By October 1958, it was considered the twelfth best film of all time according to a poll at the Brussel’s World Fair. During the same period, critic and historian Paul Rotha claimed, “For the first time in the history of the cinema, the director has worked through the camera and broken with realism on the screen; that a film could be effective dramatically when not photographic and finally, of the greatest possible importance, that the mind of the audience was brought into play psychologically.” Similarly, Arthur Knight insisted “More than any other film, (Caligari) convinced artists, critics and audiences that the movie was a medium for artistic expression.” By 1994, Entertainment Weekly included Dr. Caligari in their “Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made,” insisting that almost 75 years later “No other film’s art direction has ever come up with so original a visualization of dementia.”
Whatever your opinion on the film – and admittedly watching silent films from such an early era is an acquired taste – one must still admire the audacity of those who chose to make such a thing before there even were such things. Especially in today’s remake, Intellectual Property obsessed era, where even supposed talented directors seem to waste their time telling the same story for the thousands time (Robert Egger’s Nosferatu certainly comes to mind), the idea that anyone would push the envelope so far, taking so many risks, and inventing so many things at the same time to do so is simply astounding.
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