Francis Carolan
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) Film Review
Robert Weine’s silent horror film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari(1920) revolves around the leading character Francis and his stories about Dr. Caligari. This dark, gothic horror is a landmark in silent cinema that has not only influenced today’s horror or psychological thrillers, but ‘this gothic masterpiece has seeped into the very soul of movie-making itself, continuing to cast its unbreakable spell – thrilling, chilling, electrifying.’(1) Filmed in Germany when things were particularly crooked and improper.
Fig 1.
It begins with the main character Francis telling his own story of Dr. Caligari after seeing his fiancee Jane. The audience are then thrown into this crooked world with deformed objects and physics, in which Francis and his friend, Alan, encounter the perplexing Caligari at a fair as he presents his Somnambulist, Cesare, a man that has apparently been asleep for the past 23 years. Alan’s fate is then decided by the creepy, skinny Cesare, as he predicts when Alan is going to die and was right. By the end of the film Francis somewhat discovers that Caligari has brainwashed Cesare to do his evil bidding. However through the story the stylized sets and perplexing characters represent or portray Francis’ mental state as disorderly and unusual. The shattered mental stability of Francis is further reinforced at the end of the film when he is admitted to the mental asylum in which the one and only Dr. Caligari works as a Doctor, after he is ignored by the local police.
‘Caligari is said to be the first example in cinema of German Expressionism, a visual style in which not only the characters but the world itself is out of joint.’
Fig 2.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stylistically reflects real world events and social norms, as this film was made post World War 1, it can be said that a lot of the broken and unhinged features of Robert Weine’s world is much like how society was in Germany 1920; ‘These viewpoints framed the various, arguably conflicting messages in the narrative, which conveys fear and continuity in a way that tapped into the attitude of a nation trying to recover from what was then the most costly war in its history.’(2)
Bibliography:
Mark Kermode - "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari review - a timeless classic and a visual archetype" in The Guardian (online): hhtps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/cabinet-dr-caligari-review-mark-kermode-timeless-classic
The-artifice.com. (2017). The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Dark Relationship With Postwar Germany [online] Available at: https://the-artifice.com/the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-dark-relationship-with-postwar-germany/
Ebert, R. (2017). The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Movie Review (1920) Roger Ebert. [online] Available at: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-1920
Illustration List:
Fig 1: https://silentology.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/cabinet-of-dr-caligari-cesare-abducts-jane.jpg
Fig 2: https://samletchfordfilm.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/dr-caligari.jpg
Hi Francis!
ReplyDeleteGood to see this review :) A couple of pointers, regarding the referencing; you should be using the Harvard method to reference your sources - this means putting the author's name and the year immediately after the quote, in brackets, so (Ebert, 2009) for example. The dates in the bibliography should be the dates the quote was written, and the bibliography should be ordered alphabetically according to the author's name. Have another look at the referencing guide to see exactly how the bibliography and illustrations list should look - http://www.uca.ac.uk/library/academic-support/harvard-referencing/
Some valid points about the set reflecting the state of Germany at the time :)