BECOMING FILM LITERATE The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures Vincent LoBrutto Foreword by Jan Harlan10 Expressionism in Cinema o-o*oe*do The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Few films throughout motion picture history have had more influence on th art, and student cinema than did the German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene (1880-1938) and first shown in 1919. This seventy-five-minute black-and-white film isa primer of expressive cinema and remains a source of fascination concerning the pressionism was more openly neurotic and morbid in its approach to suibject and theme. The French practiced expressionism, but the German expressionist movement lasted longer and was a dominant art form from around 1905 to 1930. The Germans were more spontaneous and reached daring degrees of emotional extremes. In expressionism traditional notions of realism are tossed aside for the exploration of distortion and exaggeration in shape and form, as opposed to figurative representation, Expressionism is abstract in nature, gro- tesque in its depiction of social and political power, and urgent in its au- thority to express the fervent emotions experienced by the artist. German Expressionism began before World War I when a group of bo- hemian artists who all shared a sense of imminent disaster formed Die Briike (The Bridge) in Munich. Led by Ludwig Kirchner, they were in-Expressionism in Cinema + 61 Hand painted sets, distorted perspective, and a highly stylized acting style are the principal components of cinematic expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Courtesy Photofest. spired to revive German art by reaching back to the early primitives. To achieve a contemporary approach to art, they were deliberately clumsy in their draftsmanship, which was dominated by bold black lines rather than the naturalistic modeling practiced by figurative artists. The paint- ings were brooding with forbidding elements of violence and sexual ten- sion. German Expressionism was the fashion of the avant-garde and was despised by Adolph Hitler's Nazi party that suppressed it in 1933 as de- generate art. In the cinema, several forces created the artistic climate for German ex- pressionism, Germany after World War I was in political and social tur- moil. The theater of Max Reinhardt and the art style of Die Briike influenced Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? Other German film- makers followed with Destiny and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, directed by Fritz Lang, and FW. Murnau’s Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is structured in six acts defined by title cards62 + Becoming Film Literate that announce the beginning and end of each act. A scene in which two men sit on a bench anchors the nightmarish narrative. As a woman in a trance glides by, the younger man tells his companion that she is his fi- ancée. As he talks about the strange events that have occurred, the story shifts to a flashback. A diabolical looking man sporting a biack stovepipe hat and black rimmed spectacles (Werner Krauss) exhibits Cesare the Somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) at a fair. The twenty-three-year-old gaunt man dressed in, black has been in a dream state for his entire life. Brutal knife murders begin to occur. It is learned that this evil and cunning man is the direc- tor of a mental institution. After gaining access to his library research, it is revealed he has studied the history of Dr. Caligari, who had a som- rnambulist under his spell who was ordered to commit murder. As the men are in the director's office and read this information in a book, the scene is still a flashback being told by the man on the bench from the opening scene. From investigation of the book there is another flashback showing how the man known as the director became Dr. Caligari and placed Cesare under his control. This sequence is a flashback within a flashback, a narrative device used by Stanley Kubrick in Killer's Kiss and by Oliver Stone in JFK. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the tiers of story telling from present to flashback to a second generation of flashback plunge the viewer into a deeper nightmare level of time and space. After a return to the recognition of the director’s evil plan, the missing, Cesare is found, and the director, now Caligari, is straightjacketed and shut in a cell. The story then returns to present day. Cesare is still alive and sleepwalking. Jane (Lil Dagoven) the young man’s fiancée, is also in a trance. The director appears, the lover is held down, screaming that he is not crazy and that the director is Caligari. The man is put in a straight- jacket. The director dons his glasses and is again Caligari, who states the man is delusional for thinking that he is the mystical Caligari. The film ends with Caligari’s proclamation that he knows how to cure the man. ‘The narrative logic of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is distorted as if it were ‘a nightmare. It can be seen as a parable portraying a world in which evil is a constant presence winning over the struggle for rationality. The ex- pressionist style is prevalent throughout The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in- cluding the opening scene. If the story were just a nightmare, there would bbe a stylistic separation between scenes of the real world and the dream world, and the narrative would be resolved when the sleeper awoke. Weine, like the German expressionist painters, was reflecting his emo- tional reaction to the world around him, which draws the viewer into a trance state from which there is no awakening through the duration ofExpressionism in Cinema + 63 the film. In many ways The Cabiret of Dr. Caligari is a horror film with the mad scientist figure, a monster, murder, and an atmosphere of relentless fear. A social or political read of the film reveals an analogy to the moral and physical breakdown of Germany at the time, with a madman on the loose reeking havoc on a distorted and off-balanced society, a metaphor for a country in chaos. The direct link to the German expressionist art movement is evident in the sets by Walter Reinmann (Algol, Adventures of a Ten Mark Note, Eter- nna! Love), Walter Rohrig, (The Last Laugh, Faust, Rembrandt), and Hermann Warm (The Phantom, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Runaway Princess), and are largely painted in that style. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was designed in a series of tableaus, including the fair outside town, streets, the direc- tor/Caligari’s office, a police station, and interiors where the characters reside, With the exception of a prop or key element of furniture, which are also expressionistic in nature, these scenes are painted onto backdrops, and architectural elements are defined by studio constructions. ‘The painted backdrop was prominent in international art direction in early cinema. Hollywood continued the practice for decades. In The Cab- inet of Dr. Caligari, the production designers moved beyond traditional use. These are not primarily backgrounds but total environments. The tra- ditional background painting was either rendered in a realistic or im- pressionist style within the confines of figurative reality. Reinmann, Rohrig, and Warm created an environment that was physically distorted in perspective, form, dimension, scale, and representation. The images de- picting locations of, and within, the town are presented in straight, curved, and angled strokes of bold, black paint. Gray and white are em= ployed not to create the illusion of a color palette but to envision confined. and hard-edged dimensions and shadows. Light and shadow, tradition- ally applied by the chiaroscuro of the cinematographer’s art of lighting, is achieved by the art of the brush and paint. The lines create a vortex of danger. The inner logic of the design is not related to realism but is an emotional response to the terror Caligari and Cesare represent to this So- ciety. There are numbers written onto walls implying a metaphysical com- munication and sharp angles that defy architectural purity and order. This extreme visualization immediately comes to life as the film opens. Asa totality, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a complete world realized in a manner that unifies theme, plot, characterization, production design, and cinematography. The plot is a story of malevolent deceit in which a mad- ‘man achieves the power to control another to commit murder. The themes concern the spiritual and moral tampering with man’s will. The sleep- walking Cesare can be seen as a metaphor for those without a mind of64 + Becoming Film Literate their own and follow the path of others. The psychology of the film ex- amines the potential evil powers of the mind, the nature of sanity, and. the thin-line relationship between stability and chaos. Wiene and his de- signers understood that realistic locations and conventional design con- cepts could never visually express the living, paranoid, nightmare world of the narrative. Every element in the film addresses these issues. The costumes are stark and are as distorted as the environment in silhouette and contour, and in their relationship to the body. The makeup design is highly exaggerated, garish, and grotesque. Hair is essential as a design element, especially Ce sare's je-black, spiky, jagged locks. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is about the unreality of reality in tumultuous times. It is grounded by the engrossing story. The viewer yearns to know the story of the man on the bench. AS it unfolds, the plot envelops the viewer and the expressionist sets come to life to create the environment of the film. ‘The acting style is as emotionally over the top as the narrative and v sual style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The behavior of the characters rep- resents the actors’ emotional responses to the expressionistic environment and the situations in which they find themselves. Staging and movement Of the actors responds to the hysteria of Caligari’s machinations and to the fun-house labyrinth that appears to be the reflection of a crazy mir- ror, not an orderly village. ‘The characters exist in and respond to the twisted streets, rooms with radically offset windows, doors that are not squared, and chairs that are too tall, Buildings are clustered and inter connected by a cubist take on architecture in the city where they reside, which has been transformed by evil From a directorial standpoint, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more the- atrical than cinematic. There is very little interscene editing. With little exception one scene follows another without intercutting, A sequence such as the fair is accomplished in two shots. One is a painted set of the street fair and the city in the background. Then a cut to another angle, deep into the fair, reveals Caligari standing in front of a painted tent that displays Cesare. There are some close-ups and isolation shots within a scene, but by and large everything is photographed from a straight-on angle. So the result is ike watching a play on a proscenium stage. Cam- ‘era angles were not employed to change the perspective, move the story editorially, or simulate verisimilitude. All of the temporal dynamics are designed and painted onto and into the set. By extrapolating from painting and theater, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari brought a pure form of art to the cinema. Robert Wiene’s avant-garde ex- periment became more than a social-political statement or a genre trend.Expressionism in Cinema + 65 It has endured because of its attitude. Before the Beats, hippies, punks, heavy metal, industrial music, and cyberpunk, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an affront to the classical cinema, a personal film furious with feel- ings, screaming for recognition. Ultimately, the lessons of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari lay in the notion that film is an expressive art form not only in existence for entertainment or to simulate life as we know it, It isa tes tament to the artist that fiendish thoughts, dreams, and delusions can re- veal another side of human truth, Notes 1. Fauvism was a European avant-garde painting style developed from the buen ofthe twentieth century until World War I. It is characterized by an arbitrary use of vivid, non-naturalisic colors utilized for an emotional ane decorous impact. The most significant artist of the Fauvist school was Henri Matisse, who em- ployed vivid contrasting colors from 1899 and broke away the traditional de- Seriptive use of colo in 1904. Fauvism was influenced by neoimpressionism ancl inspired the creation of German Expressionism. 2. Max Reinhardt was an innovative German theater director known for his bold use of scenic design, lighting, and visual effects. He became a sensation in 1905 with an imaginative staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream. Reinhart was one ofthe prime architects ofthe German expressionist style in the- ater and film. During the 1920s and early 1930s, he tained many great German. directors and actors, including F. W. Murnau, Poul Leni, Ernst Lubitsch, Wiliam Dieterle, Otto Preminges, Conrad Veidt, Emil Jannings, Louise Rainer, and Mar- Jene Dietrich, Max Reinhardt immigrated to the United Stats in 1938 and is con- sidered to be a major influence on twentieth-century drama for his contributions, ‘hich expanded the creative influence of the director. Of Further Interest Sereen Dr: Mabuse the Gambler The Golem The Hands of Orlac Nosferat Waxworks Read Expressionism by Wolf Dieter Dube Haunted Screen: German Expressionism inthe German Cinema by Lotte Eisner66 + Becoming Film Literate From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by Siegfried Kracauer The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest File Company 1918-1945 by Klaus Kreinmeier Beyond Caligaris The Films of Rober! Wiene by Uli Jung, Walter Schatzberg