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"In the Grip of an Obsession": Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession in
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Article  in  Theatre Journal · December 2006

DOI: 10.1353/tj.2007.0034

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"In the Grip of an Obsession": Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession in "The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari"
Author(s): Julia A. Walker
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4, Film and Theatre (Dec., 2006), pp. 617-631
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 "In the Grip of an Obsession":
Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession
in The Cabinet ofDr. Caligari

Julia A. Walker

Almost from the moment of its 1920 release, the German silent-film classic The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari has generated interpretations focused on psychological themes. Given
that the film's narrative concerns a showman, Dr. who commands
traveling Caligari,
a control over
the mind of his protege, Cesare, and given that the story it
hypnotic
self is told from the perspective of Francis, a man whose sanity is questioned by the
film's frame narrative, this critical concern with psychological themes is no surprise.
Nor is it a surprise that the psychological model invoked in these critical treatments
is predominantly Freudian. As Catherine Cl?ment observes in her influential 1975
article "Charlatans and Hysterics," Dr. Caligari is the "demoniac double" of Sigmund
Freud.1 Indeed, she in the film's central narrative evoke scenarios
suggests, episodes
recorded in Freud's
Studies inHysteria.1 "Caligari, the film," she argues, "shows in the
huge and magnified forms of expressionism the phantasmic figures of the era inwhich
psychoanalysis could begin."3
That the film engages a Freudian model of the self is irrefutable. But Freud's is not
the only model of self figured in the film. In this article, I argue that The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari represents a conflict between two models of self: a Freudian self that was
certainly the focus of much discussion if not also anxiety in the moment the film was
made, and an older moral-philosophical model of self that the Freudian model was
in the process of displacing. The film's horror, Imaintain, is focused on that act of
as a clandestine act of murder, or set in
displacement, represented rape, kidnapping,
motion by a criminal mastermind cloaked behind a position of institutional authority.
In that the film represents this character as an unchecked figure of absolute authority,
Siegfried Kracauer is right to read it as an expression of cultural anxiety (even if he

Julia A. Walker is Associate and the Unit for Criticism and at

Professor of English Interpretive Theory
the University Illinois at She is the author and Modernism
of Urbana-Champaign. ?^Expressionism
on the American Bodies, Voices, Words 2005), and is currently at work on a
Stage: (Cambridge,
new book titled and Performance.
project Modernity

1
Catherine B. Cl?ment, "Charlatans and Hysterics," trans. Christiane Reese and Mike Budd in The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, ed. Mike Budd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1990), 192.
2
Ibid., 195. Here, she specifically references Cesare's kidnapping of Jane, which recalls patient ac
counts of "nocturnal terrors of stifling bourgeois bedrooms."
3
Ibid., 193.

Theatre Journal 58 (2006) 617-631 ? 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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618 / JuliaA. Walker

is wrong to read it in presciently political terms).4 Insofar as Caligari is a figure for

Freud, the film articulates a fear about the institutionalization of a Freudian model of
self. As several scholars have suggested, the split subjectivity of the Freudian model is
figured allegorically in the Caligari-Cesare dyad. But the moral-philosophical self that
it displaces is also figured allegorically in Francis, Jane, and Alan, the trio of friends
with whom the film asks us to sympathize. In this way, the film represents these two
models of self in conflict within its narrative design.

This conflict, I suggest, also appears in the film's expressionist design, for, in the
flattened perspective of its mise en sc?ne as well as in its camera work, the film en
codes a fear of depth that recapitulates the anxieties about the Freudian unconscious
that are expressed within the narrative. Moreover, the frustrated desire to know the
unconscious and thereby unify the divided self that is thematized in the narrative
may be further seen in the gestural code performed by the film's actors. As we will
see, the repeated gesture of an outstretched, grasping hand becomes a leitmotif for
the quest for self-possession?a quest the film represents both narratively and stylisti
cally as impossible. Since this gestural code, which derives from the acting method
developed by Fran?ois Delsarte, was based on a moral-philosophical model of self,
we may see how this heretofore unacknowledged model of self is formally?as well
as narratively?inscribed into the film. By uncovering this trace of the film's theatrical
legacy, I ultimately hope to show how the film's narrative and expressionistic designs
are in fact integrally, as opposed to merely incidentally, related.

Competing Models of the Self

Patrice Petro has observed that much of the scholarship on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
"reveals a preference for allegorical readings focused largely on the figuration of the
split or multiple self and the terrifying double."5 Indeed, the film easily lends itself to
a Freudian reading wherein the split self of the conscious subject and its unconscious
may be seen in the relationship between Caligari and Cesare as well as that between
Francis and Caligari / Cesare. This doubling, Dietrich Scheunemann points out, actually
derives from the Romantic literary tradition of the Doppelg?nger. In his reading,

Dr. Caligari is a Doppelg?nger, an

offspring of a gothic tale, a late descendant of those split
of nineteenth-century Romantic literature who are haunted their shadows
personalities by
and alter egos, form alliances with forces, create artificial who
dangerous magic beings
escape their control, and usually end in self-destruction.6
eventually

As he notes, this tradition, with its gothic fixation on the supernatural, first appeared
in response to the Enlightenment as a way of questioning a fixed conception of the
self, especially the idea that the self is or can be knowable.7

4
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari toHitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1947). Since 1977, when the film's original script was discovered, several scholars
have systematically debunked many of the core assumptions upon which Kracauer's thesis was built.
See, for example, Mike Budd, "The Moments of Caligari," in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Dietrich
Scheunemann, "The Double, the D?cor, and the Framing Device: Once More on Robert Wiene's The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," in Expressionist Film?New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Suffolk, UK:
Camden House, 2003), 127.
5 in The Cabinet
Patrice Petro, "The Woman, The Monster, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," of Dr.
Caligari, 207.
6
Scheunemann, "The Double, the D?cor, and the Framing Device," 130.
7Ibid., 131.

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 AND THEQUESTFORSELF-POSSESSION/
DELSARTE 619

One such example of this "knowable" Enlightenment self is the model set forth
by Johann Casper Lavater (1741-1801), an eighteenth-century Swiss theologian and
moral philosopher known for his theory of physiognomy. According to Lavater, the
self was comprised of three "faculties"?reason, sentiment, and will?each of which
resided in a specific realm of the body. Reason, he posited, governed from the head;
sentiment or moral feeling resided in the upper torso, centering upon the heart; and
will dominated the lower torso, commanding the genitals and legs. Although itwas
later contested by Franz Joseph Gall's theory of phrenology, which sought to firmly
relocate these and other so-called faculties within the brain, Lavater's theory was
highly influential, serving as the foundation for the vocal and movement theories of
Fran?ois Delsarte (1811-1871). In his hands, the three faculties of reason, sentiment,
and will became the motive forces behind the body's three "languages" of expression:
verbal, vocal, and pantomimic. Observing patterns in the habits of expression people
used in everyday life, Delsarte purported to discover the natural laws that governed
these three languages, composing a highly elaborate system of
vocality and gesture.
Delsarte, like Lavater (and even Gall), understood the self to be more or less transpar
ent. The problem for each of them was how best to document itsmanifestation in and
through the body.

By 1920, when The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was made, this moral-philosophical model
of the self was being seriously challenged by what Fred Matthews refers to as the "new
psychology."8 As Freud's theories of psychoanalysis became widely disseminated, so
also did a new model of the self, one that postulated an unconscious seat of motiva
tion propelled by instinctual drives. But, as Matthews points out, Freud's theory of
the unconscious did not appear ex nihilo; Freud simply reconceptualized and gave
scientific credibility to an idea?the unconscious?that had been circulating throughout
the nineteenth century.

Indeed, roughly concurrent with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theo
ries of physiognomy and phrenology were Franz Anton Mesmer 's theory of "animal
magnetism" and James Braid's reformulation of it as "hypnotism." Where Mesmer
held that "animal spirits" circulating through one's body could be influenced by the
magnetic force of another person, Braid took that susceptibility of influence as the
focus of his studies. a mesmerist demonstrate his
Seeing traveling magnetic power

by passing over a subject's body and thus putting him or her into a trance,
his hands
Braid realized that, though Mesmer 's theory was wrong, he had discovered a "real
phenomenon" whose physiological cause was the overstimulation of "the nervous
centres in the eyes and their appendages" (which Braid famously effected by dangling
a bright, shiny object eighteen inches in front of the
subject's eyes).9 Upon reaching a
point of exhaustion, the subject entered into a state of consciousness akin to a waking
sleep. Although Braid debunked Mesmer 's theory, the latter's influence persisted in
the terminology used to describe the two parties involved in the hypnotic session: the
or source of the force, and the "medium," the whose
"operator," controlling recipient

8
Fred Matthews, "The New Psychology and American Drama," in 1925, The Cultural Moment, ed.
Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 146-56.
9
James Braid, Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, excerpted in Embodied Selves: An

Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), 59-61. For a historical and scholarly account of mesmerism and hypnotism,
see Alan Gauld, A Press, 1992).
History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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620 / JuliaA. Walker

body was acted upon by those forces. Once the medium could be induced into a trance
state or "nervous arose over the extent to which the was
sleep," suspicions operator
in control of the medium's will, especially when unscrupulous practitioners and self
styled Svengalis used the technique to take advantage of pliable young women. But
Braid, like Mesmer before and Freud after him, maintained a scientific interest in this
state of half-consciousness, hoping to tap its curative potential for the treatment of
otherwise intractable nervous disorders.

To be sure, Freud's conception of the "unconscious" is a considerable leap from

Mesmer 's "magnetic fluids" or even Braid's "nervous sleep," yet all three point to a
common concern with an aspect or region of the self that is beyond the reach of normal
consciousness. I use the phrase "aspect or region" because late nineteenth- and early
twentieth century theorists did not know
quite what to call it. Freud himself hedges
here, drawing upon metaphors of both geography and action; in outlining his model
of self in the early 1920s, Freud refers to the id, ego, and superego as "provinces or
agencies" of the brain.10 Note that his model, like the moral-philosophical model
before it, is tripartite. Yet, the two are hardly analogous. Freud's model is rooted in
an evolutionary logic, with the id originating in the most primitive area of the brain,
the ego developing in response to environmental demands to regulate its urges, and
the superego a manifestation of the social life of humankind. By introducing this
historical dimension to his understanding of the self, Freud deepened a model that
was otherwise flat. Where Lavater mapped the faculties of reason, sentiment, and will
a
laterally onto the body, Freud introduced three-dimensionality that points to hidden,
and possibly unknowable, depths, leading his popularizers to refer to his approach
as "depth psychology."11

Within the popular imagination, this new model of the self was the subject of great
consternation. That the dominant faculties of reason, sentiment, and will were to be
replaced by the Darwinian notions of id, ego, and superego was troubling enough. But
that this new model of the self was premised upon the existence of a
region beyond
consciousness was cause for alarm. Mesmeric and had
hypnotic suggestion already
shown that this uncharted region was potentially subject to an operator's control; to
maintain, as Freud did, that it lay beyond one's own self-knowledge raised all sorts of
questions concerning moral agency and legal responsibility.

Allegory of the Two Selves

According to Stefan Andriopoulous, such questions stimulated "an intensive medical

and legal debate" in Germany and the scientific community at large between 1885 and
1900.12 At the center of this debate was the hypothetical situation of a medium com
to commit a a
crime while under hypnosis.13 That such medium could be made
pelled

10
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: W. W.
Norton, 1949), 2.
11
Freud was just beginning to formulate this tripartite model of the self when the film was being
made. Nonetheless, the split subject through which these three "provinces or agencies" operate already
suggested this element of "depth."
12 as an
Stefan Andriopoulous, in Darkness: Hypnosis of Early Cinema,"
"Spellbound Allegory
Germanic Review 77, no. 2 (2002): 102-16.
13 crimes in order to prove
Andriopoulous notes that "numerous physicians staged fictitious hypnotic
their feasibility." As evidence, he quotes the following passage from August Forel:

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 AND THEQUESTFORSELF-POSSESSION/
DELSARTE 621

to forget his or her crime upon waking only exacerbated fears about this hypothetical
situation. As Andriopoulous notes: "The belief in the possibility of perfectly camou
flaged suggestions produced the paranoia that there might be an unlimited number of
unknown hypnotic crimes, which simply could not be recognized as such."14 Tracing
the impact of this medical and legal debate in Germany, Andriopoulous suggests that
it is an important cultural subtext to Caligari, a film that directly engages these debates
by portraying Cesare as the hypnotized subject of Dr. Caligari, the mastermind of his
medium's criminal spree.

But Caligari, of course, is also a showman who seeks a permit to exhibit Cesare as
a sideshow attraction at the local fair. Given the spectacular nature of the mesmeric
session and its invitation to credulity, hypnotism naturally lent itself to the theatre,
where itwas popularly featured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Framed within its proscenium, hypnotism both thematized and enacted the power of
the theatre itself, showing how the mind is susceptible to outside suggestion and can
even be led to believe that something is real when in fact it is fabricated.15 Hypnotism
thus staged the idea that the human mind was subject to the power of charismatics,
showmen, or worse.
conjurors,

By bracketing this story inside the story of Francis's delusion, the film creates an
endless of as Kracauer and other commentators have well ob
displacement certainty,
served. Indeed, part of what makes the film so frightening is its lack of a resolution.
We don't know whether we have been entranced by Francis's story, induced to believe
(wrongly) that it is true, or to believe in its veracity and recognize our powerlessness
as subjects of Dr. Caligari's control. Who is the operator, and who is the medium? If
Francis is the operator, then we are his dupes; if Caligari is the operator, then we are
his unwilling subjects insofar as we identify with Francis. In either case, the startling
effect of the film comes from the experience of not being in control, and of not recog
nizing that fact until the end.
In Andriopoulous's reading, the film is literally about the fear of hypnotism. Yet, as
the psychoanalytic critical tradition has established, the film also invites ametaphorical
reading in which hypnotism becomes a way of figuring the relationship between the
self and its unconscious. In this reading, Caligari and Cesare (and / or Francis and
Caligari / Cesare) allegorically represent the split subjectivity of the conscious subject

I gave a revolver, loaded with blank bullets by Mister H?felt, to an elderly man, whom I had just hypnotized.

Pointing at H., I explained to the hypnotized person that H. was an evil man, whom he ought to shoot. With
great determination, he picked up the revolver and fired straight at Mister H. Mister H. fell over, simulating
an injured man. I then explained to the hypnotized that the guy was not quite dead yet, he should fire another
shot at him, which he did without hesitation.

remarks that "Forel saw an even

greater danger in so-called
Andriopoulous post-hypnotic suggestions,
which would be enacted after
awaking from hypnosis. to Forel, these post-hypnotic sug
According
gestions would allow for a crime and its execution at a
specific time to be 'implanted/ while creating
the illusion of a 'free-willed decision/" Ibid., 103.
14
Ibid.
15
Anton Kaes has famously that the film thematizes as a self-reflexive meditation
argued hypnotism
on the power of cinema. He specifically to the scene in Caligari's tent where, similar to Francis
points
and Alan, film viewers are summoned into a darkened space to be both transfixed by the image before
them and presented with the spectacle of transfixion; see Anton Kaes, "Film in der Weimarer
Republik:
Motor der Moderne," in Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans
Helmut Prinzler (Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1993), 39-100.

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622 / JuliaA. Walker

and his unconscious self. the conscious the social world of

Caligari, subject, negotiates
the fair at Holstenwall, where bureaucratic order imperfectly regulates the dynamic
energies of social exchange. Cesare, in his perpetual somnambulistic state, represents
Caligari's unconscious, locked deep inside a coffin, yet unleashed at night to act upon
aggressive or libidinal urges under the cover of darkness. He is, in Scheunemann's
formulation, "the personification of Caligari's impulsive drives."16 But, given that it is
Caligari who commands Cesare to act on his behalf, it is also possible to read Cesare
as the conscious subject, appearing to be awake and able to exert his own agency, and

Caligari as the unconscious, compelling the conscious subject to abide by his directives.
After all, we are led to believe that, though Cesare kills the town clerk, murders Alan,
and attempts to stab Jane, he does so at Caligari's behest. In either case, the film seems
to figure the psychological self as a split subjectivity, centering our fear on the possibility
that our agency is not our own, that it could be appropriated by someone (a hypnotist
or mesmeric operator) or something (the unconscious) beyond our control.
And yet, when the frame narrative is added, the allegory expands, suggesting
that Francis is the conscious subject, whose agency is established not only in the act
of narrating the story, but in his role as its hero, seeking justice and truth. When we
discover that his sanity is in question at the end of the film, however, we are inclined
to reassess his story, seeing in the figures of Cesare and Caligari a projection and dis
avowal of his own unconscious desires. After all, we don't see Cesare kill the town
clerk; we arrive at the crime scene after the fact. We don't see Cesare murder
only
Alan; we only witness a shadow of the crime. And, though it is Cesare who abducts
Jane, we know that Francis loves her from an early moment in the film and that he
claims her as his betrothed to his interlocutor at the end. Thus, as Thomas Elsaesser
has pointed out, Francis also has a motive for killing Alan, his rival in love. He also
has amotive for abducting Jane. Since it is his story, we might infer that he substitutes
Cesare for himself when he cannot admit his own desires.17 Indeed, this might explain
what Richard McCormick describes as the most "anarchic" moment in the film, when
Cesare seems "to exceed his as 'tool/ overcome his own desire
identity Caligari's by
for Jane."18 Sent to kill her, he finds himself arrested by her beauty and so abducts her
instead. The sexual connotations are obvious; Cesare cannot her with
penetrate body
his knife and so is rendered Insofar as he acts as Francis's Cesare
impotent. surrogate,

symbolically enacts his sexual frustration.

The frame narrative, then, functions to recapitulate the split subjectivity dramatized
within the central narrative. In both its central and frame narratives, the film focuses
its horror on a Freudian model of the self, which?unlike the unified and knowable
moral-philosophical self?is beyond our ken, beyond our control, and thus beyond
moral accountability.
But the moral-philosophical self also appears in the film. Indeed, we might see
its three faculties of reason, sentiment, and will figured in the three friends, Francis,
Jane, and Alan. Francis represents an Enlightenment configuration of reason, one that
seeks a cause to the events propelling the film's narrative. As Elsaesser has observed,

16 130.
Scheunemann, "The Double, the D?cor, and the Framing Device,"
17 in The Cabinet
Thomas Elsaesser, "Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema," of
Dr. Caligari, 184.
18 to Dietrich: and Cinematic inWeimar
Richard McCormick, "From Caligari Sexual, Social, Discourses
Film," Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 649.

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 AND THEQUEST FORSELF-POSSESSION/
DELSARTE 623

he is a "detective" figure who searches for the culprit throughout the film.19 Indeed,
as reason, he goes to the police, seeking agents who will act on his beliefs. Jane, as a
woman and the love object of both friends, represents sentiment. Dressed in white,
she is also a figure of moral purity and stands at the center of Francis and Alan's
friendship. And, finally, Alan represents impulsive, perhaps unthinking, will. When
we meet him, he is trying to concentrate on a book but is easily distracted by the ac
tivity outside his window?an intellectual he is not. That he represents the will may
be seen in his appeal to Francis to go to the fair, and in his readiness, while there, to
volunteer as Cesare's
stooge.

The bond uniting the three friends is strong at the beginning of Francis's story, sug
gesting a harmonious relationship among them. This is very much in keeping with late
nineteenth-century appropriations of Lavater's theory such as the Delsarte method.
As I have discussed elsewhere, followers of Delsarte's method emphasized his goal
of attaining harmony (both literal and metaphorical) and articulated it to turn-of-the
twentieth-century fears about modernity.20 In their hands, the Delsarte method became
a means of de-alienation in a moment when new communications
technologies (e.g.,
film, phonograph, typewriter) were splintering the three languages of the body into
isolated bodies, voices, and words. By practicing the Delsarte method, students could
learn to re-coordinate these three languages and so achieve spiritual harmony. The
exercises of Emil as
group-movement Jaques-Dalcroze?known "eurhythmies"?and
the dance-movement exercises of Rudolf von Laban?known as
"eukinetics"?similarly

sought to restore balance and harmony to their practitioners (as suggested by the Greek
prefix "eu," meaning "good"). Thus, the strong bond uniting the three friends at the
beginning of Francis's story suggests a spiritual harmony among them. That harmony,
however, is immediately threatened upon Caligari's arrival inHolstenwall. After they
encounter him at the fair, Francis and Alan part company, reaffirming their friendship
despite their rivalry for Jane's affection. Their friendship, however, is destroyed?not
by jealousy, but by Alan's murder, the news of which Francis at once repels and then
resolves to avenge with justice. When he tells Jane of Alan's death, she too reacts with
horror, but their mutual anger and sadness are not enough to bind them together.
As Francis adamantly expresses his intent to capture the murderer, Jane drifts into a
solipsistic reverie, perhaps grasping onto Alan's memory. The murder dissolves the
bond among the three friends not only through the violent removal of Alan, but by
splitting Francis and Jane apart in their atomized responses to it.

If, as Cl?ment observes, Caligari is Freud, then the film suggests that a stable moral
philosophical model of the self (and the worldview it supported) was destroyed by the
arrival of Freudian psychoanalysis. Indeed, the narrative conflict in the film can thus
be read as occurring between the two primary character groupings?Caligari / Cesare
and Francis / Jane / Alan?and, as such, figures a conflict between these two models of
self. At the time the film was made, the Freudian model was in the ascendant, but that
didn't mean itwasn't also attended by profound cultural anxiety. As Andriopoulous
has noted, much of that anxiety concerned questions of moral responsibility and legal
accountability that were raised by the existence of an unconscious. Itmay be significant

19
Elsaesser, "Social Mobility and the Fantastic," 182. Elsaesser identifies the detective genre as an

important subtext in the film, noting that it was popular in in the early 1920s.
Germany
20
Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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624 / JuliaA. Walker

then, that, of the three friends, Alan?the of will?is the one who is murdered.
figure
Within the allegorical reading I am proposing, the film suggests that, with the arrival
of the unconscious, the moral and legal agency whose existence is premised upon the
idea of amanifest and accountable will is doomed to die "tomorrow." After all, if one
may be understood to act upon the prompting of drives and instincts that cannot be
known, even to oneself, then how could one be held morally or legally accountable?
The introduction of a Freudian model of the self necessarily meant a wholesale over
haul of cultural attitudes toward moral and legal responsibility.

The implications that such a model held for conventional moral attitudes can be
seen in the film's account of Jane, the figure of sentiment and the moral center of the
three friends. After learning of Alan's death, she is despondent, with all feeling drained
away. When we next see her, she is looking frantically for her father, perhaps searching
for the roots of her emotional life and the source of her moral strength. Wandering
into the fair she finds not her father, but another doctor, Caligari, who, as Elsaesser
points out, is her father's perverse double.21 As with Alan, this encounter will render
her powerless as she flees the threat revealed in Cesare, only to succumb to him later.
if not killed, Jane is nonetheless a casualty in the
Kidnapped, struggle between the
two models of self, suggesting that the unconscious has taken the emotions captive
and disabled their moral base.

The paranoia that suffuses Francis's story would suggest that Caligari and Cesare
are coming for him also. As the last of the three friends and the three faculties within
the moral-philosophical model, he is the last to resist the threat posed by the Freud
ian unconscious. As reason, he seeks to uncover the truth, a that with
quest begins
his resolve to apprehend Alan's murderer. Like the hero in the conventional quest
narrative, Francis as an untested innocent who, a series of
begins through questions
answered and obstacles overcome, passes into a state of knowledge. Although he
finds answers to many of his questions?revealing the criminal in custody to be a
red herring, exposing Caligari's alibi to be a "dummy," and pursuing Caligari to the
asylum where he discovers both his assumed identity and the damning confession in
his journal?Francis is ultimately unable to complete his quest. For, just as he uncovers
the "truth" of the director's mad experiment with the somnambulist Cesare, Francis
himself is revealed to be a thus an unreliable narrator?with the reintro
patient?and
duction of the film's frame narrative. If Francis reason, then, as an inmate
represents
of an insane he reason overthrown. As a he is
asylum, represents quester, ultimately
unable to access the truth he seeks. Within the Freudian allegory this is appropriate,
since the unconscious lies beyond the reach of reason. But, given that the frame nar
rative splits Francis's subjectivity, the film also positions Francis as both the subject
and object of his quest. As reason seeking the unconscious, Francis seeks to unify his
divided self; his is a quest for self-possession.

"In the Grip of an Obsession"

We see this theme of self-possession figured through two recurring images of hands:
a single hand outstretched in a frustrated grasp, and two hands coming together in
a gesture of incomplete possession. These are Delsartean gestures, enacted by the
to a "convulsive" or "execrative" state in the first instance, and an
performers signify

21
Elsaesser, "Social Mobility and the Fantastic," 185.

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 AND THEQUESTFORSELF-POSSESSION/
DELSARTE 625

Attitude EX-con Attitude NOR-con Attitude CON-con

Convulsive state Strife, conflict

Authority
Attitude EX-nor Attitude NOR-nor Attitude CON-nor

Normal, relaxed Prostration

Expansion
Attitude EX-ex Attitude NOR-ex Attitude CON-ex

Exaltation Execration
Exasperation

1. Delsarte's "Criterion of the Hands," from Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement: A Book about
Figure
Fran?ois Delsarte (1954; repr., New York: Ted Shawn, 1963).

state in the second. As we have seen, the Delsarte method drew

"expansive" directly
and its moral-philosophical modelof the
upon Lavater's theory of physiognomy
self.22 Accordingly, it divided the into three zones, each of which corresponds to
body
a dominant reason, sentiment, and will. But, in Delsarte's schema, these three
faculty:
zones into three zones, each of which
are further divided is subject to three types of
movement?concentric, normal, and eccentric?allowing for a highly differentiated
movement and As to be the three types of movement are
range of meaning. expected,
each governed by one of the three primary faculties of the self. Concentric energies
are focused inward and reveal a predominantly mental attitude; normal energies are

22 followed Lavater remains in question. Some of Delsarte's fol

The extent to which Delsarte exactly
lowers divided the body into head, upper torso, and lower torso as did Lavater, but most divided the
into head torso (sentiment), and limbs (will); see, for example, the writings collected in
body (reason),
Fran?ois Delsarte et al., The Delsarte System of Oratory, 4th ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893). For
the best of the Delsarte method one who was trained in it), see Ted Shawn, Every Little
analysis (by
Movement: A Book about Fran?ois Delsarte (1954; repr., New York: Ted Shawn, 1963).

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626 / JuliaA. Walker

in balance, a moral and eccentric ener

perfect suggesting predominantly disposition;

gies move outward toward the world, revealing a predominantly willful temperament.
Thus, gestures such as the convulsive / execrative hand movements in figure 1 reflect
a tension between "concentric" and "eccentric" energies, suggesting an internal conflict
between thought and will that reveals frustration, while the expansive gesture (which is
akin to the "exaltative" gesture) ismotivated out of a tension between "eccentric" and
"normal" energies, suggesting a desire for emotional satisfaction or moral stability.

These gestures recur at several key moments in the film: when Caligari seeks a per
mit he must wait to obtain; when Cesare awakens; when Alan fends off his murderer;
when Alan helplessly repels his murderer in shadow; when Francis learns of Alan's
death; when Francis reflects upon the significance of Alan's death; when Francis seeks
to apprehend the killer at the police station; when Jane grasps the finality of Alan's
death; when Francis imagines Caligari "in the grip of an obsession"; and when Francis
reaches for Jane at the end, only to see her pass him by, oblivious to his desires (see
figs. 2-11). The repetition of the convulsive / execrative gesture suggests a frustrated
desire to assert or preserve oneself. Given that the film is part of the horror genre, in
which muchof the action concerns real and threatened assaults upon the self, such
gestures?and their meanings?would seem to be appropriate. The repetition of the
"expansive" hand motif, on the other hand, is more unexpected; it indicates one of
two concerns: when used single-handedly, it suggests a vaguely intuited desire; when
used double-handedly in a grasping gesture, it suggests a desire to possess something
more definite. Considering that the film is also a psychological allegory, this double
handed movement may be read as a gesture of se//-possession when we remember that
it is Francis's story and that what he seeks throughout is a reconsolidation of his split
a reconciliation of his conscious self with his unconscious desires.
subject,

This analysis presumes a naturalistic ideal; that is, it assumes that these gestures are
a
used in fairly straightforward manner to communicate the meanings that, according
to Delsarte, they "naturally" signified. Indeed, the Delsarte method was so influential
and so well known at the turn of the twentieth century that significant portions of the
audience could have been expected to easily decipher the meanings of its gestures.
As Mikhail Yampolsky has suggested, it was the basis of Sergei Eisenstein's theory
of montage,23 and no doubt served as a founding principle of the idea that silent film
could speak across cultures through the universal language of images. But the repeti
tion, if not also the exaggeration, of these gestures suggests that they might have been
for other, "expressionistic," purposes.
deployed perhaps

In his groundbreaking study of German expressionist theatre, David F. Kuhns ap

proaches his topic from the perspective of performance, providing extensive cultural
and historical background to the three types of expressionist acting, "Schrei," "Geist,"
and "Ich," first described by Mel Gordon.24 In his discussion of "Schrei" acting, for
example, Kuhns analyzes the impact Frank Wedekind had on the nascent movement
not only as a playwright, but as a performer of his own work. He cites the remarks

23 of the Actor," in Silent

Mikhail Yampolsky, "Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology
Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 45-67.
24 Uni
David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge
Press, 1997). Mel Gordon, Texts," in Expressionist Texts, ed. Mel Gordon (New
versity "Expressionist
York: PAJ Books, 1986). Kuhns, however, rechristens Gordon's third model, referring to the "Ich" style
as "emblematic."

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 DELSARTE
AND THEQUEST FORSELF-POSSESSION / 627

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628 / JuliaA. Walker

Figures 2-11. From

left to right, top to bottom: (2) Dr. Caligari in the town clerk's office. The hand

opens and in a closes

frustrated of his cane, his frustrated grasp of power.
grip symbolizing
(3) Cesare awakens. The somnambulist's arms rise and his hands open in a gesture of possession.
Insofar as he is the "conscious subject" in the Freudian model of self, he is possessed by unconscious
forces. Insofar as he is the "unconscious," he wishes to possess his desires, etc.

(4) Alan fends off his murderer. convulsive or execrative Alan's hands feature in an
Signifying feelings,
Eisensteinian montage sequence. (5) The Shadow of Death. Alan succumbs to his murderer as painted
both reveals and conceals the crime scene. 6) Francis learns of Alan's death. Note the of
light gesture
repulsion. (7) Francis reflects upon the significance of Alan's death. Does he wish to possess Alan's
murderer or Jane? 8) Francis goes to the station. As "reason" within the moral-philosophical
police
model of self, he seeks agents who will act upon his beliefs. (9) Jane learns of Alan's murder. After

expressing her horror at his death, she possesses tender of him in her memory. (10) "In the
thoughts
an obsession." In Francis's grasps at the secrets of the original Dr.
grip of imagination, the director

Caligari. (11) Francis sees Jane. Having concluded his story, Francis spies his "fiancee," from across the

yard at the asylum. Although he is not self-possessed, he nonetheless is revealed to possess "feelings"
(i.e., Jane, within the moral-philosophical schema) that he could not previously admit.

Stills captured from the restored version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, originally produced
by Decla Film Gesellschaft, Berlin.

of several contemporary observers who sought to describe the curious appeal of

Wedekind's charismatic performance style. Of his staged readings, Artur Holitscher
singled out his

extraordinary
art of accentuation [Betonung], which later as an actor of his own pieces,
[hej developed to a mastery. It was a to listen to Wedekind. When he
special pleasure
read he was in love, one might almost say, with each of his words. With voluptuous joy
a creation out of a vowel and consonant.
he fashioned He willed \fiigte] sentences into
the manifest of a harmonious
fullness form. In these readings, his dialogue achieved, and
his characters
received, a contour and depth as never did on the stage. . . .
they Through
an retardation of tempo, a before or after a word, what he said
imperceptible tiny pause
took on a meaning which could sooner be apprehended than intellectually. . . .
intuitively
While he read he appeared to be certain of the effect of each of his words and
completely
of every detail of his poetic art.25

Although Kuhns doesn't identify it as such, what Holitscher describes is a Delsartean

or to oral In to his vowels and
"expression-ist" approach interpretation.26 attending
consonants in such a as to evoke a "manifest fullness of a harmonious form,"
way

25
Quoted in Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 48.
26
Kuhns does not mention the Delsarte method as an influence on he does
Although expressionism,
cite the movement work of Dalcroze, von Laban, and Isadora Duncan, all of whom were influenced by

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 AND THEQUESTFORSELF-POSSESSION /
DELSARTE 629

Wedekind was in effect practicing the Delsartean aesthetic in using tempo and silence
to heighten the expressive powers of his words such that a listener could intuit their
meaning before he or she registered their significance intellectually.
Kuhns cites numerous others whose accounts of Wedekind's performance style

similarly attest to a Delsartean influence.27 Yet, nearly all of these commentators also
remark upon the "shrill" or "sharp" tonality Wedekind used and the "awkwardness"
of his gestures, which, like his vocal style, was strangely moving. Such terms suggest
that Wedekind's performance style, though perhaps derived from Delsarte, was not,
finally, Delsartean in the sense that it did not aim at creating a truly harmonious ef
fect. Rather, it appears to have drawn upon Delsarte's insights into the formal power
of voice and gesture to create meaning, while redirecting his techniques toward the
meaningful expression of disquieting?rather than beauteous?subject matter. In other
words, itwould appear that Wedekind stretched and distorted Delsarte's techniques
beyond Delsarte's original intent in order to represent verbally, vocally, and panto
mimically the modernist alienation and spiritual suffering of his characters. In doing
so, Wedekind developed the Schrei style of expressionist acting.

Among the actors directly influenced by Wedekind was Werner Krauss, who plays
Dr. Caligari in the film. As a member of Max Reinhardt's troupe, Krauss worked with
Wedekind during the 1913-1914 season when Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater staged
several ofWedekind's early plays.28 Although he had no formal training, Krauss became
an exemplary expressionist actor, incarnating the roles of Schigolch in Wedekind's
Erdgeist, Launhart in his Hidalla, Professor D?hring in Der Stein derWeisen, and Konsul
Kasimir inMarquis von Keith; he also played the fourth sailor in Reinhard Goering's
expressionistic Seeschlacht.29 Of his performance in this last role, Herbert Ihering re
marked that, for Krauss, "the word was not accompanied by gesture, not amplified
by movement: the word was gesture, the word became flesh. ... It [was] as though
he saw sounds and heard gestures."30 Kuhns concludes that "[i]t was precisely this
absorption of sound into sight in the Schrei acting of Werner Krauss that enabled him,
as [Julius] Bab said, to be 'one of the few in Germany [at that time] who [could be]
creative in the cinema.'"31
truly

Although the "excess" of the acting in Caligari might, from the distance of our his
torical moment, seem indistinguishable from that of early silent-film acting in general,
I believe that it is an example of the ironic appropriation of the Delsarte method that
came to be associated with what Kuhns describes as the Schrei style of expression
ism. Certainly, Delsartean gestures appear repeatedly throughout this film (and I have

Delsarte's work. Kuhns identifies von Laban's and "peripheral" as part

explicitly "centripetal" gestures
are
of the Schrei style of expressionist acting, noting that these gestures clearly evident in The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (Kuhns 71). Apropos toWedekind's
possible exposure to the Delsarte method, Kuhns has
established that the playwright / performer spent considerable time in Paris during the 1890s (54).
27Ibid., 45-51.
28
Conrad Veidt, who plays Cesare, and Lil Dagover, who plays Jane, were also members of Reinhardts
Lotte Eisner identifies Veidt as one of Reinhardt's actors, in her work, The Haunted Screen: Ex
troupe;
pressionism and the German Cinema and the Influence ofMax Reinhardt of California
(Berkeley: University
Press, 1965), 44; and J. L. Styan includes a of Dagover in a Reinhardt in his
photograph production,
book, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 105.
29
Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 106-7.
30
Quoted in Kuhns, ibid., 107.
31
Ibid., 108.

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630 / JuliaA. Walker

isolated only two or three significant motives involving the hand). That they are exag
gerated in a way that would have allowed audiences to recognize them as such may
be debatable, but it certainly accords with the interpretation I have laid out above.
Insofar as the film is about a contest between a residual moral-philosophical model of
the self and an emergent Freudian model of the self, such exaggeration would suggest
that the older model of self was, like the gestures used to signify it, under duress and
strained to the point of exhaustion.

If the crisis of the moral-philosophical model of self is encoded formally in the film's
acting, the threat posed to it by a Freudian, or "depth," model of the self is encoded
in the film's mise en sc?ne. Indeed, the fear of and desire to penetrate the depths of
the unconscious is figured not only narratively in Francis's quest, but formally in the
film's expressionistic scenic design where a dialectic of flatness and depth is presented
visually. As has been much discussed, the film renders three-dimensional space in a
stylized manner, with light and shadow painted onto walls, floors, and ceilings, and
the diminishing point of the horizon suggested by the skewed lines of awindow frame
or door. Such stylization is not merely incidental, as scholars such as Scheunemann
have claimed, nor was it simply the result of commercial opportunism, as Mike Budd
and Barry Salt have asserted; rather, it is integral to the film's thematic concern with
psychological depth and the Freudian unconscious.32 By flattening its scenic perspec
tive, the film encodes the very fear of depth that propels its narrative action. Moreover,
it secures (and perhaps overdetermines) our sympathetic identification with the trio
of friends who represent a "flat" model of the self. Through that identification and
through the shallow space in which the camera virtually moves us, we experience the
twinned desire for and fear of penetrating the hidden depths of the unconscious.

We can see that movement of penetration and the camera

repulsion replicated by
work. In the tent scene, for example, Caligari, having obtained his permit, invites us,
along with Francis and Alan and the assembled crowd, inside to view his exhibit.
First he lifts the flap and beckons us in, then he draws the curtain, and finally opens
the coffin to disclose Cesare. In a series of shots ranging from a long shot of the tent
interior to amedium shot of Caligari and Cesare onstage to a close-up of Cesare (with
a reaction shot of Caligari cut into the sequence), the camera moves us through these
various into the of the tent. When we see Cesare awaken, we are invited
layers depths
to consider that there is a deeper layer to penetrate?his mind?yet, asMichael Minden
observes, "no revelation of takes Instead, we are
magical inferiority place."33 repelled

by his hideous zombie-like gaze. When Cesare speaks?to predict Alan's imminent
death?we are transfixed with fear, not only because we react with Alan to such hor
rible news, but because the fact that Cesare speaks means that this seeming puppet has
a mind and thoughts of his own. The sensation of horror that we experience vicari

ously is effected visually by the frantic montage of close-ups?from Alan to Cesare to

Alan again and then to Francis?that punctuates a scene of medium shots of relatively

32
Scheunemann, "The Double, the D?cor, and the Framing Device," 138; Budd, "The Moments of
26; Salt, "From German Stage to German Screen," in Prima di Caligari: cinema tedesco,
Caligari, Barry
1985-1920 I Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895-1920, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli

(Pordenone, Italy: Edizioni Biblioteca dellTmmagine, 1990), 406.

33
Michael Minden, "Politics and the Silent Cinema: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Battleship Potemkin,"
in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-century Europe, ed.
Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 293.

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 AND THEQUESTFORSELF-POSSESSION/
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long duration. As Minden notes, "[Cesare's] blank face functions as a block to [our]
eagerness for ever more intimate disclosure,"34 masking the unplumbable depths from
which his words arise. We are fascinated by Cesare yet repelled by him?an action
replicated by the camera as it follows the series of intercut close-ups with a long shot
of the tent's interior that places us against its rear wall.

This movement of penetration and repulsion occurs again in the bedroom scene,
where Cesare comes to murder Jane. Here the camerawork is The scene
again, important.

begins with a long shot of Jane's bedroom, with Jane in bed asleep in the foreground. In
the background is a large window surrounded by decorative embellishments that look
like daggers. Inwhat seems to be a jump cut, Cesare appears at the window, looking in.
From this long shot, our view is immediately foreclosed by a diamond iris that focuses
our attention on Cesare while maintaining a perspective of distance. Framed by the iris,
Cesare rises menacingly from his crouched position. The camera cuts to another long
view of the room, quickly followed by a shot of Cesare?again framed by the diamond
iris?with knife in phallic position, pushing the broken window frame out of his way
and stepping into the room. In a long shot of very long duration, Cesare slowly crosses
the room, approaching the sleeping Jane in her bed. He raises his knife to kill her, but
stops inmid-action, arrested by her beauty. In a series of quick cuts ranging from full
view to close-up, Jane awakens and struggles with Cesare. As with the tent scene, we
experience the horror of the encounter vicariously by the fast-paced rhythm of the
montage. Here, though, the attempted penetration?and repulsion?is effected visually
through the alternating perspective of full view to close-up; it is almost as if the knife
moves toward us, then out, then in again, and out. With a quick cut to Jane's father and
brother, who are awakened her screams, the camera shifts once more
presumably by
to a long view of the room that Cesare crosses and exits, moving from foreground to
background, with Jane in his arms. In this scene, we stand in a different relationship
to the movements of penetration and repulsion than in the earlier scene. Where, in the
tent scene, the camera moved us toward Cesare?the unconscious?and the of
object
our penetration, here it positions us firmly in the foreground and
aligned with Jane,
whose white-clad innocence and vulnerability is our own, as Cesare penetrates the space
of the room in a threatening movement toward us. What such camerawork suggests
is that, though the unconscious itself may be impenetrable, we are not invulnerable
to the threat that it?and the Freudian model of self?represents.

Thus, we see that, when read as an allegory of two competing models of self, the
film appears to cohere as an aesthetic whole (albeit one comprised of conflicts and
contradictions). In terms of its narrative, the of a
displacement moral-philosophical
model by a Freudian one is figured in the three friends who are broken apart by a
mysterious traveling doctor and his somnambulistic minion. In terms of its formal
design, a dialectic of flatness and depth functions to encode and enact a fear of the
unconscious in the acting, scenic design, and camerawork. Although scholars long have
puzzled over seeming incongruities such as the "realistic" acting and the stylized set,
or the asymmetrical aesthetic of realism and expressionism in the frame narrative, such
problems are potentially resolved by reconsidering the rich theatrical legacy behind
the film's expressionistic style.

34
Ibid.

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