The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Director: Robert Wiene

At a town fair, the mysterious Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) presents his protégé Cesar (Conrad Veidt), a terrifying sleepwalker, a figure on the borderline between life and death, to the local onlookers, who awakens from a deep sleep. When one of the onlookers asks him about his future, according to Cesar's prophecy, he will die the next morning. Thus begins a series of bizarre murders for which the aforementioned somnambulist will be suspected. Francis' (Friedrich Fehér) investigation will lead him to the mystery of a deranged manipulator who is using Cesar to kill innocent people.

It is a well-known fact that the road leading from the cafés of the Lumière brothers to the multiplexes of today is paved with milestones on the one hand, and on the other, with cinematic greyness that fades from viewers' memories years later. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" Robert Wieny is undeniably a milestone for the history of cinema. And while it might be tempting to judge it from today's perspective, there is little point in doing so. While one could argue in Gombrowicz fashion whether or not Wiene's film delights, reading it today is more of a lesson in the history of cinema than a mere screening. "The Cabinet..."  for it shows what old cinema looked like, how narratives changed, how the language of film was shaped.

Wieny's film is a journey to a time when cinema made demands on the viewer - you had to use your imagination to enjoy it. Director of "The Cabinet...", like other Expressionist filmmakers, abandoned staged realism to create a completely new, visually different reality. And it is the set design of his film that remains most impressive to this day. The artists of the group Der Sturm - W. Röhrig, W. Reimann and H. Warm - created an extraordinary visual setting - ostentatiously artificial, unreal and yet sophisticated. On the canvas, we see painted meadows and roads, terrifying buildings and ominous shadows. There is no hint of normality here - the strange sharp-edged shapes and twisted buildings were meant to evoke a sense that there are no points of support or any fixed values in this filmic world. The plastic unreality terrified viewers. Today, it no longer frightens, but rather inspires admiration for the artistic skill and creative precision of the pioneers of German cinema.

But Wieny's film is not only an artful, sophisticated picture, but also one of the first films to introduce the figure of the demonic tyrant to German cinema. Years later, the title doctor and characters like him were seen as a prophecy of Hitlerism. The figure of Dr Caligari was of considerable importance for later cinema, and the figure of the mad scientist, somewhat Faustian and arousing terror in audiences, recurred in countless films (echoes of Viene's film can be found today, for example, in David Lynch "The Elephant Man" ). The claim that, ninety years after its release "The Cabinet..." is still a living film, would be naïve. And although as a horror film it defends itself at least moderately, it is an inspirational work, without which today's horror would certainly not be the same.