‘Come on, Franzis, let’s go to the fair…’
Two young men visit the fair in Holstenwall and see a somnambulist who can allegedly see the future. One of the men asks how long he will live and is told that he only has until dawn. His friend treats it as a joke, but the man is murdered during the night…
Groundbreaking silent horror classic with an influence that has stretched through the long decades since its production and release. Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt star for director Robert Wiene.
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Sitting in a garden, Franzis (Friedrich Feher) reminisces about recent events in his hometown of Holstenwall. When the fair comes to town, Feher’s best friend, Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), is keen to go. The two of them are drawn to one of the sideshows: an old mystic named Caligari (Krauss) presenting a Somnambulist named Cesare (Veidt). Krauss insists that Veidt can tell the future and invites questions from the audience. Foolishly, von Twardowski asks how long he will live, and Veidt responds with a chilling answer: he will be dead by dawn. Feher treats it as a joke, but during the night, his friend is stabbed to death.
Convinced that Krauss and Veidt are responsible, Feher demands that the local authorities focus their investigation on the carnival. Given that the killing ties up with a previous murder in the region, the police are happy to agree, but initial enquiries find no evidence against Krauss. A thief is apprehended with a knife and seems to be a perfect fit for the crimes, but Feher is not convinced. That night, his girlfriend, Jane Olsen (Lil Dagover), is snatched from her bed by a mysterious figure.
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Few films have made such an impact and prompted such scholarly discussion over the last century as Wiene’s silent feature, which hit German theatres in February of 1920. It’s been called the first full-length horror film and has been dissected, analysed and deconstructed so thoroughly as to make further discussion almost redundant. The nightmarish landscape of hand-painted backdrops, skewed perspectives and extreme angles was such a bold design statement that it has even been argued that the film marks the birth of the medium as artistic expression.
Viewing the film today, it’s the technical aspects that immediately grab the attention. The startling artificiality of the sets is a revelation, appearing like theatrical ‘flats’ left close to a fire just long enough to warp their overall shape without blurring sharp edges and jagged lines. Buildings tilt and lean over, casting menacing shadows on the people who pass through the narrow streets, and window frames are collections of acute angles. Room interiors are bare and drab, and the town clerk sits at a desk so ridiculously far off the floor that he’s almost in mid-air.
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Although it is generally acknowledged that the Expressionist Art movement was the inspiration for the film’s signature look, it’s worth noting that the style’s heyday was already past by the time production of the film began. It’s also a difficult movement to define, having much in common with several other avant-garde schools, including Cubism and Surrealism. Here, it’s employed as a backdrop to showcase a bizarre, unhinged pantomime with no attempt to convey a semblance of grounded reality.
Whereas the technical aspects are admirable, the story doesn’t bear close scrutiny if approached from a logical perspective. Although the narrative is linear for the most part, events always feel fractured, as if parts of the tale are being deliberately withheld from the audience. Certain developments, motivations and actions are never sufficiently justified by scriptwriters Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer. Of course, such inconsistencies can always be explained by what may be cinema’s first ‘unreliable narrator’, but how unreliable is he? The controversial framing story that provides the film’s climactic twist can be viewed more than one way, and different interpretations are possible. Was any of this intentional? It’s hard to say.
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Deficiencies or not, these aspects help conjure the drama’s famous dream-like atmosphere, which is essential to keep the audience fully invested. It’s necessary because there’s little mystery to the proceedings for a large part of the running time. The plot develops very predictably, and modern viewers may already feel a little impatient with Feher playing catch-up by the time he uncovers Krauss’s secret via a poorly concealed diary. This sequence is somewhat contrived and plays too long, considering it occurs near the end of the film. However, the film was being presented to a 1920 audience whose viewing experience was far more limited than anyone watching it today. It’s also likely that many would not have had an understanding of mental health issues and may have needed the exposition provided to follow the story.
Given the film’s immediate and phenomenal success and lasting acclaim, it’s perhaps not surprising that several of the creative minds involved tried to claim the lion’s share of the credit in subsequent years. Screenwriter Janowitz was the most vocal, insisting that Caligari was born out of the anti-authoritarian spirit that reigned in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. He also alleged that the framing story was added over his and Meyer’s objections because they felt that its inclusion diluted the film’s political message. These claims played into the theories of film historians such as Siegfried Kracauer, who saw Caligari as a Hitler figure and the film as an anticipation of the Nazi’s rise to power. However, Janowitz also stated that the unique visuals and set design were detailed in the original screenplay. This was effectively debunked when a copy of the original shooting script surfaced in 1995 and contained no such details. It also had a framing story, albeit different from the one in the finished film, but it’s hard to reconcile its content with a supposed political agenda.
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However, Janowitz and Meyer did create a story that’s still being discussed over a century later, with all its ambiguities and creative intentions open to debate. Thematically, the German preoccupation with dual identity was long established, firstly in literature, where the notion of a doppelgänger appeared as early as 1796, and then in film with Paul Wegener’s appearance as ‘Der Student Von Prag/The Student of Prague (1913). So the notion of Krauss as a kindly asylum director moonlighting as the evil Caligari was a familiar trope, reinforced by the sane/insane dichotomy present in nearly all the other principal characters. Arguably, Caligari’s most direct descendant was super-criminal Dr Mabuse, first brought to the screen shortly afterwards by director Fritz Lang. Coincidentally, it was Lang who introduced untried screenwriters Janowitz and Meyer to studio head Erich Pommer, who bought their Caligari script. Lang later claimed he was initially slated to direct the film and Pommer that he was involved with the design decisions, although there is no evidence to support either assertion. It is possible, of course, that the minimalist set design may have actually been inspired by cost-cutting rather than any tremendous artistic vision, even if it seems almost heretical to introduce such a prosaic notion into the conversation.
Although tinged with hypnotism and mind control here, sadly, Somnambulism is just another word for sleepwalking as opposed to anything more involved or sinister. Janowitz and Meyer may have been inspired to place it in a story context by none other than Sigmund Freud, who had addressed it recently in his article ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’ published in 1917 in Vienna. There was a history of its scientific study in Germany, most famously by Baron Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach, who used such work to formulate his belief in a human life energy called the Odic force, which was also linked to hypnotism. Sleepwalking had already been used successfully as a legal defence in an American murder case in 1846.
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In the face of the film’s technical achievements, it would be easy to undervalue the human aspect of the exercise. However, it’s undeniable that the film would only capture the imagination in quite the way it does with the participation of Krauss and Veidt. The latter arguably has the showier role as Caigari’s puppet, his skeletal form and heavy black face makeup providing one of silent cinema’s most unforgettable images. Although it was a star-making appearance, the actor was able to diversify quickly into other roles, perhaps partially because horror wasn’t yet a recognised genre into which he could be typecast. Ironically, he most often appeared as noblemen, both heroic and villainous, and was able to make a career as similar urbane sophisticates in Hollywood after fleeing the rise of the Nazis. Despite many leading roles, he’s probably best remembered now as the Nazi Major Heinrich Strasser in ‘Casablanca’ (1942).
Krauss arguably has the more challenging role of the two. It’s surprising to learn that he was only in his mid-thirties at the time of the film’s production, given that his performance as a far older man is so convincing. This is particularly true in his shabby Caligari persona, where his body language, posture and movement bring to mind nothing as much as a giant insect scuttling from one place to another. He appears overly demonstrative to modern eyes on a few occasions, but even then, he’s deliciously grotesque rather than clownish. It’s utterly appropriate that his cramped trailer seems like an animal’s lair with its absence of comfort and furniture.
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There is some dispute over who plays the criminal wrongly arrested for the killings after he attacks a landlady (Elsa Wagner) during an attempted robbery. Some sources have Rudolf Klein-Rogge in the role, others the lesser-known performer Ludwig Rex. Visual identification isn’t aided by the lack of authenticated photographs of Rex, whose work has largely vanished into the abyss of time. Klein-Rogge was a legitimate star of German cinema, though, which makes the comparison more straightforward, and the actor certainly resembles him. However, I will probably plant my flag in the Rex camp if push comes to shove.
Some of the principals’ subsequent careers differed significantly from Veidt’s ascent to stardom. Robert Wiene, whose contribution is nearly always sidelined, was already an experienced director who had worked with Veidt before on the intriguing ‘Fear/Furcht’ (1917). After Caligari, he attempted to replicate its success by bringing an expressionistic touch to several films, most notably the horror tale ‘Genuine/Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses (1920) and ‘Raskolnikow’ (1923). The latter was a major studio adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment’, although it’s not well remembered today. When the Nazis rose to power, he accepted an offer to direct in Hungary. He later moved to Paris, where he attempted to mount a Caligari remake with famous French surrealist Jean Cocteau. He passed on in 1938 due to cancer.
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Krauss remained in his homeland during the Nazi era as he fully embraced its ideologies and politics. He was a fervent anti-semite who counted both Benito Mussolini and Joseph Goebbels as friendly acquaintances. He was appointed vice-chairman of the Reich Chamber of Culture’s theatrical department in 1933 and was exempted from military service. Both Goebbels and Hitler considered Krauss a cultural ambassador for Nazi Germany. After the war, he was initially banned from performing in films and theatre. However, in a surprisingly short space of time, he was receiving prestigious awards, including the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany and the High Decoration of the Republic of Austria. He died after collapsing during a performance of King Lear in 1959.
It’s a cinema classic. Not seen it yet? Then you must become Caligari!