-Devdutt Trivedi
Completed in 1920, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the most important of the German Expressionist masterworks that would later not just influence but mould perhaps the most important cinematic genres of the ‘Golden Era of Hollywood’: Film Noir. The film transformed the way German audiences looked at cinema, following the footsteps of the films of Paul Wegener (The Student of Prague (1913) and The Golem:How he came into the world (1920)) and opened up a space that would be immediately occupied by the forthcoming works of Fritz Lang, his early masterwork Destiny (1921) and his magnum opus, the four hour long Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922). The conditions that sparked off the remarkable story written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and its eccentric production process in the hands of director, Dr. Robert Wiene and its eventual public reception reinforces the significance of the bizarre events portrayed in the film.
After the entry of the United States into the First World War, American movies swept the world over with their sophisticated distribution network, to impress an unrivalled hatred for Germany. Germany’s answer to war propaganda films churned out by America was the state approved private organization, UFA, which largely fed off the elated intellectual atmosphere of Germany after the war. The concern was to depart from the shattered world of yesterday and conceive of a revolutionary Germany which would allow a nation whose people would shape both its society as well as appropriate its nature. From this emerged an avante-garde movement, much like during the Russian Revolution of 1917, where representation was overthrown for the sake of specific formal abstraction that reflected the sub conscience of the masses.
In the case of Russia, a movement influenced by the Italian art movement, Futurism, influenced largely by the works of Italian Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, emerged as an approving response to the cry of Marxism, with its emphasis on transformation of the human body into machines (remarkably transformed to the cinematic medium in both Eisenstein’s Battleship Pottemkin and Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera).
However in Germany, with the aftermath of the war, due to Allied pressure, internal struggles and economic inflation, the masses acted in terrific shock which resulted in withdrawal from any participation in external life. The middle-class which was always happy being ruled was now repressed. Any bourgeoisie emancipation on their part would find its reaction in a socialist settlement.
German Expressionism had already emerged in the work of Edward Munch whose outstanding work The Scream was completed in 1893. The works under the ideology, both technical and political, of this art movement denied bourgeoisie traditions with faith in a social order that would shape both society and nature without any state interference. The jagged, pointed forms in architectural designs and landscapes underlined the split between the inside and outside world of the German masses and their lack of expression for their repressed post-war trauma. Expressionism depicted man as being lost in a nightmarish world of diagonals, which served the function of both depicting this schizophrenic internal condition as well as giving expression to repressed rage. In this
way it formalized, in the Modernist sense, the relationship between the state of the German public and their subconscious trauma.
Both the writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer had strange experiences which reflected German society at the time and greatly helped shape the story they would write together. Hans Janowitz had encountered a serial rapist in October 1913, in a part of Hamburg known as Holstenwall which had amongst Otto Von Bismarck’s most important statues overlooking ships at the harbour. This average bourgeoisie man was someone Janowitz seemed to recognize when he later turned up for the victim’s funeral. Carl Mayer on the other hand had a very difficult childhood and was forced to raise his three younger children after his father, an obsessive gambler, committed suicide after he went broke after making heavy losses at ‘scientific gambling.’ According to Siegfried Kracauer in his landmark book From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Mayer made his living by sketching Hindenburg portraits on postcards in Munich cafes. According to Janowitz, later in the war, Mayer had to undergo repeated examinations of his medical condition. Both the youths, intoxicated by Paul Wegener’s films, met in Berlin and interacted with each other on their personal struggles and strange adventures. One night, they went to a show titled Man and the Machine where they saw an unusually strong man accompany his miracles of strength with strange utterances which affected the spell bound spectators. That same night they finished their story.
The original story was revolutionary in content, about Dr. Caligari (a name Janowitz chanced upon while reading the Unknown Letters of Stendhal) and his somnambulist Cesare, in a town, significantly named Holstenwall, near the Dutch border, who dominated by Caligari’s hypnotic powers is force to commit murder, much like the German public captivated by the State was forced to go to war. The film was surprisingly accepted by Eric Pommer, head of Decla Film, who sensed the timeliness of the story and expected Fritz Lang to direct the film. Since Lang was busy completing his serial Spiders (1919), the film was assigned to Dr. Robert Wiene, whose father, a once famous Dresden actor had gone insane. The film subverted the revolutionary potential of the text, by convicting the antagonists of authority i.e. Cesare to madness. Dr. Caligari declares Cesare insane precisely since he believed him to be the mythic Caligari. This is referred to in the film through a nomadic 11th century Italian text that denotes the name Caligari representing an authoritative magician who would hypnotize somnambulists to murder people. However Wiene suggests the revolutionary potential of the story by ending the film in a way that depicted the past events as a madman’s fantasy.
The sets in the technique of German Expressionism were designed by Alfred Kubin and influenced by the works of Lyonel Feininger and testified to Expressionist painter Hermann Warm’s dictum of film being ‘paintings brought to life.’ The jagged, pointed shapes, according to Kracauer transformed the material objects to emotional objects, an obviously Bergsonian example of the transformation of matter into (a post-war) memory and its corresponding affect as developing throughout the duration of the film. The film transformed Eisenstein’s dictum of the commune as being men at work to an Expressionist formulation: (the) soul at work and the film medium, its use of light and shadow as being key in expressing this formulation.
On its release the importance of the film echoed across reviews except for Vorwarts, the leading Social Democratic Party (which also consisted of important German Communists of the KDP) publication which misunderstood the film as having ‘sympathy for the diseased and comprehension for the self sacrificing activities of the psychiatrists and attendants.’ The French realized the groundbreaking quality of the film and coined the term Caligarisme.
Caligari followed by the Dr. Mabuse cycle, anticipated the arrival of Hitler who would carry out these psychological experiments on a mass scale. The film also sparked of a trend to make completely studio made films in Germany.
Reference Bibliography
From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer, 1947, Princeston University Press