The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of D. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is Robert Wiene's Expressionist nightmare brought to cinematic life by the amazing performance of Conrad Veidt as Cesare the Somnambulist, Werner Krauss as the Doctor himself, and the amazing visual look, borrowed from surrealism and Expressionism until the actors are simply living foreground against a warped painting of things in an in-between world between consciousness and subconscious madness. It is a dark, grainy, and ancient vision brought forth from the bowels of a mind haunted by turmoil, by a sense of the mechanisms of psychic control that can possess and shape us all.

It takes place on a great hat-like peak surrounded by crazily-leaning shadows, ringed by painted houses, in a twisted alternate European city of claustrophobic alleys and streets, doorways festooned with plumed paintings, and chairs that are really, really tall. Caligari sweeps in, in his lopsided wagon, with a canvas painting of Cesare, and sets up shop at the Holstenwall fairgrounds (which is atop one of the hat-like hills, which lean at crazy angles, ringed by the crazily-leaning domiciles; everything here is at an odd, non-Euclidean, nightmare angle, and everything is a pale, grainy old painting one can step into, mentally, while the performers cavort in the foreground).

Francis (Friedrich Fehér) and Alan (Hans Heinz v. Twardowski) go to the fair, Alan having found an impressive handbill advertising the Somnambulist. In a slow, zombie-like scene Cesare emerges from his cabinet, and gives a prophecy to Francis, Francis foolishly asks, "When will I die?"

Cesare, ever-obligate, answers, "You have until dawn!"

And Francis is then hysterical. And goes off. And is soon murdered. Dead by DAWN.

(The Town Clerk is also a victim. But of who?)

A man is captured trying to sneak into the home of an old woman with a knife. He is a perverted killer but claims not to have killed Francis and the town clerk, although, he was most certainly going to kill the old woman, he readily confesses. Alan begins to investigate the Polizei and is sure it must have something to do with the odd Somnambulist show that has blown into town. (This story, incidentally, is recounted by Alan, so that we are seeing here his memories. Our film opens on a park bench. Alan is discussing his story, and also spooks and spirits, with an old man, when Jane (Lil Dagover), his lover, "my former fiance," comes up the pathway, looking as if she woke up on the wrong side of a vampire's tomb.)

Cesare abducts Jane, heading over the dangerous rooftops with her slung over his shoulder. He eventually drops her; what's sleeping in Caligari's cabinet at this point is discovered, by the polizei, to be nothing more than a man of straw. A crowd chases the black-clad sleeper (who, Caligari informs us, "Is twenty-three years old and has been asleep for twenty-three years!") and then we proceed to a house of madness.

The denouement sees that a certain keeper of a madhouse, shades of Dracula perhaps, is imitating the actions of a great alchemist, or hypnotist of many hundred years past, who also possessed a somnambulist he sent out to KILL for him. Or so claims the mad narrator, whose vision of this story unfolds from his mind, thus explaining the foreground of animate, if grotesque and bizarre characters, and the background, which is a nightmare of painted scenery, bizarre geometry; the aforementioned occult angles of a madman's nightmare. The characters that people his story are the same that people his life; his life of insanity, wherein he suspicions the Herr Direktor of being...THAT MYSTIC CALIGARI!

But, says Herr Direktor (who walks with a strange, rooster-like gait on the balls of his feet), "I know how to cure him." And then he smiles. And all is lost.

Incidentally, the look of Dr. Caligari--with his tall stovepipe hat, circular black glasses, whispy white hair, and hunched over, cloaked gate--his face full of contorted grimace, is said to have been inspired by the look of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer; who, no doubt, would have understood the psychological despair and spiritual void of this terrifying and antique film. And is that "Cabinet" a symbol of the mind, of the spiritual void within? Does the man that reclines there live and breathe, or is he made of straw? Or will he sleep, nursing his bestial prognostications and will to kill, until summoned, by his dread Master, once more?

You decide.

Written by Carly Mayer and Hans Janowitz, and directed by Robert Wiene.