Freud, Gestures, and Bluebeard

Alright. As the so-called ‘mistress of the blog’, I went on a bit of a JSTOR splurge, and came across these gems.

What, you don’t have time to read a couple ridiculously long articles, you say? Worry not! For I’ve taken the liberty to read and summarize the relavant points in them for you!

You’re welcome.

Now this article, I found to be very Clark-appropriate. It’s called “In the Grip of an Obsession”: Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and is all about – you guessed it (oh, you didn’t? Well this is awkward…) – PSYCHOLOGY!

Commenting on the psycho-horror themes of the film, Julia Walker writes that it is no surprise “that the psychological model invoked in these critical treatments is predominantly Fredudian. As Catherine Clement observes in her influential 1975 article ‘Charlatans and Hysterics,’ Dr. Caligari is the ‘demoniac double’ of Sigmund Freud.”

Ahh, good ol’ Freud. Showing up, somehow, somewhere, in every class I’ve taken.

Clement’s point is that psychoanalysis in Freud’s Studies in Hysteria parallels that in Caligari. Walker’s point? That Caligari presents “a Freudian model of the self”. Because I’ve only taken one Psychology class in my life, I may be wrong in my interpretation of this quote, but I take her to mean by ‘a Freudian self’ a self that is confused and conflicted.

Wikipedia agrees. The id is the part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest. In Caligari, this would be the innate impulse to become obsessive over something (such as discovering the psychology behind the real Caligari). The ego is the individual’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance (a.k.a. Caligari’s anger at the clerk when he was made to wait just like everybody else, and was scoffed at when he told him he was showing a somnambulist. Caligari clearly thought himself important, also seen through his manner of dress). I would go into the superego, the part of the mind that acts as a conscience, but Caligari seemed not to have one. Thoughts?

Back to Walker’s article. She refers to Kracauer and his opinion that the film is about cultural anxiety, and claims he was “wrong to read it in presciently political terms”. Ouch Kracauer, looks like it’s not so obvious after all.

What I found most interesting in her article were the diagrams of the set of Delsartean gestures used in the film “to signifiy a ‘convulsive’ or ‘execrative’ state in the first instance, and an ‘expansive’ state in the second.”

There arealso a couple pages with screen shots from the film where these hand gestures came into play, with brief captions about their specific symbolic meanings.

Next article!

This one is called “The National Board of Review and the Early Art Cinema in New York: “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as Affirmative Culture” by Mike Budd. He reiterated a lot of the ideas found in Kracauer’s book, namely that in critiquing German Film, scholars “neglected concrete historical processes” and many have used Wiene’s Caligari “for their own purposes”.

So, in the spirit of interpreting the Caligari film to my own ends, I thought I’d extrapolate a bit. I took the National Imagination course last year, and we had a section about Perrault, the french writer made famous through his fairy tales. From his story “Bluebeard” comes this quote, spoken by the title character to his last wife:

“As for this little key, it is the key to the cabinet at the end of the grand gallery of the room below; open everything, go anywhere, but as far as this little cabinet is concerned, I forbid you to enter and I forbid you so strongly, that if you dare open it, there will be no bounds to my wrath.”

Imagine Bluebeard as Caligari. Both are short-tempered fellows, not the most sought-after by young mädchens. And people around them keep disappearing. With Bluebeard, it’s his myriad of wives. With Caligari, it’s the fair-goers. While the wrath of Bluebeard was to attempt to turn his disobidient wife into a dead one, Caligari’s took a much more psychological turn.
Francis’ punishment for opening the Doctor’s cabinet and revealing the Cesare hoax was to be forced to believe himself mad. Caligari was able to turn the situation on the young man, and convinced everyone that it was Francis who was mentally ill, leaving an eery feeling in the minds of the audience as the credits start to roll.
Both stories are example of fairy tales gone bad. If Perrault had written the script for the film, his moral (usually not of the most sentimental or politically-correct variety) would probably be something along the lines of “don’t accuse mad people of their lunacy, or you’ll be next.”
Yeah, he’s a real sweetheart.

Back to Mike Budd’s article, he quotes Alfred Kuttner’s review of Caligari, who basically states that the film revealed what this new form of expression was capable of, and that if the American public doesn’t see that, then that is our fault and misfortune.
This struck me as interesting, mostly because I remember Kracauer making it seem like American films were more popular, and that it was the German filmmakers who were trying to catch up to us. Hmm…

Budd also makes a more universally relatable argument for the themes in the film, versus Kracauer’s focus on a strictly Germanic one. He quotes Kuttner as writing that the expressionism solidified “into universally valid ‘values’ [and] directly to a universal audience.” This ties back in with the whole “let’s neglect a part of history” phenomenon, and, as Kuttner puts it, Caligari “exhalt[s] ‘universal’ affirmative values precisely in their imaginary separation from society and history.”