Last year, in my English class, we read his novel, and I wrote a paper about some of the themes throughout, which I find to be prevalent to the film as well.
My thesis was about the roles of men in Victorian-era society (as portrayed in the novel) falling along a binary axis of male sexuality: the “unnatural” homosexual male, and the excessively stereotypical dominant heterosexual one. Because this post could easily get out of hand if I went into the main points of both, I’ll focus on the “unnatural” interpretation.
In the conservative times in which this novel’s story was placed, anything “unnatural” (such as homosexuality or, I don’t know, vampires) was considered in direct opposition to God’s will, consequently making it evil. Examples of this in the film are plenty: the Count’s magical appearances and disappearances; the doors opening and closing of their own accord; the rapid, unnatural speed of his horse-drawn carriage; his power over others, even those far away; his sleeping with his eyes open in a coffin; his disgustingly long and crooked fingers – the list goes on.
The townspeople at the inn Hutter stayed at crossed themselves in fear at the mention of the Count’s name, unable to bear the thought of his ‘otherness’. In contrast, wooden crosses framed Ellen, the pure character, on both sides during the scene of her pining at the beach. The presence of God in the characters’ lives, whether directly or indirectly, was the deciding factor in whether or not they were evil or “sinful,” as the book Hutter found would put it.
The Count in Nosferatu was not depicted as being homosexual as much as the one in Dracula was. The only moment I can think of that could be interpreted as such would be the one in which he tries to lick Hutter’s finger and asks him to spend more time with him. Nevertheless, both versions of the vampire as “abnormal” (in appearance and demeanor), create a feeling of “uneasiness which [the characters] always [have]” when they are around the Count” (Dracula, 26).
In the book, the plague is not so much what is being spread, as is the “corruption” of pure souls by the vampire. My interpretation of this in my paper was that the men with Van Helsing who set out to destroy Dracula had recognized the threat that the spread of homosexuality (read: unnaturalism) would hold over the conservative and religious Victorian ideals of their time. So, with the help of God, they fought the “corruption” of the traditional gender roles idealized by their society.
I also went into the associations of the wolf and bat/mosquitos with the vampire character, basically saying that his blatantly animalistic, lustful behaviors towards his victims stressed the immorality of his kind, and Victorian citizens saw such conduct as an attack on their society’s values.
The Count poses the threat of consuming the morality of susceptible – but otherwise decent – citizens through his sexuality. Take, for instance, the character of Ellen. She was portrayed as a naiive, pure, ideal woman of her era. She was decent, for sure. She was even troubled by Hutton’s ‘killing of the beautful flowers’ that he gave her as a token of his love. Yet, she was still succeptible enough to the Count’s power to open her window, and to almost jump off her balcony.
The Counts in both Nosferatu and Dracula are representative of the damage they could inflict upon the conservative society of the “normal” world as the prime motivators and instigators of the plauge-like spread of abnormalism.
Thoughts?
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.”
He described the ‘inherent nihilism’ of Germany mentioned throughout the reading, prominent on pages 52 and 53, as a blend of “cynicism and melodramatic sentimentality”, and concluded that this national trait “characterized history as meaningless.” Did they though? Did Germans generally feel that history was meaningless? Or did they, unintentionally through their actions, make it seem as if it was so? If we take this opinion to be true, then another question is raised: Is this nihilism still present today?
After World War II, most can agree that Germans have been altogether overly conscious of the effects that their nation had on the history of the entire world. While I acquiesce that it is possible that they may be an extremely skeptical nation, it doesn’t mean that they are unaware of the meaning and consequences of their ancestors’ actions.
If they were indeed a nation nihilistic by way of deeming life to be meaningless, then this disposition may have been a strong underlying factor in the carrying out of the atrocious actions nder the Nazi regime.
A second quote that caught my eye in the book was on page 54, and is as follows: “crowds were to develop from an element of [the] stage into one of German everyday life – a process that reached its climax after the war, when no one could avoid encountering them on streets and squares.”
Oh really? The phenomenon of a crowd only occurred after they were a fixture on the stage?
Understandably, the size and disposition of the crowd shifted after the war. But I found this observation of Kracauer’s to be somewhat far-fetched. It seemed a little too convenient, and a little too coincidental.
Moving away from the book, I wanted to bring up a comparable film I saw last year. A French film under the title He Love Me…He Loves Me Not deals with a psychological instability in the same way, telling the story first through the eyes of the affected before revealing the true nature of events.
In this film, Angélique is in love with Loïc, a cardiologist who happens to be married with a child on the way. She’s perfectly infatuated however, and talks often of him with her friend, mostly about how he plans to leave his wife for her. The scenes consist of instances where she is unable to reach him, or she just came from seeing him, or he is peering into her darkened window at night. Yet, you never see the two of them together. Things become more and more intense, and Loïc’s home life starts to deteriorate as he recieves all of these anonymous gifts of affection (from Angélique).
So at this point in the film, the viewer is feeling sorry for Angélique for falling for such an uncaring, unresponsive guy, and ticked off by proxy at Loïc for acting as such.
Suddenly, the film’s perspective switches, and the entire previous story is now seen through Loïc’s eyes. Warning: Spoiler Alert. If you plan on watching this (which I suggest you do, it’s really very good), then do not read the rest of this post. Trust me.
As it turns out, Loïc didn’t even know her, they were just neighbors, and she began stalking him after a chance encounter. She tried to commit suicide over his lack of attention towards her.
She was diagnosed with erotomania, a condition described by Webster as “a delusion in which a person believes that another person is in love with them.” It ends on quite a haunting note. The similarities though, in the delusions of Angélique and Francis and in the way that these films were shot, make them interesting to compare.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is of the first in the series of German Expressionism films. It had a great impact on my understanding of how wide the scope of conceptual thinking at the time was and at the same time how exact a story of murder was shown. The back and forth of events in the movie, the mystery behind it, and the sudden realization that what we have been seeing was a confused memory of a madman are some great ways to develop the plot of a horror movie.
Carl Bennett in the "Silent Era Films" states that: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a tale of a mysterious showman who arrives in a small European town at the time of their annual fair. He intends to amaze the crowds with a genuine somnambulist who knows the past and sees the future. Outside of the sideshow, however, Caligari the showman has sinister plans.
Immediately a series of murders are committed in the town. Suspicion quickly falls on Caligari and his sleepwalker Cesare (Conrad Veidt). But a thief also becomes a suspect.
When Cesare cannot bring himself to murder the beautiful Jane, he kidnaps her, and is hunted by the angry people of the village. Caligari eventually flees the wrath of the mob, and is traced back to an insane asylum.
Werner Krauss’ Dr. Caligari is wonderfully played to archtypical levels, and Veidt delivers a stand-out performance as the somnambulist. Lil Dagover is gorgeous in her film debut as Jane, and Friedrich Fehér as Franzis is at times animatedly maniacal.
The simple but compelling story is augmented by the much-acclaimed expressionist set design that is full of angles and painted shafts of light and shadow. The angular settings and exaggerated makeup emphasize the bizarre world occupied by the mad Caligari. The film’s cramped, off-center and uneasy world is perfectly communicated to the viewer, and there can be no mistaking it: it is a mad world, but its denizens are not aware of it. Caligariremains a deliciously intriguing film, and one of world cinema’s required viewings. — Carl Bennett
After viewing “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, I found myself, as so often happens, skimming through different reviews and related articles on the Internet. While much of the time it’s wonderful having such a vast amount of information so readily available, I can’t help but wonder that without every answer at my fingertips, perhaps my own ability to inquire, reflect, and discover my own interpretation to films, readings, and what have you, would be greatly furthered. It is in this manner that while nodding along to Roger Ebert’s review of “Caligari’s” bizarre set design, with the disconcerting landscape and sharp angles, that I had to shut the computer for a few minutes, realizing that I was getting awfully close to crossing the line between gathering background research and becoming someone eagerly willing to regurgitate the words of a dozen different critics mashed together.
Having cleared that up, back to Mr. Ebert. He offers an interesting review of the film that coincidentally references Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler. He discusses the disjointed world displayed in “Caligari’s” set design, which in fact is the aspect of the film that impresses itself best on most audience members, myself included. When viewing the film, I was completely mesmerized by the set design with the slanting buildings, distorted streets, long staircases, high ceilinged rooms, and eccentric color scheme on top of it all. It was as if it had all been taken from a rather frightening childhood nightmare brought on by an afternoon trip to the carnival.
This distorted look, with sets that resemble expressionist paintings, mirrors the deceptive storyline and is what sets “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” apart from earlier films. Ebert refers to it as the first example of German Expressionism in film. He also suggests that “Caligari” is arguably the first true horror film. While earlier ghost stories and crime fiction existed in film, “their characters inhabited a recognizable world.” “Caligari” represented a new unimaginable, our deepest fears projected into reality.
Another stab at horror alluded to in Ebert’s article is the creepy crime serial, Fantômas, produced by the French director Louis Feuillade in 1913-1914 (7 years prior to “Caligari”).
Starring Rene Navarre as Fantômas, the five-part serial is considered a masterpiece of silent film. While very different from the alien landscape of "Caligari", you can see for yourself how the eerie master of disguise, Fantômas, would have brought chills to his 1914 audience. Here's a trailer if you're interested.
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| Veidt describes himself as a young boy: "I can see myself at school, a small anemic- |
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| Veidt as Cesare from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920). It was said that his starkly angular face corresponded to, and strengthened, the abstract, jagged sets used throughout the film. |
