The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

It’s a staple. Battleship Potemkin. Caligari. Nouvelle vague. It’s the building block of any film criticism and one of the key texts in all cinema. I have a masters. Msc.English and European Film studies. From the University of Edinburgh. I have watched this film repeatedly. With and without sound. In and out of colour. And at times endured and at times enjoyed. But always with some sense of its mesmerism. Yet I’ve not been in the last 20 years. In a spare7 minimum tess, the story seems attic, while convoluted—ththeirse ch—their pantomime and pomp. Yet the gravity and threat have always been conveyed yet marred by absurdity.

The  4k restoration does a lot to create a superior experience that genuinely takes the film away from a curiosity at worst and a piece of history at best and contemporaries it to a modern cinematic experience while not detracting from its time and production and should be applauded for what it unveils behind the somnambulic tendencies of Francis and Jane. Let alone, Cesare.

Watching this now as Alan, Francis and Jane discuss their emotions. While the colourisation process is more tintethanen emotive, as in earlier editions, the work on the frames allows a greater sense of nuance in acting. Indeed often revisited as a sort of expressionism of emotions, the characters can be naturalistic in their peculiarities. The townsfolks are ,at worst, a collective of eccentrics and the authorities little more than an ad hoc council of beards and hats. However, the conversations and neurosis are not at the fore and have a more excellent range than the earlier editions would reveal. Alan himself, having been the lead until this point, shows way more ‘gaiety’ than allowed before…and one can’t help but feel he is trying to encourage Francis more to a non-binary reframing and frankly ‘thrupledom’ would probably suit Alan and Jane more…given of the two Francis is quite Whitney.

Being shown as part of the Picturehouse weimer season, its place as commentary about uncertain and askew times seems particularly relevant today.

While the film and new print allow us to see more of the bleak worldview. With prisons and numbers more like graffiti. A hard place to know where the trees end and the bricks begin.

We also see clearly how Caligari can fool many with a simple tool like a dummy to replace cesCesarHe is a docile figure while the violent actions of his creation, using the vulnerable Cesare as some sort of golem of myth for his wrongdoing. Cesare awakens with passion at one point, and his struggle with a much more confrontational jane than we have seen before awakens his own will.

The classic bookends of the film make us wonder which narrative we are watching. Is Caligari the monster or the saviour? But the use of the grimoires and texts in the asylum in the last two acts shows how popular movements can be fraudulent. 

We see this now with war and confrontations to this day. Recently I have been reading one book, i’m not broad, but one is better than none. Bad News, Anjan Sundaram. It’s the account of running a school for journalists in Rwanda. Kigali, to be specific. Under a brutal regime, how does one get the truth to the public, subterfuge? Satire, or simple capitulation. 

In the account, civil servants disappear, and journalists are blackmailed into allowing one man’s need for idolatry to come to power. The army has its money raised, and evil scapegoats for evil are found, much like a murderous type who never committed a crime. 

The film is a work and commentary on dictatorship and corruption of one’s trust in authorities and how they can be broken, not be coups but by erosion. Back in my post-grad days, ad Siegfrieds Kracauers’ ‘from Caligari to Hitler’, a text I found hard and technical but never wavered from the political act of cinema.

When it comes to these ideals. And democracy. Our fears and need to account. Caligari to Kigali may be trite. But how absurd is a dummy president in a fake news world?

See the rendition as soon as possible, it’s a dark dream but immersive to our times.