#hans janowitz

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Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari 1920 dir Robert Wiene

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Batman: Nosferatu

by Randy Lofficier, Jean-Marc Lofficier, and Ted McKeever

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On April 3, 1921, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari debuted in the United States.

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1,000 Greatest Films: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

And suddenly I understand half the movies I've seen just a little bit better now. They were all copying this one! Tim Burton's not an inspired visionary, he's just really, really into this one film. Okay, that's obviously an exaggeration, but my first sentence still stands.

Cabinet was born in the aftermath of World War I, written by a veteran and a draft dodger. Hans Janowitz had served as an officer and like a great many of those with firsthand exposure to trench warfare had become a pacifist. Carl Mayer had escaped the horrors of war by feigning madness, undergoing intense examinations by the military. Both were penniless (in Weimar Germany, who wasn't?), and shortly after being introduced to each other and seeing a hypnotist's performance, set to work on an absolutely bizarre film.

Of course, even in 1920 the behind-the-scenes workings of cinema had already been established. They had to basically force their way into a meeting to get their script selected, had to sign a deal that was much less generous than they could have hoped, and agreed that the script could be changed as the studio saw fit. Robert Wiene directed, the co-founder of the Austrian Filmbund with quite a few other works under his belt. Though not the first choice, he was appreciated due to his father's own mental health struggles, which were thought to help better connect him to the piece.

The team assembled, the film promptly descended into an artist madness that I will envy for the rest of my life. They could have gone for a realistic aesthetic with the sets, but they didn't. Expressionism had just been invented a couple decades ago and Caligari set out to perfect it. Straight lines were effectively forbidden, Euclidean geometry distorted in ways that would have given Lovecraft fits if he'd been brave enough to look at something so foreign as German cinema.

Every set is designed to emphasize a feeling more than a real space. The village is crowded and disorganized, Jane's bedroom is almost entirely windows (all the better for Cesare to break through), the tent interior is tiny and oppressive no matter how few people are in it. A great bit is the ridiculously tall stool a bureaucrat is sitting on.

Likewise, the characterization is not particularly concerned with realistic interiority, but archetypes. Jane in particular is a clear Ophelia, as close to the mad girl as possible at the beginning of the film and the narrative allegedly about the circumstances that brought her to her madness. Likewise, Caligari is so wrapped up in the archetype of the mad scientist (well, psychologist) pursuing amoral research that his very character is revealed to be a copycat criminal, recreating the circumstances of a 1700s serial killer.

And Franzis, the hero, is our plucky everyman, dragged into the horrors of Caligari's entertainment entirely by accident (his friend is murdered) and hardly capable of making a difference in the events that proceed. What attempts he does make are quite reasonable but accomplish nothing. The criminal he catches is only another copycat killer, his night spent watching Cesare is thwarted because he was only spying on a decoy, and of course, none of this is actually true because he's a crazy person at an insane asylum.

It's a Shyamalanian twist if I've ever seen one, fifty years before he was born! Caligari codified the horror genre so thoroughly that everyone has to do twist endings now. And while people loved it on release, having had time to think about it, there's... certainly been some negative thoughts to. But first, let's be real here: it's certainly fairly choreographed. The framing device makes so much more sense when you think about the story of the other gentleman (driven out of his house by spirits... or delusions???), and the set works well as the strange perspective of a madman.

But... man did it mess up the message. Remember when I said that the writers gave the studio script-editing rights? This original framing device didn't exist. A different one did, and maybe it had a similar twist ending, but we'll never know because the only surviving copy of the script doesn't actually have an ending to the frame device. Oh well! I certainly think it's unlikely though. The core is highly anti-authoritarian, with the story version of Caligari being an unrepentant monster who ultimately gets a taste of his own medicine by being institutionalized. The framing device?

Well, some critics would argue that it was proof of Germany's subconscious desire to listen to authority regardless of its irrationality, which considering what happened... Yeah.

Of course, this interpretation is pretty disrespectful to Jewish director Robert Wiene, who would be driven into exile by the Nazis, and to Fritz Lang, the originally intended director, who claimed responsibility for the framing device and...

*checks notes*

was driven into exile by the Nazis!

Considering the alternative, this is actually the happy ending. Carl Meyer was likewise Jewish and got the hell out of Germany while the getting was good. Hans Janowitz was apparently Aryan and went into the oil business, but as much as I disdain oil, I'm certainly happy he wasn't a Holocaust victim.

Considering the general everything going on in Germany in the course of the surrounding decades, it's no surprise that there's a lot of different ways you can interpret it all. Is the fictitious Caligari the government of 1910s Germany, forcing the innocent common men like Cesare into the horrible role of killers? Are the stairs a symbol of the preposterous ways that leaders make themselves difficult for the common people to reach? Do the subtle touches of expressionism in the epilogue suggest that the real Caligari is more insane than the real Franzis? What are we to make of the duality that is everywhere in the film, to the point that the two narratives are mirror images of authority vs Franzis? And how deeply ingrained into the German psyche was the question/answer pair of "How long will I live?" and "Until tomorrow at dawn" as they lurched from one horrifying war towards another?

But that's much too depressing a note to end on, so let's instead take a moment to congratulate the film for another of its inventions: viral marketing. All throughout the city, posters were put up reading "Du musst Caligari werden," which means "You must become Caligari". Ominous as all hell, since no one knew what Caligari was at the time. Considering how many people went to see it, we must hope that this particular directive didn't get too lodged in anyone's psyche...

Ah man there I go getting weird again. It's hard not to when horror is involved, okay? Next time, probably not horror, because it's Charlie Chaplin instead, in the 1921 film The Kid!

[lisystrata]

Ernst Deutsch — actor who was supposed to play the somnambulist in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"

Before Conrad Veidt was cast, screenwriter Hans Janowitz intended the part of Cesare to go to his friend, actor Ernst Deutsch.

In the end, Deutsch did not get to participate in the filming, and the film was created as we know it now, a hundred years later.

(whispers to the side) On my own behalf, I will add that in the case with the participation of Deutsch, it is unlikely that Cesare would have made such an impression on me as Cesare performed by Veidt. Conrad was like created for this role. This is my opinion, I do not impose it on anyone!

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Although it doesn’t contain the types of scares modern-day audiences are used to, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has a haunting, eerily chilling quality. This movie is over a hundred years old. Everyone who starred in it, who was behind the camera when it was made, who saw it upon its initial release is dead and gone. All that’s left of them are these strange images in this imaginary story. No one involved could’ve imagined that a century later, their work would still be influential. Made before sound recordings or colour cinema was possible and before modern-day cinematic techniques were established, it looks unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Combined with its subject matter, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari feels less like a movie from long ago and more like a glimpse into another reality.

Told in flashback, the story takes places in Holstenwall, where the town fair is in full swing. Francis (Friedrich Fehér) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinz v. Twardowski) attend a new attraction presented by Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). He commands a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) to tell audiences about the future. Cesare’s predictions of death prove to be true: there is a serial killer in Holstenwall.

The most striking aspect of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the art direction. Buildings lean unnaturally, doorways, stairs, and streets twist like something out of a madman’s notebook. Pieces of furniture are disproportionate to the people who use them. Trees are hardly recognizable as living things. The architecture's angles, curves, and spirals are such that you might not notice a broken window in the background despite it being intact in the previous scene. The shadows are painted, which means people can move through them without disturbing the light. It’s like these places and people are merely fragments of an un-reality, or (appropriately enough) ghosts reliving their actions as best they can considering their life is over. More than an experiment in style, these visuals emphasize the panic Francis and his sweetheart Jane (Lil Dagover) experience as the murders continue. They also employ excellent graphic design techniques. Your eye is naturally drawn to important objects or characters as they follow the bold lines on-screen.

To casual moviegoers, the performances in old films tend to feel over-the-top. We’re used to natural performances, realistic dialogue and sets that mimic our world. Nothing you see in Caligari resembles real life but that’s the point. Even the title cards use a font reminiscent of insane asylum scribbles. The performances turn out to be just about perfect because of how they exaggerated they are. Rather than feel dated, this 1920 film is immediate and mesmerizing.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the kind of movie you could watch a hundred times and still feel like you haven't seen it all. You can tell why it had an impact on filmmakers like Tim Burton and is very much the sort of movie that makes you repeatedly go "Oh! That's where that's from!" It’s so different from what we’re used to that you cannot forget the way it looks or feels. (On Blu-ray, January 15, 2021)

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TIL that Hans Janowitz, writer of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, claims to have gotten the idea for the film after witnessing a shady looking man at a carnival. The next day he heard a young girl was brutally murdered there. When he attended the funeral, he saw the same man lurking around

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Some of the few surviving stills from F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (1920), with Conrad Veidt in the dual role of Dr. Warren and Mr. O’Connor. The final image also shows us Béla Lugosi, in one of his few Weimar roles. He had a small part of Dr. Warren’s butler. The film was a loose and unlicensed adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and like Nosferatu, Murnau’s other unlicensed horror adaptation, Der Januskopf was subject to legal action. However, where a few reels Nosferatu managed to survive, it seems none still exist of Der Januskopf. The loss is especially unfortunate considering the wealth of talent behind it (it’s script was written by Hans Janowitz, who had written The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; and the cinematographer was Karl Freund of Metropolis fame). Script notes suggest the film would also have had one of the first instances of a moving camera (a staple of Murnau’s filmography).