The visionary screen: Expressionist German cinema from the Student of Prague (1913) to the Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)

Margherita Bonomo
(University of Catania)
mbonomo@unict.it

 

Abstract

The paper’s aim is to explore the characteristics of the so-called German expressionist cinema through the analysis of four classics: Der Student von Prag (S. Rye, 1913), Der Golem (P. Wegener, H. Galeen,1914), Homunculus (O. Rippert,1916), Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920).  In this research the author illustrates the latest developments in the literature on the subject, following the seminal works of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, pioneers in the study of a national cinema and its historical origins.

 

“Post-war spirits”

“There are spirits … on every side … they are around us. They took me away from Home, from my Wife and from my Son”. So runs the first caption of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari (R. Wiene, 1920), considered as the founding, paradigmatic work of German cinematographic expressionism. It is pronounced, in the prologue, by an old man with hallucinated gaze who, at the end of the film, will find himself together with Franzis, the protagonist, an inmate of an asylum. In isolation from the image, the caption appears to operate on different levels of meaning. Such an interpretation might appear somewhat forced, but it finds justification in the film’s semantic complexity. That caption, in such a form, seems to describe the condition of the survivors of the immense tragedy of the great war, an unthinkable experience for those who had not experienced it. Those who returned from the front were often encased in silence, devoid of words to narrate the unspeakable, mute in their efforts to forget their lacerating memories. Who knows if they would ever free themselves from the cries of comrades left to die alone in no man’s land? Between those who stayed at home and those who fought, a dramatic rift gradually insinuates itself. Even the soldiers who died on the battlefield may have been addressed by that caption, wandering spirits among spirits, torn violently from life. The capital letters used for Hearth, Wife and Son suggest the universal meaning of the terms. They indicate daily rituals lost forever, together with a system of values that particularly in Germany seems to have collapsed together with the imperialist dream.

Historiography has shown how the flourishing of miracles, portents, legends, rumours and superstitions was a feature of the Great War. This mystical-magical component is common to all armies, and resonated particularly with the German spirit, according to Lotte Eisner. In the murky atmosphere of the post-war years, German anxiety was driven to a paroxysm by the frustration of defeat, by the blood with which the Freikorps had crushed revolutionary impulses, and by disastrous economic conditions. “The ghosts which have haunted the German Romantics revived, like the shades of Hades after draughts of blood. A new stimulus was thus given to the eternal attraction towards all that is obscure and undetermined, towards the kind of brooding speculative reflection called Grübelei which culminated in the apocalyptic doctrine of Expressionism”¹.

The fascinating essay by Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen, and the equally evocative German Cinema: from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Hitler (1918-1933), by Siegfried Kracauer, landmarks in the study of a national cinema, have exercised an enormous influence since their appearance, respectively in 1952 and in 1947, on cinema studies and in particular on the interpretation of the Weimar cinema. While, as is known, Kracauer offers a socio-psychological interpretation of the films of the period, animated by the need to discover what prompted a large sector of the German population to surrender to Nazism, Eisner focuses on aesthetic aspects, in particular on the development of expressionist characters of in the films of the 1920s, and has the unquestionable merit of first having situated the cinema alongside other arts such as theatre and painting².

Half a century after their publication, although still recognized as authoritative sources regarding their subject of study, both works have been subjected to extensive criticism. In particular, it has been noted that they have not taken into consideration the history of Weimar cinema in its entirety, neglecting trends and films that did not fit easily into their research hypothesis. One of the greatest specialists in the history of German cinema, Elsaesser, highlights the ideological character of both texts which, written after the Second World War, project a view of German cinema of the 1920s that is skewed by the dramatic events that followed³. He prefers to emphasize how the Weimar cinema absorbs the trends of French, Scandinavian, Russian and American cinema, in turn exerting a very strong influence on international cinematography, even conquering Hollywood, to the extent that its national character is in doubt⁴.

Furthermore, a tendency to exaggeration is noticeable in Kracauer’s essay, in his extension of interpretation of individual films to the Weimar cinema as a whole.⁵ To this it must be added that the discovery of new documents such as Caligari’s original screenplay, belies the main source on which the scholar constructed his analysis of this film. Since the interpretation of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the pillars of his general argument about Weimar cinema as emblematic of the collective unconscious of the German people, it has therefore lost its persuasive force⁶.

Although the criticisms of Kracauer’s work are widely shared, however, the German sociologist must certainly be credited with having introduced a methodology that was revisited and developed in the late 1960s by Pierre Sorlin, with the introduction of the concept of “visible” and of cinema as an agent of history. As already pointed out by the Russian director Pudovkin, unlike other works, the film is a collective and industrial product. The producer has a personal interest in making the invested capital bear fruit, hence, the film must find favour with the public and reflect its tastes. The long-term presence of topoi and/or inconsistencies thus allow us to grasp the diachronic evolution of the mentality of a given society. As Lagny writes, films offer us the representation that a society makes of itself at a given moment. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the essays by Kracauer and Essner still represent important references for those preparing to study pre-Hitler German cinema and, in the following pages the parts that are still current will be taken into account.

The origins of the industry

In 1895, two months before the first public performance of the Lumière brothers, at the Wintergarten in Berlin, the Skladanovsky brothers presented the Bioskop, fragments of scenes shot and projected with their own apparatus. However, Germany did not have its own film industry until 1910. It was French, Italian and American films that won the favour of the public of the first Tent Shows, of Nickelodeon and finally the first stable film directors. Only after 1908, after having despised the new medium, considering it an inferior form of expression, did actors and theatre directors become interested in cinema, following the French and Italian examples. Pushing them in this direction was the attraction of more lavish earnings, together with the possibility of acquiring greater fame thanks to the wider cinema audience. In the four years preceding the war, large movie studios were built in the suburbs of Berlin. On the eve of the conflict a national production started, though with only a few works. In this first phase, actors and directors did nothing but transfer onto the screen the practices of the theatre, incapable as they were of grasping the specificity of the new medium, and they incurred the indifference of the public and the criticism of the experts. So, despite the progress of local production, the public continued to favour foreign films.

It was the war that, by freeing the field from foreign competition, intervened to reverse the situation. The closing of the borders, in fact, offered the nascent national industry both the opportunity and the heavy task of satisfying increased internal demand. Cinemas had increased in number, and their ranks had been increased by military cinemas around the front, demanding a constant supply of new films. New cinematographic societies sprang up like mushrooms, growing from 28 in 1913 to 245 in 1919. The necessity to cope with the enormous demand resulted in the production of a large quantity of bad films. At the same time, foreign anti-German filmography gained increasing influence. This circumstance, together with the consideration that the national production was far from matching the propaganda effectiveness of the Entente films, pushed the government authorities to direct intervention in the production of films. Thus, in 1916, the government, with the agreement of associations for economic, political and cultural purposes, founded DEULIG, a film company whose aim was to promote the image of Germany at home and abroad through documentary films. In 1917, BUFA was established, a government agency with the task of organizing cinemas for troops at the front and providing documentaries on military activities.

With the entry of the United States into the war, the international market was invaded by anti-German American films. Ludendorff, Chief of Staff, took the initiative of introducing a merger of the most important film companies, in order to converge their energies in the national interest. Thus it was that Messner film, Union and the subsidiaries of Nordisk, with the support of a banking institution, merged into a new society called UFA (Universum Film A. G.) with a share capital of 25 million marks. The tasks of the new company were summarized as to put in place effective propaganda in favour of Germany, based on government directives. To this end it was a question of producing not only direct propaganda films, but more broadly representative films of German culture, as well as films for the purpose of national education. In order to improve the quality of production, UFA formed a body of actors, operators, directors and technicians whose training was to represent an important resource for German cinema in the aftermath of the war. The company survived the collapse of the Empire with a transfer of ownership, the Reich renounced its shareholding and Deutsche Bank began to acquire the majority shares including that of Nordisk. Having become a private company, UFA’s propagandistic interest was only partially reduced by commercial requirements, especially in relation to exports. In view of the conquest of the foreign market it was necessary to perfect German films because of international obstructionism towards such a product. Precisely in order to break through this barrier, UFA began, immediately after the war, to secure rights on the Swiss, Scandinavian, Dutch, Spanish and other neutral cinemas. DEULIG, which also operated in the Weimar Republic used the same tactic in the Balkans. BUFA was dissolved.⁷

Doppelgänger, someone is walking behind us.

Despite the decisive thrust towards the development of a national cinema, which must be traced to the immediate post-war period that inaugurated the golden age of the so-called classic films of the 1920s, some thematic and stylistic advances had already taken place in the ’10s. Kracauer identified these characteristics in four films in particular, defined by him as “archaic”, The Prague student (S. Rye, 1913), The Golem (P. Wegener, H. Galeen, 1914), Homunculus (O. Rippert, 1916 ) and The Other (M. Mack, 1913). The first three reflect fantastic worlds crowded with mysterious creatures, in accordance with the most progressive German cinema theories of the time. These emphasised the specific features of the medium, insisting on the need to abandon the mere reproduction of the existent in favour of subjects born of pure fantasy, where elements of reality are interchanged with unreal elements. Lukacs, for example, considered film as the equivalent of the fairy tale and the dream. The fourth is the film version of the theatrical drama by Paul Lindau of the same title; by contrast, it is a variation on the theme of Dr. Jeckyll-Mr. Hyde in a contemporary bourgeois setting.⁸

The first to put into practice the suggestions of progressive theorists was Paul Wegener, an actor of Reinhardt. Since the time of his academic studies, he had become adept in experimenting with photographic effects and tricks, in particular the phantom effect given by double exposure, which produced an objective instance of the double which is so celebrated in German popular literature and tradition. Wegener, fascinated by the possibility of using it in the cinema, discussed the idea with Guido Seeber, one of the most important technicians of the German film company Bioskop. The result of these discussions was the filming in 1913, of Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, directed by S. Rye) one of the most visionary and innovative films of German cinema of that era, which was to constitute the first example in the world of auteur films (Autorenfilm) and the avant-garde. Thus was launched the ambitious process of integration of high and popular culture, which saw the involvement of writers and playwrights in the cinema with the aim of legitimizing its status as an art.

Its sources of inspiration are to be found in the tales of Hoffman, the legend of Faust, in Poe’s novel William Wilson and in Peter Schlemihl, a tale by Chamisso. The themes of Gothic romance intertwine with those of the episodic novel, in a combination that had found a fertile ground in certain fields of German literature since the beginning of the century in writers like Meyrink and Ewers.

The story was written in collaboration by Wegener and Hanns Ewers, a future follower of Hitler, and author of stories related to the theme of blood and will. The plot tells the tale of Baldwin, a poor student in love with a wealthy countess. The humble conditions of the youth make that love impossible, but a disturbing figure, the magician Scapinelli, promises him 100,000 gold coins in exchange for his image reflected in a mirror. The young man accepts by signing a contract. Having become rich and having achieved happiness in love, according to the terms of the agreement, an abyss of perdition opens up for Baldwin. His double acts autonomously against the will of the young man, making his dream of love unrealizable and finally ruining it. Accused of the murder of his rival, the student, who has now fallen into disgrace, desperately shoots his own image in the same miserable attic where everything had begun. But the shot fired at the mirror kills him too.

Der Student introduces the theme of the double which was to become a recurrent one in later expressionist productions. The German word for double is Doppelgänger composed of doppel = double, Gänger = who goes, literally meaning “double goer” or someone who walks with us, or still more worryingly, who walks hidden behind us, like a shadow.⁹ The worrying (unheimlich) is the antithesis of comfortable or calm, from Heim = home (heimlich). Freud elaborates the concept in 1919, specifically analysing some texts by E. T. Hoffman, and associates the term with the sense of anxiety that accompanies the re-emergence of a repressed psychic content. Baldwin’s double may thus be understood as the emergence of a hidden and self-destructive part of himself, the diabolic ‘I’ which dwells in each of us and induces us to succumb to devilish temptations.

Lotte Eisner finds, in the film, many of the qualities which constitute the value of the so-called classic films of the twenties: attention to scenography and magical atmosphere, the use of chiaroscuro, the display of menacing shadows on the walls. Stellan Rye, the Danish director entrusted by the Union with the task, explored the old city of Prague, where traces of an enigmatic and shadowy Middle Ages survived: narrow alleyways, the old bridge from which can be seen the upright outline of the cathedral gargoyles.¹⁰ On screen the ‘Magical Prague’ evoked by Kafka emerges, used as a symbolic allegory by Meyrink in his Golem. The mythical creature was also to constitute the theme of the second film by Wagener.

Golem and the Jewish Question

Less than a year had passed when Wegener started shooting his first Golem. As he himself testified in a public conference in April 1916, it was the legend of the Prague ghetto that inspired him: “with this film – he says – I went further into the domain of pure cinema. Everything depends on the image, on a certain vagueness of outline where the fantastic world of the past meets the world of today. I realized that photographic technique was going to determine the destiny of the cinema. Light and darkness in the cinema play the same role as rhythm and cadence in music.”¹¹

A real world fact, the discovery of the Golem in Prague, was used by Wegener in this first version, in combination with the legend of Rabbi Low, which created the giant around 1580. The ancient legend was, therefore, set in the director’s own time and shot on contemporary sets. In 1917, he made a further adaptation: Der Golem und die Tanzerin (Golem and the dancer). Only a few fragments of these early films survive, the advertising material, which survived the war, and the original criticisms. Among the latter is that of Arnold Zweig, who appreciated its shape, highlighting how the struggle of the artificial creature to become a human being attained a lyricism, thanks to the new medium, which no theatrical representation would have made possible. The state of the art of cinema was beginning to be recognized.

In 1920, Wegener completed the trilogy with another Golem, (Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam; How Golem came to the world), this time totally set in the XVIth century. The adaptation of the legend to the context of the expulsion of the Jews from the empire, led some to see in the film the reflection of the contemporary Jewish question at the time of the film. This was linked to the increased immigration flow of Jews from central and eastern Europe during and after war, which was perceived as an invasion. In the insertion of the Decree of Expulsion we read in clear letters “the popular accusations made against Jews can no longer be ignored: they have killed Our Lord, despise the festive ceremonies of Christians, they endanger their lives and property, they exercise black magic […].” This seem to legitimize the perception of threat that the Germans of Weimar felt towards the increased Jewish presence in their cities. In circumstances all-too familiar to our own times, a few days before the release of Wegener’s film, Joseph Roth denounced from the pages of the Neue Berliner Zeitung that “in all 50,000 people (author’s note: Jews) arrived in Germany after the war. It seems that millions have arrived”¹². This is a perception that the film seems to display in the crowds that occupy the ghetto, as already highlighted in a review published in 1920 in Der Kinematograph.¹³

Even the iconography of the Jew, of which the film presents a caricatured construction, surpasses the original content of the legend, as do the representations propagated by the German and Austrian political campaigns of those times, and as does the German publication, in 1920, the “protocols of the elderly Sion.” Thus, magic and mystery dominate the life of the Wegener ghetto, whose dark aspect is emphasized by the combination of the Poelzig sets with a Reinhardtian illumination. The bristling and tortuous stairs, the crowded and narrow streets, the dimly lit rooms and the sinister figures appear to support the motives and fears of the emperor; and, by analogy, those of the contemporaries of Wegener, whose feelings of frustration because of defeat and the variation of the borders accentuated the perception of vulnerability of the German state.¹⁴

The contrast between the dark world of the ghetto and the enlightened one of the empire, as a separation between Jewish witchcraft and German culture, is accentuated by the final scene of the film. Here the furious Golem, after having murdered Florian and set fire to the ghetto, breaks the heavy bars on the great door and exits, to where a group of blonde children in white tunics and flower garlands, a picture of Aryan perfection, are playing. At the sight of the monster they run away terrified except for one of them, who looks particularly innocent, and offers an apple to the Golem. The unusual gesture of kindness towards him calms the monster, who picks the girl up. She will be the one to remove the star-shaped amulet, that animates the monster, from the Golem’s chest. Devoid of life the monster falls to the ground, soon to be surrounded by the festive children.

The film was a great success, if the publicity material of the Film-Kurrier is to be believed; it was shown in the UFA cinemas in Berlin for two consecutive months, attracting crowds, before it toured Germany and crossed the Atlantic. Wegener himself defined it as his most powerful film.¹⁵

My father’s house is a chemical laboratory¹⁶ or of the Super Man

The themes of the artificial creature, the extreme, horrifying symbol of modernity, of the scientist’s laboratory, the violation of God’s limits to creation, are expressed innovatively in Homunculus. Directed by Otto Rippert, and based on a script by Robert Reinert for the Deutsche Bioscop, the film represents the highest expression of the Autorenfilm, and is considered a turning point in German cinema with regard to the legitimization of cinema as an art form. It was conceived as a film in six parts, a series of episodes in themselves concluded and linked through captions. The first four episodes were presented at the Marmorhaus in Berlin in the second half of 1916; the last two at the beginning of 1917. The film was re-issued in August 1920 in a new revised edition, divided into three parts.

In 2014, the director of the Munich Film Museum, Stefan Dobler, presented a monumental restoration of Homunculus (until then thought to be largely lost), the result of a reconstruction through German copies and others found in Moscow, which in total represent three quarters of the original film. This 3-hour and 16-minute version with music by Richard Siedhoff was presented on August 17, 2014, at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn.

The film represents one of the most important documents, if not the key to German film production in the 1910s. At the industrial-institutional level, it is one of the founding works of episodic production, that was to experience great development over the following years. With reference to motifs and iconography, it not only anticipates, but also influences the films of the 1920s. Here the double influence of the motifs of the gothic novel and the feuilleton emerges with a more complex and original effect. The classic theme of the double is rejected in favour of the myth of the superman which here contains both a positive version (The Count of Montecristo) and a negative (the damned hero, the great criminal Fantomas, the popular continuation of Nietzschean super humanism, Frankenstein). Homunculus thus presents a personality divided between sadism and cruelty on the one hand, and a drive towards generosity and empathy on the other. Like the Golem, condemned by its artificial origins to otherness, to social rejection, Homunculus has the awareness of what the clay monster feels only obscurely: being deprived of the greatest good, that of being able to give and receive love. Hence, Homunculus’s desire for revenge on his creator and all of humanity. However he is also moved, as has been said, by benevolent impulses, by great acts of generosity that push him to stand up as the defender of the weakest, to be moved by the tears of children, and to protect orphan girls. It is precisely from these oscillations and ambiguities that the film draws its deepest fascination, originality and effectiveness.¹⁷

The devastating and demonic aspects, the supernatural powers, the irresistible impulse to carry out evil in Homunculus make him an heir of Frankenstein and the forerunner of Murnau’s Nosferatu. The link with the latter is apparent from the physiognomy, the iconographic elements and the staging of the narrative sequence.¹⁸ Lotte Eisner refers to it as a work prefiguring expressionism because of the effects of contrast of black and white, the shocks of light and shadow and the presence of the classic elements of German film from Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) and Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang. Regarding the latter, the influence of Homunculus is particularly evident in the movements of the masses, as in the sequence where the excited crowd lashes out against Homunculus then unfolds in a triangle in a rush towards the staircase; or in the pyramid pattern in the revolt scene. Unconventional staging solutions are represented by dramatic and stylistic features of natural outdoor shots. A particularly striking example of these is the quarry space, a sort of amphitheatre where the revolt of the crowd is set, as well as the encounter with the hero.¹⁹

As for Baldwin (The Student of Prague) the time of reckoning with himself will also come for Homunculus. In the last part of the film the protagonist encounters a second artificial human that challenges him, in a titanic clash that will be resolved with the death of both. Although in the context of the debate between supporters and opponents of expressionist cinema the film was judged too demanding and intellectual for the popular public, nevertheless it was so successful that it influenced Berlin fashion, and in this too anticipated the fortunes of Caligari.

“The cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, the dispute

Du musst Caligari werden…, you must become Caligari… the new imperative was gigantic on the walls of lively Berlin in the twenties, substituting posters that until recently touted subscriptions for war loans. In the place of the silhouette of a soldier armed with a sabre appeared that of Caesar, the somnambulist able to foresee the future, the monstrum, slave of Dr. Caligari. Already a few weeks before the film’s release, the advertising campaign promoted by the manufacturer Decla, had plastered the city with enormous posters that contained expressionist stylizations of the work and slogans full of mystery.²⁰ Also thanks to this, at the first public screening held at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920, the film was a huge success with audiences and critics. A success that was destined to cross national borders, The cabinet represented, in fact, the battering ram that was capable of breaking down the obstructionist barriers that the international market had opposed to German cinematography, even conquering the States and inaugurating the phenomenon of caligarism.

It is precisely in the extremely successful outcome of the film that we can trace the origin of the contrasting testimonies which emerged over the course of time among those who, for various reasons, participated in its making, and probably wished to highlight their own role. This is specifically the case for Hans Janowitz, who, together with Carl Mayer, wrote the story. He emigrated to New York in 1939, and had made available to Kracauer his unpublished manuscript on the genesis of the film,²¹ which was the main reference source for the sociologist in interpreting. As is well-known Janowitz accused the production of sabotaging the meaning of the work by represent the original character as the director of a psychiatric hospital. The intention had been, in fact, that of denouncing the repressive system and the demonic thirst for power of constituted authority which had caused the death of many young people in the First World War, had enslaved it and forced it to kill just like the sleepwalker Caesar. The prologue and the epilogue introduced by the director Robert Wiene, reducing the narrative structure to the story of a madman, had completely reversed its meaning, transforming the film’s message from revolutionary to conformist.²² The acquisition, in 1976, by the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek of Berlin of a copy of the original screenplay, which belonged to the actor Werner Krauß, deprived Janowitz’s testimony of credibility, showing how a certain frame, different from that used in the actual film, had been envisaged by the same authors, who even introduced a happy ending.²³ In this Francis and Jane, happily married, recalled the history of Caligari, which had taken place twenty years earlier, on the occasion of a bourgeois reception on the terrace of their villa in Wannsee. Already in 1970 Hans Feld, in the essay published in Caligari und Caligarismus,²⁴ provided evidence of the original prologue of the frame, based on a meeting he had with Carl Mayer. The scholar, whose version was denied by Fritz Lang, who had first directed the film only to renounce the task, was not believed. The successive discovery of the screenplay, as well as confirming Feld’s version, together with careful analysis of the archival and current sources, represented an important turning point in the study of the origins of Caligari, allowing the revision of some of the more mystifying interpretations.²⁵ The lengthy dispute, as well as amplifying the film’s fame, also had the effect of shifting attention from the film itself to its origins, undervaluing the role of the director Wiene and his formal project, which have only recently been re-evaluated.

Today, as Walter Kaul had already done,²⁶ a fundamental function in the multiplication of planes of reality and meanings is recognized in the much contested frame of Wiene. In this perspective, Paolo Bertetto, in his in-depth analysis, focuses on the final frame of the film in which an iris – which recalls, by analogy, the one included in the close-up of the demonic Caligari in his first appearance – appears in the final look of the director of the psychiatric hospital. The accentuated duration of the shot of the iris has an ambiguous effect, almost leaving the ending open. It does not resolve the enigma, but rather throws it to the viewer, leaving him in a state of anxiety. What is the truth? Is Franzis a madman possessed by an obsession, or is he the victim of a criminal with a double personality? And who is Caligari really?

The fiction of a real world

The shattering of the uniqueness of reality, the impossibility of truth in a “visionary” and arbitrary, Nietschean world that Caligari presents, make it the first modern film as well as a paradigmatically expressionist one. The expressionist movement had set out, in 1910, to make a clean sweep of the principles that had hitherto been the basis of art. Its imperatives were the struggle against bourgeois decadence, naturalism and its petty intent to reproduce nature or daily life. It was necessary to penetrate the visible aura of things, to grasp their latent physiognomy.²⁷ Thus Holstenwall, the imaginary German town where the action takes place, disturbs the viewer on its first appearance at the start of a long flashback in which Franzis recalls the horrible story to the elderly gentleman sitting next to him on a plain garden bench, the setting for the prologue. In contrast with this is the pyramidal structure of the town, bristling with pointed and crooked little houses perched one on top of another, dominated by a cathedral whose oblique towers shake threateningly, the bare trees as black as those burned by the artillery during the recent conflict. They introduce a labyrinthine world in which the inorganic is animated by an interior life.

Reading the story inspired the authors of the superb scenography, Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig and Walter Reimann, to adopt the graphic and pictorial model of expressionism, in particular that of the Brücke, even if they were not part of the movement. Influences are also to be found in the theatrical sets created in 1917 by Ernst Stern for the Reinhardtian staging of Der Bettler by Sorge; in 1918 by Sievert for Der Sohn by Hasenclever; in 1919 by Neppach for Die Wandlung of Toller.²⁸ Thus, the urban space depicted on painted décors was stylized, deformed, illusionistic, consisting of winding alleyways broken by unexpected angles, and prolonged by broken lines painted in the background. The houses have lopsided facades whose dark entrances open like jaws in a scream; lozenge or triangular windows seem like wounds in the walls, the street lamps are curved, the verticals made diagonal. This universe is dense with a dark latent energy, tragedy is immanent and only apparently caused by the foreigner.

Caligari frees this demonic energy with his arrival, breaking the habits of relationships and superficial social rites, interrupting the natural rhythm of time.²⁹ He comes to Holstenwall for the annual fair. His gait with its small, broken steps, his unusual clothing, and heavy facial make-up immediately make him a mysterious and disturbing character. At the fair he presents his phenomenon Caesar, a sleepwalker with the gift of prediction. From the moment of his arrival the town is disturbed by a series of murders. The first victim is the municipal secretary who has shown himself rude and disrespectful towards Caligari. The second is Alan, fraternal friend of Franzis, like him in love with Jane, a man whose death had been predicted as the next by the sleepwalker. From that moment on, the clash between Franzis and Caligari begins, and proceeds with the compelling rhythm of a detective story. It is a conflict in which we can see a reference to generational issues, to the rebellion of the young against the authoritarianism of their fathers and repressive systems. This is a theme that crosses literature, and in particular that relating to expressionist theatre. The negative paternal, repressive, controlling image is expressed metaphorically here in the figure of the director of the psychiatric hospital, against whom Franzis unleashes his irrepressible anger and in exposing him forces him into a straitjacket.³⁰ Carl Mayer, as Janowitz relates in the most authentic part of his manuscript, had endured several tests of his mental health during the conflict, and had developed a very strong grudge towards the military psychiatrist who had dealt with his case. For his part, Janowitz, an infantry regiment officer, had returned from the war a convinced pacifist, full of hatred towards the authority that had sent so many young people to the slaughter. Their mutual experiences constituted the deep substratum of their work.³¹ The unmasking of the asylum director and his confinement in a straitjacket symbolises the condemnation of constituted authority in its various configurations. This intention can be seen in other passages of the film, and is underlined by the eidetic function of the scenography. Thus, the chair and desk of the arrogant official who humiliates Caligari and those of the sleepy policemen at the police station are unnaturally tall in size. On the side of the burocrat’s desk appears the symbol used in the German penal and civil code to indicate the paragraph together with the number 5. This number also appears on the wall of the prison where the alleged murderer is held. In esoteric symbolism, 5 refers to man, and in its negative value indicates involution, degradation, descent. The pentagram reversed the forces of evil. It is no coincidence that the place of established authority, the prison and Caligari’s cell, are located on an underground level with respect to the square where the fair is held, symbolically in the underworld. To access them, the characters make a descending movement that makes them disappear in the lower field of the screen. Wiene thus demonstrates that he has not betrayed the original idea of the story.

For Expressionism, reality exists only in the inner vision that it provokes, and in this sense the “visionary” scenography of Caligari acquires a further semantic value, becoming the visualization of the complex psyche of the protagonists; of their anguish, their madness and death instinct. First of all Franzis, whose relentless struggle with Caligari begins with the suspicion that he was the murderer of his brotherly friend Alan. The latter, however, as we know, is also his rival in love. However painful, the death of his friend ultimately benefits Franzis, since he is freed from his antagonist. In the convincing reading of Pier Giorgio Tone,³² the fury of the young man against Caligari is explained in terms of the projection he makes of his own unconscious desire to eliminate his rival. In the grip of guilt, Franzis would see Caligari as his own unacceptable dark, violent double. Jane is also involved in the battle, as the object of multiple desire, of Alan and Franzis, but also of Caligari and Cesare. Only apparently corresponding to the cliché of the vestal virgin, Jane, who also has a nocturnal side, is attracted by the dark, the unknown, the forbidden. Justified by her search for her father, she accepts the invitation of a seductive Caligari to cross the threshold of the pavilion and meet the creature of the night par excellence, the sleepwalker Caesar. Between the girl and the monstrum there is an intense exchange of glances. Jane is shocked, unable to bear the sight of her own powerful sexuality, and flees in horror.³³ What terrorizes her is also the unbearable anguish and loneliness that the black-rimmed eyes reveal, wide open on the white and emaciated face of the creature condemned to otherness. Caesar, who finds human relations impossible because of his very nature, is like the Golem and Homunculus. In the same way Caligari, dominated by a desire for unlimited power, like the rabbi and the scientist who violate ethical limits, can be seen as a victim of his own obsession with domination, betrayed by the rebellion of his creature.

The epilogue places them all in the space of the asylum, along with other extras including a mad orator whose appearance recalls Karl Marx: can revolutionary thrusts also translate into madness and chaos? The concentration camp universe of the psychiatric hospital, while distinguishing itself from the ghostly world of Holstenwall, preserves, unlike the garden of the prologue, an anti-naturalist appearance. The rigorously geometric scenography that tends towards abstraction recalls the metaphysical painting of De Chirico in the façade of the hospital and in the paving of the courtyard. The dominant white and the extreme stylization make it a cold, rational space. Therapeutic reason exercises its repressive control over the chaos of madness. Thus concludes Franzis‘ long internal story, which begins after his chase of a fugitive Caligari, when he discovers that the criminal is none other than the director of the asylum. Unmasked, he is locked up in an isolation cell and forced into a straitjacket. Once the story is over, Franzis sets off with his elderly companion along the garden path, to reach the same courtyard, which is now populated by all the characters in his own story. Receiving a refusal from Jane of his offer of love, Franzis becomes enraged; the staff rush to ask for the director’s intervention. The director actually seems to be Caligari, but without his make-up he looks kind and reassuring. When he has visited Franzis, he says he can finally cure him, having discovered the origin of his madness in his belief that the director is in reality the mystic, Caligari. The enigma therefore seems to have been solved: the whole story is the result of a madman’s obsession, but it is precisely the coincidence of the asylum space in the inner story and the epilogue which ensures that the enigma is not resolved. As well as that last disquieting look with accentuated duration, emphasizing an iris.

 

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