Even when you’ve by no means really watched The Cupboard of Dr. Caligari, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it all through the century of cinema historical past because the movie first got here out, throughout which its affect has manifested repeatedly: in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Terry Gilliam’s Concern and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley — to not point out a lot of the filmographies of auteurs like David Lynch and Tim Burton. These are simply a number of the movies referenced by Tyler Knudsen, higher often called CinemaTyler, within the video essay above, “Dr. Caligari Did Extra Than Simply Invent Horror Motion pictures.”
“A case will be made that Caligari was the primary true horror movie,” writes Roger Ebert. In earlier cinematic scary tales, “characters have been inhabiting a recognizable world. Caligari creates a mindscape, a subjective psychological fantasy. On this world, unspeakable horror turns into potential.”
The strategies employed to that finish have additionally satisfied sure historians of the medium to name the image “the primary instance in cinema of German Expressionism, a visible fashion through which not solely the characters however the world itself is out of joint.” Knudsen locations this fashion in historic context, particularly that of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which was established after World Warfare I and lasted till the rise of the Nazis.
Politically unstable however artistically fruitful, the Weimar interval gave rise to quite a lot of new creative attitudes, directly enthusiastic and overwhelmed. “Whereas impressionism tries to depict the actual world, however solely from a primary look or impression as an alternative of specializing in particulars,” Knudsen says, “expressionism tries to get on the artist’s inside emotions fairly than the precise look of the subject material.” Therefore the weird units of Caligari, whose each angle seems designed to be maximally unconvincing. And but the movie is solely devoted to its specific actuality: not the one occupied by Weimar-era Germans or anybody else, however the one it conjures up in a way solely movement footage can. 102 years later, The Cupboard of Dr. Caligari stays a haunting viewing expertise — and one expressive of the sheer potential of cinema. You may watch it above.
Associated content material:
10 Nice German Expressionist Movies: From Nosferatu to The Cupboard of Dr. Caligari
From Caligari to Hitler: A Have a look at How Cinema Laid the Basis for Tyranny in Weimar Germany
How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e-book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Fb, or on Instagram.