Reinterpreting the Frame

BEWARE SPOILERS

As always, when it comes to our Dissections, we don’t care about spoilers. So watch before you read. Apart from that, we have a couple other notes on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

It’s in the public domain, so there are many different versions available, each scored with its own music, and none definitive because silent films didn’t come with soundtracks (hence, “silent”). The music was performed live, which means the audio on any version you find was recorded long after the film was made and finding the “right” version is a matter of musical taste. We haven’t heard enough of them to have strong opinions on the “best” score, but we saw at least two that clashed so badly with what was happening onscreen that we had to turn them off.

We also stopped watching several videos because either the digital copy of the film was horribly pixelated or the physical film from which the digital copy was made had been overexposed or damaged in some way.

The lesson is, if you hate this film within the first five minutes, if it looks washed out or garbled, or if the music just feels wrong, look for a different version.

Cesare awakens.

Image Credit: Decla-Film

Often hailed as the first “arthouse” film and the first psychological thriller, as well as the first piece of cinema to engage with the early twentieth-century artistic movement of German Expressionism, Director Robert Wiene’s bizarre and groundbreaking 1920 silent classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, has been bestowed many impressive titles. Roger Ebert even once suggested “that Caligari was the first true horror film.”

Of course, those types of grand declarations tend to be pretty debatable, but there’s no denying that Caligari has had an incredible influence on cinema. There are plenty of reasons for that: From its highly stylized and moody sets to the particular theatricality and melodrama enjoyed during the silent film era to the rich political meanings critics have drawn from the film to the Mad Scientist and Psychotic Psychologist character archetypes in Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) to the hero’s depiction as an unreliable narrator in Francis (Friedrich Fehér).

Caligari has cast a broad shadow over cinema, and it’s an early prototype of what we called “lyric horror” in our latest Judgment, which introduced this series of Dissections. In a way, Caligari is a blueprint that mapped out basic structures and approaches for future filmmakers whose work would focus on mood, imagery, and characters’ interior states of mind, rather than the external features of plot and drama. The film gave us sets, costumes, and cinematography that cross brazenly into the cartoonish and a highly expressive, almost dance-like acting style. In all, as Horror Obsessive’s Dean Delp notes, Caligari is the birthplace of an astounding range of modern horror character types, plot beats, clichés, stylistic tendencies, and about “every…horror trait or trope you can think of.” The crooked nightmarescapes of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Paperhouse (1988), the outlandish acting styles in the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, the twisting plots of Perfect Blue (1997) and Jacob’s Ladder (1990), the social consciousness of The Stepford Wives (1975) and Get Out (2017) can all be traced back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

We said in our last Judgment that lyric cinema, in general, strives for some particular qualities of lyric poetry, which itself is striving for particular qualities found in music,

… and music is the artform of the inexpressible. It speaks to ancient parts of the mind that don’t think in words but emotions and impressions, the places where dreams live. Imitating music, the lyric mode also tries to speak to those ancient parts of our minds, and lyric horror, in particular, traces the imprints left by deep-seated traumas, bizarre nightmares, and all-consuming fears, anxieties, and perversions.

Largely concerned with representing trauma and human emotion through metaphorical imagery and with navigating the messy spaces of subjective perception and the unconscious mind, lyric horror often rejects realistic set design, characterization, and performance. Caligari and its many descendants instead opt for surreal and sinister sets full of disproportion and optical illusion, for demented camerawork and tricks of light and paint, for melodrama and spectacle, for the iconic and bizarre, rather than the naturalistic.

Cesare abducts Jane.

Image Credit: Decla-Film

The world of Caligari is strange and macabre, using the techniques of German Expressionism to represent the war-shattered psyche of a German people suffering compounding economic crises and an increasingly oppressive totalitarian state that would go on to commit utterly inhuman acts of sadistic and bigoted cruelty that eventually led to the second World War.

Part of what gives the film its great longevity and influence is the way it filters what the audience sees through the confused and traumatized perspective of its narrator, Francis.

We keep saying lyric horror approaches its subjects sideways, circling around deeper truths. Caligari is no different, circling an ominous and shadowy reality darker than either of the two versions of reality we see onscreen, and it’s one so bleak and oppressive that it has driven Francis mad. The film’s framing device obscures—even, on the surface, seems to undermine—this interpretation, but if you watch closely, you’ll notice vague impressions throughout the film that none of what’s shown onscreen, with the possible exception of two moments, is entirely true, that a third reality exists beyond the one spun by Francis’ deranged mind and beyond the one spun by the insane asylum’s Director and staff.

This reality resembles Francis’ story, in that he and the other patients are, in fact, at the mercy of a mad psychiatrist turning them into sleep-walking murderers and conning the rest of us into paying him for the privilege of being killed by them. But the chronology and characters of the past and present have been jumbled in Francis’ memory. He’s mapping people from his present, in the asylum, onto people and events of the past that led him there, and he’s viewing that past through a distorted lens.

This interpretation, in which much of Francis’ memory is true, transforms the film into straightforward allegory about a charismatic madman in a position of authority hypnotizing people into committing terrible acts, which fits more clearly with the common, modern-day interpretation that the film is about a post-WWI German public susceptible to the dangerous and hypnotic charisma of an increasingly authoritarian government that would soon lead them to commit vile acts of inhumanity.

Expressionist Allegory

Rippling through early twentieth century European art and culture, including in the silent films of the ‘20s and ‘30s, German Expressionism pushed against the realism that had dominated the visual and theatrical arts of the past. Instead, Expressionism externalized the inner thoughts and feelings of the public. For German Expressionism, this meant, in the words of Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian over at Interiors, “a direct reaction to the aftermath of World War I.” They go on to say that

The stylistic techniques and formal qualities of German Expressionism films include the exploration of themes of paranoia, fear, and schizophrenia through mise-en-scène, cinematography and lighting.

Additionally, according to a definition from Movements in Film:

German expressionist filmmakers used visual distortion and hyper-expressive performance to show inner turmoils, fears and desires of … its 1920s German audience by giving their woes an inescapably external presence.

Put simply, Expressionism looks at the world through the prism of subjective emotions shared among the members of its audience, expressing them through set design, lighting, cinematography, and acting.

In Caligari, this translates to bold, chunky, jagged lettering in the title cards, sharply angled sets, painted lights and shadows on narrow streets and staircases, and makeup-plastered actors delivering intentionally over-the-top performances. Everything is slanted, out of proportion, bathed in shadow. Ordinary objects like chairs and stools are made strange by their great height, marking a stark division between authority figures and the “rabble.” Among film critics, it’s generally agreed that these and other visual elements of Caligari’s bleak, macabre world reflect Germany’s fragile psyche amid the devastating aftermath of a lost war, an economic crisis, and an increasingly tyrannical and eventually Fascist state. It’s important to remember, though, that these visuals also reflect the specific fragile psyche and unreliability of our protagonist and narrator.

Francis

Francis tells his story.

Image Credit: Decla-Film

Lyric horror often approaches its subject matter indirectly, circling around an idea or experience and tracing its outline without looking straight at it. Films like Caligari show us their worlds through warped lenses, often from the perspectives of traumatized or otherwise mentally unstable characters attempting to cope with devastating situations.

Caligari begins as an unidentified man on a park bench tells Francis:

There are spirits— They are all around us— They have driven me from hearth and home— from wife and child.

As a woman glides past in a white nightgown, forlorn and ghostlike, Francis identifies her as Jane, his fiancée. Still reeling from his own (and Jane’s) recent trauma, Francis then goes on to reveal the story of Dr. Caligari, a conniving hypnotist who, in his tale, comes to Francis’ hometown with a sideshow for the annual fair: a fortune-telling “somnambulist” named Cesare (Conrad Veidt). Upon his arrival, the town is racked by a series of murders. During one show, Cesare tells Francis’ friend Alan (Hans Heinz v. Twardowski) that he will be dead by the break of dawn. Shocked and unsettled, Alan returns home and, before dawn, is murdered by Cesare himself.

Following this, we’re given to understand that Cesare has been hypnotized and forced to carry out these deeds by Caligari, who has devised a trick (on the order of Scooby Doo villainy) to fool the townspeople into assuming he and Cesare are innocent. Caligari places a life-sized dummy resembling Cesare in the cabinet, which he sits with all night while Francis, who has grown suspicious of the pair, spies on them from outside. Around that same time, the real Cesare awakens just as he’s about to kill Jane, the woman Francis loves, in her bed. Instead of carrying out the murder, Cesare panics and kidnaps her after she faints. Some townsfolk spot Cesare fleeing the scene with Jane tucked under one arm and give chase.

Then, perhaps because the truth of his murderous deeds overcame him, or maybe because hauling an adult human under one arm while running away from an angry mob was just too much for him, something in Cesare gives up. He drops Jane to the ground, runs a bit farther, and then finally collapses to the ground and dies.

With the man originally arrested for the murders exonerated and the ruse soon discovered, Francis chases Caligari to an insane asylum, where it turns out Caligari is the Director. Francis tells other asylum employees about him, but they’ve never heard of any “Caligari.” When they investigate the Director’s diary entries, however, they discover his descent into obsession and madness over an old folktale about a mystic of that name who carried out the same murdering somnambulist act we’ve just witnessed on an unsuspecting town. They then capture Caligari and commit him to the very asylum where he was once Director.

Francis saves the day, and all is well and good in the world… until we learn that he’s been locked up in the asylum all along, that the Director is not Caligari after all, and that Francis is delusional. In other words, we get the first ever film in which “it was all just a dream.” Except we also get a final shot of the Director, in which he looks particularly nefarious and says he knows “exactly how to cure [Francis],” suggesting that there is something more sinister going on, and that there might be more truth to Francis’ story than the frame seems to initially suggest.

Juxtaposed against the film’s darkly whimsical imagery, theatrical and exaggerated performances, and title cards scrawled with chunky, jagged lines and letters, Francis’ slanted depiction of events reflects his fragile mental state. Feelings of loss, dread, fear, and paranoia overlay his tale. In what would go on to become a regular trope of lyric horror, he struggles to confront his trauma directly, which the film reflects visually. Before we ever learn that Francis resides in an asylum, we get visual signs that his memory and perception are unreliable. The characters in Francis’ story—many sporting cartoonish makeup and costumes—exist in a world of sharp angles, bent and towering buildings, crooked streets, painted lights and shadows, and absurdly high stools that separate authority figures from the hoi polloi below. Everything we see is made strange, unreal. Even the murder of Francis’ best friend Alan is presented with shadow puppets, indicating his inability to deal with reality.

Cesare murders Alan before dawn.

Image Credit: Decla-Film

An Authoritarian Frame Around an Anti-Authoritarian Story

It’s worth noting, the inclusion of Caligari’s frame—the beginning and end of the film, in which Francis tells his story to the old man and in which it’s eventually revealed that they’re both patients in a lunatic asylum—has a complicated history. Like Den of Geeks’ Jim Knipfel says, the movie’s production backstory is full of “misinformation, conflicting memories, urban legends, shaky recordkeeping, and contradictory ego trips.”

One piece of backstory claims that screenwriters Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, both of them pacifists, vehemently opposed the incorporation of the frame. And film historian Siegfried Kracauer, author of the 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler, argues that the frame and the unreliable narrator undermine the film’s themes by upholding totalitarian cruelty, advocating conformity and complacency, and labeling those who oppose tyrants, rather than the tyrants themselves, as dangerous.

With Kracauer’s line of thinking, that the frame is the film’s true reality and Francis’ tale pure fantasy, Francis is not a hero who saves his hometown from a mad scientist. Instead, goes Kracauer’s complaint, Francis is depicted as a raving lunatic, and authorities like the Director are presented as benevolent defenders of the broader public from such madness.

It’s easy to see how, as Kracauer asserts, this presents a problem for interpretations that emphasize the film’s anti-authoritarian themes.

Don’t Let the Frame Fool You

Note, though, that even when we return to the asylum of the frame, the visual strangeness hasn’t really changed. The large common area in the facility remains essentially the same, but with more furniture and more people wandering about, trapped in the dark depths of their own minds. This includes Jane, who’s seated on a throne, and Cesare, who leans against a wall, plucking petals from a large flower. In fact, the outdoor area from the opening scene and the scene immediately following Francis’ story is the most realistic-looking part of the movie—despite its general gloom and the ghostlike way that Jane glides past. In this sense, visually, those two scenes are the only moments of lucidity in the film.

The Director/Dr. Caligari claims that he knows how to “cure” Francis.

Image Credit: Decla-Film

And while the painted patterns on the walls of the asylum leading to Dr. Caligari’s cell and the cell itself in Francis’ story differ a bit from the painted patterns leading to Francis’ new prison in the frame, they’re not all that different. The walls still curl unrealistically over our characters. The windows, with their round lines and sharp points, still hold an unlikely triangular shape. The camera is still cockeyed. It’s all still dark and bizarre and surreal, suggesting that something’s still not quite right in the perspective we’re being given. In the frame story, when Francis confronts the Director, the men in white coats who locked up Dr. Caligari in Francis’ fantasy now strap Francis himself into a straightjacket and throw him into a cell. After that, we get one final claustrophobic close-up on the Director as he declares, with an ominous, calculating stare,

At last I understand his delusion. He thinks I am that mystic, Caligari—! Now I know exactly how to cure him.

We never learn the actual truth of the situation, and there’s no explanation for what this alleged “cure” entails.

The film simply ends, and questions linger: What’s going on with the other man’s tale, in which spirits have driven him “from hearth and home—from wife and child”? What about Alan, who doesn’t appear anywhere in the frame the way Jane and Cesare do? Was Alan a patient too? Is he truly dead? Murdered? Did Dr. Caligari have something to do with that murder or with Francis’ current mental state? What actually happened with Cesare, if anything? Has he spent his entire life institutionalized? And most importantly, what is this cure the Director refers to? All these unanswered questions leave behind the nagging sense that Francis’ story could be a way of indirectly confronting a truth bleaker than anything shown onscreen.

The frame story, at first, seems to break Francis’ version of events, but maybe there’s a version of his story that did happen—that’s still happening—in which he and the other patients actually are at the mercy of a mad psychiatrist, and the Director’s “cure” is to “hypnotize” Francis into a somnambulist trance of some sort.

What’s more, the final scene feels sort of half-baked, abruptly cutting itself off after the Director’s declaration that he knows how to cure Francis.

(In fact, the first time we watched Caligari, Meg was convinced the streaming service had just interrupted the conclusion of the film mid-scene and that there had to be more.)

On the surface, the ending seems to be so bad that the frame story appears to utterly contradict the anti-authoritarian themes throughout the rest of the film—and in German Expressionism more broadly. But the lingering strangeness of the sets and that final, sinister shot of the Director suggest that the frame story is a deliberate deception, not merely something tacked on against the will of the writers that totally screws up their otherwise-masterpiece.

As a bit of meaningful misdirection, the frame subverts our expectations and demands reinterpretation.

Think of Jane, Cesare, and the whitecoats from the asylum not as the same characters Francis remembers in the rest of the film, but as stand-ins for people from a real memory. His story is not the literal truth, but a version of how he ended up at the asylum.

The specifics of what’s real and what’s not real in his memory, though, aren’t important. What’s important is that the frame doesn’t actually break Caligari’s anti-authoritarian themes, even if it does seem to cut against the rest of the film’s grain and even if it was tacked on against the will of the writers—which is possible, but the historical record is far from clear on this.

There are no definitive answers about the trauma Francis has endured or is about to endure. Only glimpses and impressions. One impression is that the whitecoats, the Director/Caligari, and the asylum itself should be understood as stand-ins for real-life institutions, as parts of an allegory warning us about the dangers of authoritarianism. In this way, the frame adds a layer of allegorical depth that asks audiences to question the authority of powerful individuals and institutions who imprison opponents and attack their credibility by labeling them insane, unhinged, or delusional. In our current world of rising authoritarianism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent film more than a century old, reminds us that authority unquestioned is power unchecked.