Robert Wiene: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a film by Robert Wiene, written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, which marked the birth of the cinema movement of expressionism, known as German Expressionism. It screened for the first time in Berlin in February 1920, deeply striking the imagination of the German public and later that of the international public. The film begins with one of the characters, Franz, who tells an elderly gentleman a sinister story, which took place in 1830, in the small town of Holstenwall. Here arrives a certain Dr. Caligari, an insane hypnotist, who introduces his sleepwalker, Cesare, as a man able to predict the future. Simultaneously with his arrival, many suspicious deaths begin to take place. Franz’s story will end with Dr. Caligari forced into confinement within a mental institution. Only at the end will we discover that all the characters in Franz’s story, including himself, are actually guests of a mental institution and that Dr. Caligari is none other than Dr. Oscar, the doctor, and director of the institute. The film uses stylized sets, with, strange, distorted buildings painted on canvas backdrops and flats in a theatrical manner- The actors make no attempt at realistic performance; instead, they exhibit jerky or dancelike movements. The distorted reality, as told by Franz, finds an iconographic confirmation in the scenographies with deformed geometries and in the framing-scenes conceived and composed as pictorial works, where the actors move in an unnatural way, almost dancing; thus becoming part of the scenography itself as we see in the scene in which the sleepwalker Cesare moves up-close to the wall, almost blending in with it.