The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Delusion and Distortion in 1920s Germany

The 1920 silent horror classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, embodies many of the artistic achievements of the golden age of German Expressionist cinema. At the heart of this short-lived movement was a sense of the importance of conveying emotion and subjective psychological states rather than objective reality. Influenced by psychology, the earliest filmmakers used the new medium of cinema as a visual expression of the mind, designed to mirror the discontinuity and disorder of the individual thought process. It is this rejection of psychological realism that lends the films of this period such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu (1922) and The Golem (1920) a surreal, dreamlike quality. In the 1920s, distortion, asymmetry and non-linear narratives became the hallmark of German Expressionist cinema.

Significantly, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari follows a non-linear narrative from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.  The story is told in flashback by Francis, who encounters the mysterious Caligari, a doctor exhibiting a somnambulist as an attraction at a village carnival. The somnambulist- named Cesare- under Dr. Caligari's sinister powers predicts the future on command and when Francis visits the carnival with his best friend Alan, Cesare predicts Alan's death the following day. As Cesare's deadly predictions coincide with a series of vicious murders in the village, Francis investigates of Caligari and discovers his true identity as the director of a nearby insane asylum. As he reads the director’s journals, Francis uncovers his maniacal plot to use the hypnotised somnambulist under his care to commit brutal killings ostensibly for the purposes of scientific experimentation. In a final twist, the authenticity of Francis’ narrative becomes ambiguous and the audience is left unclear as to whether his story is an accurate retelling of real events or the consequence of fantasy, delusion and madness.

"This dreamscape acts as a visual shorthand for Cesare’s state of hypnosis and lends the film a menacing, nightmarish quality"

The hallucinogenic mood of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is cemented by its use of flat, distorted sets. Influenced by the magazine of expressionism Der Sturm, art director Hermann Warm painted light and shadow directly onto the sets to create an angular, stark and at times abstract environment. This dreamscape acts as a  visual shorthand for Cesare’s state of hypnosis and lends the film a menacing, nightmarish quality that became a recurring feature of German expressionist film.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was undoubtedly a product of its environment. The 1920s were a period of great social upheaval, cultural experimentation, innovation and controversy in Germany- particularly in cities such as Berlin where the expressionist movement found a natural home. The implosion of the German aristocracy following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and the end of WWI gave rise to the establishment of the Weimar republic, a short-lived liberal democracy that granted German citizens universal suffrage and signalled the end of censorship. This created a fertile environment for filmmakers, writers, artists and musicians to express new ideas while rejecting the old order. Yet, at the same time, Germany in the 1920s was plagued by economic catastrophe and haunted by prolonged and violent political confrontations between communists, socialists and right-wing extremists. This cultural renaissance in the cities and tales of moral decay and political anarchy engendered a perception of social chaos amongst conservative elements. The seeds of this sense of insecurity were embedded as early as 1920 and can be identified in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari where we find the natural social order upturned and distorted. Indeed, the travelling carnival that facilitates Dr. Caligari’s crimes is itself symbolic of moral ambiguity. The German expressionist movement was so closely related to the tensions of the Weimar republic and its social, political context that the collapse of the Weimar republic in 1933 as a result of Hitler’s rise to power signalled its sudden and almost complete death in Germany. Its introspection, subjectivism and fascination with psychology proved inconsistent with the new regime’s prescriptive ideals.

The impact of German Expressionism on cinema has been pervasive - not least because many of its key actors, writers and directors such as Fritz Lang, Carl Freund and Robert Wiene fled Germany under the strain of the censorship  and creative bankruptcy of Hitler’s Third Reich, to find new outlets for experimentation in Hollywood and Europe. Members of the German Expressionist movement went on to influence the Universal Hollywood horror films of the 1930s. Their impact is also plainly evident in the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed and Orson Welles among others. Furthermore, several of the motifs of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; the character of the mad scientist embodied by the asylum Director, the non-linear narrative technique, the sense of social chaos, emotional intensity, depiction of insanity, abstraction and stylised contrast of dark and light, would be replicated again and again in the emerging genres of film noir, horror and science fiction.