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.
