Written by Eric
March 14, 2010
Watching Caligari, you truly get a sense for how much of an influence it had on future filmmakers venturing into the same dark territory.
I was warned away from this film by a friend of mine who had seen it in school for some reason or another, so I wasn't at all prepared for what an odd and creepy experience I was in store for when I went to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The guy who introduced the film said, "I know you've all seen this movie in high school or other film appreciation classes as a silent and blotchy piece of German expressionism that teachers like to traumatize their students with, but you've never seen it like this. The print has been cleaned up to look almost like new, and will be accompanied by live electronic music by Kento Oiwa." Needless to say, this screening turned out to be an infinitely better chance at getting something out of Caligari than my friend had.
The Fucking Creepy Music made a huge difference. Unfortunately, having never seen the low-quality version, I probably have no idea how much of a difference the clean-up job made. The plot is necessarily elementary, involving a creepy old man who showcases his sleepwalking oddity, Cesare, at the local fair. By night, Cesare commits several murders and kidnaps a young woman. There are revelations about Cesare and the man who calls himself Dr. Caligari, and plot twists that pull the rug out from under us in terms of through whose eyes we thought we were being told the story. But, of course, the plot is not what makes this film so special.
The fact that this film represents an era of filmmaking so different from today's would make for a longer and more thoughtful review if I had any sort of knowledge about that era, but I don't. All I can say for sure is that watching Caligari, you truly get a sense for how much of an influence it had on future filmmakers venturing into the same dark territory, crafting a reality based on our own but distorted to the point of perversion. Caligari's deep impact on Tim Burton in particular is immediately apparent; The sets are so deliriously twisted, it seems to have been constructed by someone who had never even heard of a right angle. The jerky, unevenly paced movements of the actors bring to mind the stop-motion phantasmagoria of his Nightmare Before Christmas, the haunted gait of Edward Scissorhands, the mysterious midnight killings of Sleepy Hollow.
Caligari is a mesmerizing and deeply unsettling relic, as presented the way it was. I have no idea if most people are going to have the opportunity to, or even want to, experience Caligari the way I did, but it definitely qualified as a "Moviegoing Experience," which was new and exciting for me.
