Word: caligari
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...idea of the "film society" is nothing very new, but it is nevertheless, flourishing today with all the vigor of a new idea. There is hardly a large city in the country whose citizens have not been lately offered a chance to see "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "The Birth of a Nation," and other film classics. Although the audiences may be told that they are gathered together for the purpose of studying the new art form of the motion picture, there may be no more than a handful of really serious students of the cinema in each audience...
...nation subconsciously reveal itself through the movies it turns out? An expert who thinks so, and has written a book to prove his point, is German-born Dr. Siegfried Kracauer, who apparently knows a good bit about both psychology and German movies. As sociology, Dr. Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton University Press; $5) depends pretty heavily on historical hindsight. As movie lore, it may fascinate cinemagoers who know little about German films except that they gave the world Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Emil Jannings and Director Fritz Lang...
Kracauer divides German film history into three main periods. The first (1918-24) was a period of fierce mental ferment; during those years, the German film attained its highest artistic maturity (Variety, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and the screen was a battleground for most of the conflicting anxieties and desires of the German mind...
...Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally, a weird, ferocious melodrama about a power-mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) and his tool, a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). It was intended as an attack on authoritarianism. But the director cooked up a story "frame" (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the "framing story," Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell...
...Caligari was followed by many imitations. The picture's "basic theme-the soul faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos-exerted extraordinary fascination." A long procession of tyrants crossed the screen; Dr. Kracauer wonders whether their cruelties and excesses were expressions of a premonitory fear of what lay in the depths of the German soul...