Word: caligari
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...that excellent oldtime silent picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the lead was played by a skinny, macabre Viennese named Friedrich Feher. Mr. Feher is now a grey-haired, heavy-set man who looks like the composer he has become. Two years ago, Composer Feher got the notion of a cinema in which music would bear the burden of narration. With his voluptuous wife, Magda Sonja, and his chubby son, Hans, in the main roles, he wrote, composed, directed and cut The Robber Symphony. It won immediate success in Europe, was chosen one of the ten best pictures...
...picture's profits. The Eternal Mask won a prize, for "originality of theme," at last summer's Venice Exposition. Last week, released in the U. S. with English subtitles, it was hailed by critics as the ablest cinema study of mental aberration since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari...
...Great Train Robbery (1903), The Birth of a Nation (1914), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Jazz Singer (1927), the newsreel of the sinking Vestris (1928) are classics which help explain how & why the cinema became what it now is. Because the profitable demand for them is soon exhausted, most films, classic or otherwise, are retired after about two years, frequently forgotten, sometimes destroyed. To preserve for students and posterity important moving pictures of the past will be the function of the film library which Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this week announced...
...that impersonal and reportorial tool, the camera, to tell a tale from a madman's brain and show the world through a mad-man's eyes. They wanted to becloud the lens, to forsake realism to gain artistic reality. In 1920 this film was finished, and "Dr. Caligari" made his crooked bow to Europe. In those days nothing like it had been seen. Devotees of the arts went to marvel, and there was talk of the cinema coming of age. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" gave the impetus for a brilliant series of European films which included Murneau's "Dracula...
...give the effect of a silhouet, is three dimensional. The figures had to be drawn, then cut out of cardboard and sheet-lead, then articulated so that they could move. A German designer, Mrs. Lotte Reiniger, working with Walter Ruttmann (who made for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari expressionistic sets never surpassed in the cinema) spent three years on The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The story is tenuous. Achmed makes love, goes to war, combats a sorcerer in settings and among characters taken from the Arabian Nights. Aladdin is there, though now he has to light his lamp instead...