Word: caligaris
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...production-but Film Distributor Nat Sanders feels fine. Last year Sanders waded through a list of titles in the U.S. Office of Alien Property, found two old German pictures that many a moviegoer still remembers fondly: The Last Laugh (1924), with Emil Jannings, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Sanders made a percentage deal with the Government, added a sound track with music and background noises, and opened his double bill last week in a small Manhattan "art" theater...
...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...
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...