Film and Film

Marcel Picott

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920” 

The history of the cinema is full of legends and myths, it seems that, the larger they are the most they remain in time, and thus grow even more. German cinema has undergone this situation since the time of its famous silent film so far, for example, with the current myth Fassbinder; but "Dr. Caligari" has been the most highlighted not only by its duration and the opposite comments, which at that time served to be called a style, making it extended to all a huge production, since this film was known as a representative of the "expressionist" style, that carried out really three or four more films, but from there, the vast and colossal production of German silent film has been tagged as "Expressionism" for many years (an estimated for this period of more than four thousand films).

This impressive event goes hand in hand with the same tape, adulterated in its original and completely perverted its anti-authoritarian message history; something that almost everyone does not know as the same film, but everyone says it is the creator of the Expressionism, including inexplicably, everything that took place before its creation in 1920 which is huge, without mentioning everything that was subsequently held.

The film representative of German silent film, which has been taken as a symbol, even for misrepresenting all that kind of cinema, became a myth from the beginning that it made to forget its Director (an unknown at that time and as such he is so far) and the conditions in which this film arose, as it was filmed distorted and altered to the original idea of its creators. Hans Janowitz, who conceived the film, and Carl Mayer who wrote the screenplay, had conceived the story of a murky Dr. Caligari, a man who with his mental power dominated Cesar and committed a series of crimes, later he was discovered and unmasked, although he pretended being a director of a psychiatric hospital.

That was the finish of the film, introducing the double face of a worthy representative of the authority, embodied in the psychiatric director, and finally arrested by the police; as this film was altered, it was reduced to the single story that a madman tells to another, or as later it was called a crazy story. The project included the decorations and designs which are still so amazing and its authors suggested that curtains were made by the renowned painter Alfred Kubin, ideal to capture the atmosphere of mystery and terror that they wanted to highlight.

The idea as such was adopted by Erich Pommer, then producer and astute businessman who knew how to combine artistic quality with grossing profitability. He appointed Fritz Lang as director, who in the first preliminary work was not according to the script and changed it, showing everything as distortions of a mental alienated young man, who takes as the target of his attacks to the director of the psychiatric hospital; It was only required to add a first sequence in which this young man appears telling his story to another, and then leave the original idea as it had been submitted, adding to the end, another sequence in which he attempts to attack the Director and so he can conclude which is the origin of his illness to be able to cure him.

But Fritz Lang had to interrupt the preparations for the film, because by previous contracts had no time at that moment and in its place was called Robert Wiene, who from the outset agreed totally with the modifications made by Lang, that substantially altered the entire contents of the original idea (A very godly fact that often is ignored by the biographers of Lang). The angry protests of its creators did not find echo, especially the ones of Janowitz, besides the idea that the painter Kubin was in charge of the decoration was not accepted and three scenographers were introduced as "painters" of the expressionist stream, stream that was very distant in time and distance.

So this film was made, it was born in studies a work amending the critical essence of its original, to turn it into a defense of the institutions and morality, and thus went on the market. At the beginning it did not find echo in the German public but it was in Paris and New York where it received great acclaim. Independent of all the conditions which preceded it and of those that in major scales will continue, it was a surprising and innovative work in those years. It was an attempt to explore new avenues in narrative and film composition, primarily in its architectural non-natural, accompanied by a dense gloom. An avant-garde attempt which did not have continuity, and that as filmic idea and placed on stage belongs to one of its creators, Carl Mayer, who would be revealed as a great visual creator and would produce another important stream of those films.