The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Description

Made before “horror” was a designated genre, this is sometimes cited as the first true horror film. Caligari is considered a classic film, often shown in introductory film courses, film societies and museums, and is one of the most famous German films from the silent era. The most complete essay in the décor of delirium, it was a radical advance in film technique and the earliest German film included among the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”. Film scholar Lewis Jacobs called it the “most widely discussed film of the time”. Though often thought to be an art film by some modern critics and scholars, Caligari was produced and marketed the same way as a normal commercial production of its time. Writer Hans Janowitz claims he got the idea for the film when he was at a carnival one day. He saw a strange man lurking in the shadows. The next day he heard that a girl was brutally murdered there. In the film: Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. It is the annual fair in Holstenwall. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for a few moments from his death-like sleep. When Alan asks Cesare about his future, Cesare answers that he will die before dawn. The next morning Alan is found dead. Francis suspects Cesare of being the murderer, and starts spying on him and Dr. Caligari.

Clearly this is a very old film and the copies around in use today have been largely “tinkered” with using different negative print sources of varying quality. The opening and closing sequences (that were added afterwards) being particularly poor. We have spent rather more time “cleaning up” this film than most in our collection. This is mostly because even restored versions have left in the enormously irritating “sparkly” splices at every scene change which we found enormously irritating. We have fixed the majority of these splices and spent time reducing the amount of flickering and contrast anomalies. The result is still far from perfect but we think you will find our version runs much more smoothly and is more watchable than many. We have used sepia (rather than highly coloured tints used in other versions) as we feel it is a superior method to convey the resolution available and is less distracting. We are also using the original title cards for Caligari which have been removed in many versions. These featured stylized, misshapen lettering with excessive underlinings, exclamation points and occasionally archaic spellings. The bizarre style, which matches that of the film as a whole, mimics the lettering of Expressionistic posters at the time. Some sources believe these were originally shown in green but we have stuck with sepia throughout. These title cards are in German but are accompanied by embedded captions in English.