The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Spoiler alert.

There is a guy. He has a friend. They both like the same girl.

There is a man who calls himself Dr. Caligari. He has a carnival act, what he calls a “somnambulist.”

Dr. C is mistreated by an impatient clerk.

The clerk is found stabbed to death in his bed. This upsets the citizenry.

The guy and his friend go to the carnival and see Dr. C and his somnambulist, whose name is Cesare.

Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, has a thin, weird, unsettling, urbaniak-style creepiness about him. He sleeps in a coffin, the “cabinet” of the title.  (For unrivalled creepiness, check him out in The Man Who Laughs, where he inspired the Batman folks to create The Joker.)

Dr. C says that Cesare can tell the future. The guy’s friend steps forward and says, with a laugh, “How long will I live?” Cesare stares at him with his Urbaniak glare and says “’til break of day.”

That night, Dr. C sends the sleepwalking Cesare out into the night to murder the guy’s friend in his bed. He does so. This upsets the citizenry.

The guy now has the girl, but she’s upset because the friend has been stabbed to death in his bed. Her father, sensitive to this type of thing, goes to investigate the doctor and his somnambulist. The father goes out to the fairgrounds and finds that a dummy rests in Cesare’s coffin.

Cesare, at that moment, has gone to the girl’s house to kill her. He is startled in his efforts by some local citizenry, who chase him through town (shades of Fritz Lang’s M).*

The guy goes chasing after Dr. C and follows him to an insane asylum. The staff of the asylum grab the guy, who is hysterical. He insists that the man responsible for the death of his friend and the abduction of his fiancee is in their asylum. The orderlies take the guy to the head doctor, who turns out to be — yes, Dr. Caligari.

The guy waits until the doctor is out of his office, then ransacks his files until he finds the proof that he is behind the mysterious murders in town. It seems that this doctor, inspired by an Italian man named Dr. Caligari, decided to perform an experiment on a cataleptic, to see if he could get a sleeping man to do things he would not do when awake. Once he had done so, it appears that the doctor got a little carried away, getting poor Cesare to kill just about anyone who inconvenienced the doctor.

The guy, burning with righteous fury, accuses the doctor, who denies everything until the body of the dead Cesare, who has apparently collapsed in a field outside of town, is brought in. At this point, the doctor also collapses, in grief, and spills the beans about his psychiactric misdeeds. He is bound in a strait-jacket and carted off to one of his own cells.

All well and good. But then, in a Donald Kaufman-esque twist ending, we PULL BACK TO REVEAL that this tale is being told to us by the guy, who, for some reason, STILL LIVES AT THE INSANE ASYLUM. We come to find that his fiancee is there, and Cesare too, and that they’re all quite stark raving mad. So apparently none of this involving tale is true.

In addition to the twist ending (or as M. Night Shamalyan calls them the “paradigm shift”), there’s the matter of the sets.

They are deliberately weird, fake, flat, hand-made, crazy, unsettling and bizarre. Unlike anything that’s been done before or since, I don’t know why. And at first you’re like “What’s with the sets?” But then, when the twist ending comes, you say “Oh, I see, because the narrator is crazy.” Frankly, I don’t know why this experiment has never been repeated. Only recently, with movies like Sin City and A Scanner Darkly has this kind of heavily stylized, deliberate artificiality found its way into a mainstream feature.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

And, of course, I’m thinking about a remake.

The thing I like best about the movie, aside from the visionary sets and the ahead-of-its-time narrative, is the film’s ideas about guilt.  Dr. C has found a way to commit evil acts with a clean conscience — he’s not the one killing people, Cesare is.  Cesare, on the other hand, also feels no guilt because he doesn’t even know that he’s killing anyone.  People die, citizenry is hysterical, and no one has to pay a penalty.  No one is guilty.  No wonder the protagonist has gone insane.

*smarty-pant film students will recall that Lang was first asked to direct Caligari.
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Comments

14 Responses to “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”
  1. rennameeks says:

    As an up front aside, I personally prefer The Urbaniak Creepiness (though who doesn’t love Veidt’s presence?).

    Caligari always struck me as a headache-inducing movie like The Usual Suspects, where the narrator turned out to be a liar, but had thrown in enough of the truth to thoroughly confuse the heck out of us, the poor audience. The main difference between them is that in Suspects, we KNEW we were being lied to. In Caligari, it’s never made completely clear whether the whole thing was in our hero’s head or if it all happened, but no one believed him and he was forced to stay in the asylum (although since Cesare’s alive, it does seem that the former is true).

    Expressionistic sets like that are generally too weird for mainstream audiences, or at least they were in that time period. As it is, most weird experiments take place in non-mainstream films and if they work, the mainstream films eventually pick up on them and make them trends. I think the main reason that artificial-looking sets are making an appearance now is that comic book movies are increasing in popularity and number. The success of Sin City didn’t hurt either. Also, with films like Sin City and Sky Commander being entirely shot on green screens with their sets being dropped in later, artificial backgrounds are on the rise.

    I’m curious as to what you’d have in mind for a remake, since the original film is extremely “stagey,” like a theatrical performance. All of the sets are two-dimensional and exist solely for the camera’s benefit. Would you keep that aspect of it or try to find some way of adding the third dimension?

    • rennameeks says:

      Oooh, almost forgot: I love Donald Kaufman’s work! 😛

    • Todd says:

      Caligari always struck me as a headache-inducing movie like The Usual Suspects

      Well, I think the two endings function in very different ways. In The Usual Suspects, there is a crime boss named Keyser Sose, and the police are looking for him. In Caligari, it turns out there was never a crime committed by anybody. In Suspects we have the satisfaction of at least learning the answer to the mystery. In Caligari, it comes completely out of left field. For me, the problem is not so much that the ending is a complete surprise, but that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie we were just watching (except to explain why the sets are so wacky). It would take some thought, but I think if that problem could be solved, a remake is a viable idea.

      Also, with films like Sin City and Sky Commander being entirely shot on green screens with their sets being dropped in later, artificial backgrounds are on the rise.

      No kidding. (I have not seen the film in question. And I probably should not.)

      I’m curious as to what you’d have in mind for a remake, since the original film is extremely “stagey,” like a theatrical performance.

      Well, that’s the easy part. Caligari was at the pinnacle of filmmaking’s possibilities in 1920, but you simply wouldn’t write it or shoot that way today.

      My ideas for a remake fall along three lines:

      1. Leave the expressionistic sets, but take away the staginess. Sky Captain is a great idea for a movie, but was dead and airless on screen. Maybe green-screen technology made it that way, although Sin City proved that the concept could work with the right material. Here we wouldn’t be trying to convince an audience that this is a real world, we would be telling them all along that this is a weird, expressionistic world.

      2. Make it “a real screenplay,” the sort of movie that an audience is already familiar with, to make its formal experiments easier to accept. It could be sold as a detective film, say, or a horror thriller, that just happens to stand out from the crowd of genre pictures because it has a bold formal (90-year-old) “experiment.”

      3. Figure out a way to fix the ending, or provide a different ending, so that it doesn’t come so completely out of left field.

      • rennameeks says:

        In Caligari, it comes completely out of left field. For me, the problem is not so much that the ending is a complete surprise, but that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie we were just watching (except to explain why the sets are so wacky). It would take some thought, but I think if that problem could be solved, a remake is a viable idea.

        Sort of like how in Fight Club, there are brief hints of what’s really going on throughout the first two thirds of the movie. Another movie that came to mind was Mulholland Dr.. The entire first half of the movie is a bizarre dream sequence that is loosely “explained” by the second half. The Fight Club method of foreshadowing is more easily accessible, though.

        (an aside: *winces at her own mis-reference from last night* Must remember to look these things up at 4 in the morning – my apologies!)

        No kidding. (I have not seen the film in question. And I probably should not.)

        Wow, so the film’s already been remade once recently. O_o That’s rather eerie. It’s probably just another example of what the Psycho remake proved: you can’t make an almost identical remake and capture the soul of the original film. There’s more to it than camera angles and pacing.

        Mixing ideas 1 and 3 certainly seems like a good idea. Once point #3 is addressed, point #2 will fall into place on its own. I would be careful not to make it too generic, though, because remakes are always compared with the original film, something that is especially difficult for remakes of famous films. If the remake doesn’t break some new ground like its predecessor did, it will get raked over the coals a bit.

        • ghostgecko says:

          That twist ending wasn’t in the original screenplay. The writers had it so that Caligari was the head of a local asylum who was so obsessed by the legend of a hyponotist and his sleepwalker, that he couldn’t resist acting it out. When he was shown Cesare’s corpse, he goes insane himself. The framing story was Francis telling this to friends. It was supposed to be a politcal allegory, Caligari standing for the state, Cesare for the millions sent to kill and be killed in war.

          This, from David Skal: “A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one – following the much used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum. Then, as always, the producers suspected that they challenged conventional taste at their economic peril. The man on the street would regard the themes and images of Caligari as crazy, and therefore needed to be reassured that his opinion was the correct one.”

          Hm, crazed leader obsessed with old stories sending thousands to die in wars? Nah, could never work these days.

          • Todd says:

            crazed leader obsessed with old stories sending thousands to die in wars?

            Well, and of course this is part of my interest in the film.

            • ghostgecko says:

              >>>Well, and of course this is part of my interest in the film.

              Heh, I figured as much. I think the original ending would’ve been stronger, anyways.

              I do think a mix of 1 & 3 would be a cool bet. The groovy thing you could do with greenscreen is make those expressionistic sets dimensional, like that great seqeunce in Labyrinth (just saw that again recently) where the characters are running around inside an Escher-inspired set. It seems like a waste of CGI to just try and duplicate reality exactly. Of course, a whole movie like that might make people a little motion sick, but it would look damn cool.

              • Todd says:

                Of course, a whole movie like that might make people a little motion sick, but it would look damn cool.

                Well, it works for Sin City. I would want to push it further though, into weirder, more abstract realms.

                I’m also thinking of telling the story from three different points of view, that is from the hero’s, the doctor’s and the sleepwalkers, in the Tarantino style. You could give each POV a different stylistic bent due to the way the character views the world. I think it could really work.

  2. craigjclark says:

    If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. It strives for some of the same effects as Caligari, despite being grounded in the “real” world. And there’s a similar confrontation in an insane asylum. Highly recommended. It’s quite possibly my favorite Lang film.

    • Todd says:

      I did watch Mabuse, and for whatever reason it didn’t haunt me the way Caligari does. M, on the other hand, immediately caught my attention for its remake possibilities. I called my people to find out about the rights and found that someone else was already working on it. I forget who it was, but the name impressed me enough that it made me think “Oh. Well they’re going to do a better job with it than I ever would have.”

      In any case, that movie has not yet been made (unless this is it, although its plot summary makes it seem like an extremely loose remake.

      It also seems highly unlikely that it was remade for the children’s market in 1982, but I suppose anything is possible in Hollywood.

      I have a terrible record with remakes, by the way. When I first saw Kurosawa’s Ikiru, I thought “By Jimbo, now there’s a movie that could be a big fat hit.” I contacted my representation, none of whom had ever heard of the movie. But it turned out that the remake rights were in the process of being bought, that very minute, by Steven Spielberg, to star Tom Hanks.

      • craigjclark says:

        On the subject of remakes, M was given the Hollywood treatment in 1951 by Joseph Losey. Furthermore, Testament was remade in Germany in 1962, following Lang’s The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (in much the same way that the original Testament followed the original M).

        Finally, Caligari itself was remade in Hollywood in 1962 and was recently released on DVD to boot.

  3. monica_black says:

    The season two finale of the show House used basically the same thing as this. We discover at the end that the whole episode was just a dream/halluciantion.