The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (movie) | Karl Bartos

Into this journey : Caligari, himself, had played with artifice. He is the hypnotist, a shamanistic figure who controls Cesare who resides as if dead in a coffin-like wooden cabinet. A somnambulist who can predict the future, and who only wakes at Caligari’s bidding. Caligari, in top hat, hornrimmed glasses and white hair is, by turns oddly ridiculous with his facial mannerisms and gurning and dangerously demonic in his magical control. Cesare by contrast is strangely beautiful if tortured, his dark tousled short hair matted in sweat, his clownlike face a rictus of fear and possession. With dark kohl round the eyes and lipstick on the lips, he looks more modern, alarmingly so, yet the contortions and terror in his eyes seem only too real. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is rightly considered a classic and is a film which is endlessly debatable given its themes of power, control and possession, themes which took on an even deeper resonance in the 1930’s and 40’s as the world witnessed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. We can hear on Karl Bartos’ album several melodies that lie within the tradition of the Baroque Age of Bach, the early Romanticism of Mozart, the dissonance of Schoenberg, the unsettling metric play of Stravinsky and the harshly dramatic repetitions of Philip Glass. From outside of the classical tradition there is the folklorist bricolage of the fairground barrel organ tempered playfully by some psychedelic backwards musique concrete along with some melodies which would not have been out of place on a Kraftwerk album from the classic era. (Bureau B) Starring : Werner Krauss Lil Dagover Friedrich Fehér Conrad Veidt Directed by Robert Wiene Wiene has also directed a variety of other films, styles and genres. Following the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Wiene, of Jewish origin, fled into exile. Wiene died in Paris ten days before the end of production on a spy film, Ultimatum, after suffering from cancer. The film was finished by Wiene’s friend Robert Siodmak.