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"The difference between myself and a madman," says Dalí, "is that I am not mad." The foundational nightmare vision begins with a little joke, drolly understated to set off the heavy expressionism all around, two men on a bench interrupted by the catatonic maiden in pale sheets drifting by ("That's my fiancée"). A tale told in discordant angles, a slanting cabin with an even more slanting window, the German psyche between wars. Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) comes to town like a bewigged, top-hatted bullfrog, stooped at the clerk's office but a master at his fairground tent, where he unveils Cesare the Somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) for the audience. (Kokoschka is the main modality, Veidt's painted visage twitching in a rare close-up introduces Munch.) Investigating a string of murders, the callow hero (Friedrich Feher) questions the malefic carny as the sleepwalking slave slinks like Nijinsky toward the dormant beauty (Lil Dagover). "There are spirits... everywhere." The corkscrew mind and the warping eye, the elements of Robert Wiene's legendary trance-film. Streets and landscapes are jagged forms drawn on paper backdrops (painted shadows go one way while the performers' actual shadows go another), the stark camera records the all-engulfing distortion head-on: An iris-encircled glimpse of a carousel precariously spinning yields to an off-kilter tableau, the stagy frame unsettled by line upon line of bustling-baleful movement. "The irresistible passion of my life is being fulfilled," reads the lunatic's diary, a parable of domination to chill Kracauer's blood. Lang is the natural inheritor of this, the influence down the decades encompasses everything from Frankenstein and Spellbound to Amadeus and Mulholland Drive. The zigzagging road leads to the mental asylum—the embodiment of sinister authority, a dungeon disguised as sanatorium, or that chamber of projected visions known as cinema? Cinematography by Willy Hameister. With Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Rudolf Lettinger, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |