Summary
“Act I,” a title card reads. We see an older gentleman telling a young man, Francis, that there are spirits all around them and that they have driven him away from his home and family. Suddenly, a catatonic female figure comes wandering towards them out of the woods. Francis’s eyes widen as the woman approaches, then walks past them. Francis tells the older man that the woman is his fiancée, and that he and she have lived through something “stranger still” than what the old man has ever lived through. “I will tell you about it,” the younger man says, and he begins to tell the older gentleman about “the little town” where he was born. We see the town, an assemblage of houses on a hill. As Francis begins to tell his story, we see an older and sinister-looking man, hobbling along with a cane, glasses, and a top hat.
Francis’s story begins with his friend, Alan. We see Alan reading a book in his room. He looks suspiciously around the room, then goes to the window and smiles, before grabbing a hat and coat to go outside. Out on the street, he sees a sign for a kind of fair with entertainment. We then see Alan going to visit Francis, and encouraging him to come to the fair. Francis smiles at him, and the friends set off down a winding street in the town. We see the older man with the top hat and cane, following close behind, shuffling along. He runs into a man, who warns him not to visit the town clerk, who is “in a vile temper today!” The man in the top hat hands him his card, which reads “Dr. Caligari” and the administrator takes it and leads him into the office of the town clerk.
Inside, the town clerk is anxiously talking to a number of people. As Dr. Caligari approaches him, the town clerk waves him aside. After the other men have left the office, Dr. Caligari tries to approach the town clerk again, but again the town clerk waves him aside and tells him to wait. When the town clerk comes down from the platform on which he has been standing, Dr. Caligari asks for a “permit to present [his] spectacle at the Fair.” When the town clerk wants to know more about the spectacle, Dr. Caligari tells him that he’ll be presenting a somnambulist, or sleepwalker. The town clerk signals to another administrator and walks away abruptly. As Dr. Caligari goes over to talk to the other administrator the scene shifts.
We see the fair beginning, and people happily approaching the various spectacles and rides. Dr. Caligari enters the fair and looks around with a strange expression. He takes his place at a booth and begins ringing a bell. A crowd assembles as he unfurls a poster and announces that he will be presenting “Cesare the Somnambulist” for the first time. A title card signals that this is the end of Act I, and a new one marks the beginning of “Act II.”
To begin “Act II,” a title card tells us: “That night the first in a series of mysterious crimes took place.” We see a group of men slowly standing up from peering down on the ground. One of them exclaims that the town clerk has been killed, stabbed in his side with “a strange pointed instrument.” The men look around for evidence of what happened. The scene shifts back to the fair. Francis and Alan are walking around, as smiling crowds gather around. We once again see Dr. Caligari announcing Cesare the Somnambulist. He explains that Cesare is 23 years old and has been sleeping continuously for all 23 years of his life. “Right before your eyes Cesare will awaken from his death-like trance.”
Analysis
The film announces its unique and memorable aesthetic from the first moment. The title cards used in the credits have a certain handmade and whimsical typeface that orients the viewer in the surreal setting of the film. Then, as the action of the film begins, figures emerge from the landscape almost as if out of a dream. When we see the young man, Francis, sitting with the older man, it is almost as though they are part of a tableau, like they are inanimate models that have come to life. This visual language is partially to do with the recent invention of film—indeed, in the silent era, all filmmakers were experimenting with and inventing new visual forms—but also to do with director Robert Wiene’s singular style and use of a surreal vocabulary of images to heighten the uncanniness of the story. As scenes shift, the settings will dissolve and a circular window will frame a characters’ face before the scene goes entirely to black, giving the impression that scenes are unfurling into one another. Transitional cues such as these make the plot feel all the less linear and all the more dreamlike, as though any moment can fade into any other.
Another part of what makes the visual language of the film so distinct and unusual is how theatrical and staged it all feels. The images projected on the screen look more like theater set pieces than realistic representations. The town on the hill is made up of a series of triangles, small and relatively simple representations of houses, lined up in rows up the side of a wall-like mountain. It looks like an impressively crafted paper construction, and its primitivity and cartoonish-ness make clear that the film is not seeking to be realistic. Rather than try to represent the world as it looks in reality, the film presents life as it looks through the prism of a dream. Indeed, director Wiene came from a theatre background originally, and it is his distinctively and intentionally artificial visual flourishes that pull the viewer into the unusual plot of the film.
Performative cues also heighten the dream-like and surrealistic tone of the film. When we see Francis speaking to the old man, he has an unusual affect, a cartoonishly wide-eyed expression, as if he has been permanently shocked and disturbed by the events of his life. In the silent film era, actors often utilized broad gestures and giant expressions in lieu of spoken text—this was simply a style of the times and the medium of silent film. Additionally, however, the largeness of the actors’ gestural languages contributes to the overall tone, making it all the more mysterious and unusual. Francis' exaggeratedly stricken face foreshadows just how unusual his story will be, and its broadness transports the viewer far from the world of realism and into a much more unsettling tonal palette. This is also particularly true of Dr. Caligari, who walks, gestures, and makes faces in a particularly nefarious way. While we do not fully know the root of his evil or the mystery behind his identity, details of his performance and the way he looks on camera communicate a great deal about his character.
The distinctive style of the film is connected not only to Robert Wiene’s particular strengths and expertise, but also to the broader project of German expressionism, the genre to which the film belongs. Expressionism developed in the years following World War I. Following the war, in 1916, foreign films were banned in Germany, which led to a greater number of German films being developed, many of which adopted boldly experimental aesthetics and storytelling techniques. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the most iconic examples of this movement and typifies many of the traits commonly associated with Expressionism—a preoccupation with madness and deceit, and an investment in more elevated intellectual topics. Additionally, early on, Expressionism was defined by its anti-realism stance, and the desire of its practitioners to privilege the emotional or expressive reality of an experience rather than a more legible verisimilitude. The way that reality is distorted and made dreamlike and unfamiliar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reflects this tenet of Expressionism.
We do not learn much in the first section of the film, and a great deal is left mysterious in the storytelling. Francis invites us into the main plot by way of a retrospective narration. He sits on a bench next to an unidentified old man and begins his story. After the men talk about the fact that the world is a mysterious and treacherous place, and we see Francis’ fiancée walk past them as if in a dreamy zombie-like trance, Francis begins his account. Thus, the viewer begins the story from the end, having already seen the unusual repercussions of whatever must have befallen him in the past. This structure of the narrative only lends it more mystery and peculiarity. We begin the story in a state of curiosity and wonder, and the tone of the film further piques our interest in the revelation of the mysterious forces at work.
