Summary
Dr. Caligari holds up a painted poster of the somnambulist, before pulling back a curtain and inviting spectators into his tent. As Francis and Alan approach the tent, a title card reads “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Inside the tent, Caligari rings his bell and waves his cane around before climbing up onstage and opening a small cabinet, in which Cesare is sleeping standing up. Caligari asks Cesare to open his eyes, referring to himself as Cesare’s master. “Awaken for a moment from your dark night,” he says. Slowly, Cesare opens his eyes and becomes animate. He holds up his arms and emerges from his cabinet slowly. Alan and Francis watch from the crowd as Caligari smiles at the audience and says that Cesare “will answer all your questions—Cesare knows every secret—Cesare knows the past and sees the future—judge for yourselves.”
Alan looks frightened and steps up to ask Cesare a question. “How long will I live?” he asks, to which Cesare responds, “Till the break of dawn.” Alan looks horrified at the idea that he will die before the end of the night. He walks away, crestfallen, accompanied by Francis. Out in a square a man lights a lantern, and Francis and Alan walk by. On a nearby wall, Alan is terrified to see a sign announcing that there was a murder nearby. They run into a woman nearby, and they offer to walk with her for awhile, each of them taking one of her arms. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Dr. Caligari comes out of a small dwelling and looks around before going back inside.
A title card reads, “The way home.” As they walk, Francis turns to Alan and says, “Alan, we both love her,” about the girl they are escorting. Alan smiles and nods, clearly smitten with the girl, and Francis continues: “We’ll leave the choice up to her, but whomever she chooses, we shall remain friends.” Alan agrees and shakes Francis’s hand.
A title card reads “Night,” and we see Alan sleeping in bed. Suddenly, we see a shadow on the wall behind him, an intruder. Alan wakes up and begins to scream, as we see the shadow of the intruder murdering Alan. A title card reads “End of Act II.”
Act III. The next day, a woman walks down the street towards Francis’s house. Coming up to Francis’s room, she finds him and tells him that Alan has been murdered. Francis is distressed to hear the news. He suddenly remembers Cesare’s prophecy and begins to think. The scene shifts and we see Francis running into a police station and telling them about Alan’s murder. “I won’t rest until I get to the bottom of these dreadful deeds,” he says. We see Francis descending a starkly lit staircase and covering his face in grief. He walks off and goes to the woman that he and Alan were both in love with. She is surprised to see him so sad and takes his hand. When he tells her that Alan has been murdered, she pushes him away and wears a terrified expression.
Analysis
Striking visuals continue to highlight the suspenseful and mysterious elements of the story. In addition to the theatrical rendering of architecture and the town itself, as well as the dissolving transitions between scenes, light and shadow become all the more important to the storytelling in this section. Chiaroscuro, the visual technique of using stark contrasts between light and dark, shadows and brightness, is Wiene’s main method for heightening the spookiness of the story. As the spectators at the fair wander into Dr. Caligari’s tent, the lighting becomes more overtly theatrical, with Caligari lit in a dramatic way. This creates brighter lights and darker shadows, which heightens the strangeness of his spectacle, the prophetic somnambulist Cesare. Then later, as Francis emerges from reporting Alan’s death to the policemen, he climbs down an ominously lit staircase, the light hitting his face in a particularly dramatic way. The contrast between light and dark in the lighting scheme represents the contrasts between good and evil in the plot, the scary juxtaposition between moral rightness and the more nefarious forces at play.
In this section, the contrast between shadow and light is used to its most horrifying effect in the scene of Alan’s murder. Earlier, Cesare the somnambulist predicts Alan’s death in the night, which startles the young man quite a bit. Nevertheless, he goes to sleep, but is awakened by a mysterious intruder. While Alan can clearly see the murderer in plain view, we see only the shadow of an unidentified man, coming towards Alan. Alan is lit as if by stage lights, almost from below, which creates peculiar shadows across his face and across the wall behind him. The lighting scheme makes it so that the entire mise-en-scene is horrific, not just the murderer. Even Alan, the victim of the violent crime, looks horrific, because of the way that he is lit. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it is not simply the villains that are rendered horrifically, but the entire filmic world.
In Dr. Caligari’s tent, chiaroscuro is used to heighten the scariness of the scene, which is then made all the more terrifying by the close-ups of Dr. Caligari and Cesare’s faces. We see Caligari’s leering grin and his eccentric expression in a tightly framed shot, as he theatrically reveals his servant, the fortune-telling Cesare. Cesare’s gaunt frame looks like it has wandered out of the frame of an artwork by another prominent German Expressionist, Egon Schiele. The somnambulist has angular cheekbones and a strong jaw, a floppy haircut, an exceptionally skinny and androgynous frame, and dark painted circles under his eyes. He looks both like a skeleton and a cabaret performer, and his makeup—with its white foundation and black drawn eyes—echoes the effect of chiaroscuro. Cesare is at once magnetic and uncanny, and the close-cropped framing of his face draws the viewer into his mystical and terrifying spell.
Before Alan is murdered, but after he has received Cesare’s prophecy, he and best friend Francis run into a woman they both love. We learn very little about her, but when they come across her in the square, the two men run to her side and begin escorting her home. While a love triangle is often cause for conflict, Alan and Francis settle their competing desires for the woman in an exceedingly amicable and affectionate way. Francis assures his insecure friend that they will let the woman decide who she loves more, but no matter what, they will remain friends with one another. This element of the plot, that Alan shares such a strong friendship with Francis, as well as kindles an earnest love for a woman in town, raises the stakes of his death because it shows that he has multiple reasons to live and enjoy his life. While the viewer is hardly surprised to see Alan killed—it was, after all, Cesare’s prophecy—the fact that we have seen bits of his personal life make us more saddened by his death.
The pantomimic and gestural acting continues to highlight the suspense of the plot in this section of the film. After Alan is told that he will die before the end of the night, his face becomes immediately horrified, almost as though he has already met his murderer, and he wanders out of Caligari’s tent with an exaggeratedly dejected affect. His anxiety following the prophecy becomes manifest in his entire body, and he exhibits a palpable tension in the way he moves and uses his face. Additionally, after Francis learns of Alan’s murder, his mournfulness becomes gestural, almost melodramatic. He leans on furniture, covers his face in horror, makes expressions of distress, using his elastic features to play through the intense emotions that he feels about his friend’s death. This acting style is certainly representative of the historic moment in which the film was released, and serves to communicate clearly the psychological journey of the characters. The broadness of the expressions pulls the viewer in, asks us to sympathize directly with the plight of the characters, to feel the story viscerally.
