Summary
Francis and the woman go into another room with couches and a table with flowers on it. The woman, whose name is Jane, goes and retrieves a man, her father, Dr. Olsen, who comes out and speaks to Francis. Francis tells him what happened, and Dr. Olsen assures him, “I will obtain police authorization to examine the Somnambulist.” In town, we see a man sneaking around a corner. Suddenly, we see a woman popping her head out of a window and crying that there has been a murder. The police grab the man who was sneaking around the corner and he struggles to break free.
Dr. Caligari is in his dwelling, and he opens the cabinet in which Cesare sleeps. Sitting Cesare upright, Caligari feeds him porridge. Francis and Dr. Olsen approach the dwelling and knock on the door. When Caligari emerges, he asks them what they want and Dr. Olsen shows him a warrant to investigate Cesare. Caligari motions for them to enter. Meanwhile, the policemen bring the apparent murderer in for questioning. They all point their fingers at him and one of them examines a knife that they found in his possession.
Back in Caligari’s dwelling, Dr. Olsen looks at Cesare as Caligari eyes them suspiciously. “Wake him up,” urges Dr. Olsen, and Caligari just looks at him. Suddenly a messenger arrives at the dwelling with a letter. Francis goes out and looks at it, followed by Dr. Olsen. It’s a notice that the murderer has been caught. Caligari follows them out of his dwelling and begins to laugh. Dr. Olsen and Francis run away.
Act IV. A title card reveals that Jane is worried because her father has been away for so long. We see Jane reading and looking around anxiously. At the police station, Francis and Dr. Olsen look at the convicted murderer, who tells them that he had nothing to do with the murders. He goes on: “The old woman—it’s true, I tried to kill her by stabbing her in the side with a similar knife, to throw suspicion on the mysterious murderer.” The men seem confused by his admission, and Francis looks upset.
The scene shifts to show Jane wandering around the town looking for her father and Francis. She comes upon Caligari’s tent, and he pops his head out, startling her. When Jane asks after her father, Caligari shakes his head. As a deceitful smile spreads across his face, he invites her inside. In the tent, he brings out Cesare, whom he awakens. Cesare looks at Jane with wide eyes and Jane is horrified, running out of the tent.
A title card reads “After the Funeral.” We see Jane, Dr. Olsen, and Francis coming out of Alan’s funeral, as night falls. Later, we see Francis wandering down to Caligari’s tent. He crawls up onto the platforms and peeks through the curtain. Finding no one there, he wanders over to Caligari’s dwelling and looks in the window. He sees Caligari sitting in a chair and what appears to be Cesare asleep in the box. Abruptly the scene shifts and we see Cesare walking through the shadows down the street, running his hands along a wall. He approaches Jane’s door and wanders in.
Inside, Jane is asleep in bed. Cesare quietly wanders in through a nearby window, which he appears to disassemble on his way in. He walks towards Jane’s bed and raises his knife to stab her, but suddenly stops and lowers it. Instead, Cesare grabs her with his hands. When Jane wakes up, she immediately struggles, but he manages to hold back her arms and drags her out the window. Two men hear her screams, but they are too late.
Analysis
Jane, the sole young woman in the film, becomes a damsel in distress, and her role in the narrative is reflected in the set of her home and bedroom. While the rest of the strange town on the hill is haunted by asymmetry and dark corners, the house of Dr. Olsen and Jane is grander and less ominous. When Francis enters, we see that the windows are tall and adorned with white curtains, there are fine chairs and flowers on the table. Then later, when Cesare goes to abduct Jane, we see her bedroom, full of large windows and with a bed covered in luxurious-looking white bedding. Thus, Jane’s purity in the narrative itself is reflected in the sets in which we see her. While the world around her is tawdry and unsavory in some way, she lives in a lap of luxury, positioning her as a helpless, princess-like figure.
Indeed, when Jane wanders out into the town alone, she finds herself in a strange, uncanny place. While Dr. Olsen and Francis go to find out more about the alleged murderer, she wanders anxiously through the streets that appear almost to have been abandoned. There is no one else in sight, and she turns the corners of the strangely angled set pieces looking for someone to help her. She must then descend the staircase to Caligari’s tent, which in itself seems symbolic of her wandering down into a kind of hell or underworld. Yet again, the surrealism of the sets and visual world heighten the horror of the scenario. It is not just that Jane is wandering through town alone, but that she must navigate a ghostly and seemingly abandoned set piece, a funhouse version of a town, and hardly knows the dangers that lurk around each corner.
Another effect of the set pieces and stage-like photography of the film is that the lines between interiors and exteriors are blurred. Because the set pieces are actively anti-realist, it is unclear at any given moment what is meant to be interior or exterior, and indeed we never see any evidence of the natural world. While scenes take place outside, the “outside” of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seems to be one that exists on another plane entirely. The only evidence of nature is the vase full of flowers on the table in the Olsens' house, but even these, however pleasant to look at, strike an artificial note. Additionally, the barriers between inside and outside are blurred as well. Characters are constantly going inside and outside rather fluidly, bursting into one another’s dwellings or else cowering at the threshold (as at Caligari’s). When Cesare goes to abduct Jane from her bed, he violates the boundary between the exterior of their house and her bedroom by coming through her window, but he neither opens the window nor breaks it. Rather, he seems to pull the frame of it out of the structure itself and walk calmly through.
Thus, while there are illusions and representations of barriers and boundaries in the film, these boundaries do not pose any real obstruction. The task of breaking into a room and murdering someone is as simple as removing the obstruction, requiring hardly any effort. This blurring between interiority and exteriority, between one side of the door and the other, mirrors the spectacle of Cesare the Somnambulist. What is remarkable about him is the fact that one can never tell if he is awake or asleep, as indeed he exists in a constant waking sleep. His entire existence is itself liminal, and this is what makes him both so exceptional and so terrifying. This terrifying ambiguity is of a piece with the broader confusion that makes the world of the film itself terrifying, that windows can be walked through and people can be murdered in the night, that a town filled with people can also feel abandoned. It is the ambiguity and cloudiness of the film’s circumstances that makes it so terrifying to the viewer.
Cesare is a complicated and vague figure in the film. The ambiguity of his identity and appearance, as well as his supposed ability to prophecy, make him almost non-human. Rather he is a force, an expression, a manifestation of the town’s unconscious. This is represented both in other characters’ responses to him, as well as his physicality. Whenever anyone encounters him, they look at him with a kind of shocked confusion, and he appears to be at once horrific and magnificent. In appearance, he is gaunt and underfed, and the circles under his eyes make him look sickly and unusual. On his way to abduct Jane, Cesare moves almost as though he is an interpretive dancer or an underfed mime in search of food, scaling and hugging the walls of the street with a catlike elegance. When Jane wakes up to him standing above her bed, he flashes grotesque teeth at her, and his fascinating face becomes all at once horrific. These contradictions and mysteries in his appearance and affect make Cesare all the more otherworldly, a true unknowable monster, made beastly by his servitude to Dr. Caligari.
