BEFORE: "Scared Stiff" was a linking dead-end for me, but I'm sort of suspending my linking for the duration of the October horror-movie marathon - although many of these horror films WILL link together, not all of them will, which is why I'll consider two films that both feature Dracula, or, say, the Frankenstein Monster, to be linked in spirit. Go ahead, you try and find another horror film with Carmen Miranda in it. Can't be done.
"Scared Stiff" was also a carry-over from last year's Halloween-themed chain - I just didn't have room for it, and there are three other films I didn't have room for, they're three German expressionist films from the very early days of filmmaking itself. TCM ran them in 2016 and I tried very hard to work them it - but again, they just don't seem to link to anything else, or even to each other. So I'm just going to watch them now and get them out of the way, then I can deal with all things vampire or alien or creature-related.
Oh, yeah, here's what's being pushed back to Movie Year 10: 3 films about zombies, "Swamp Thing", and the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Also "Salem's Lot", which you might think belongs with this year's vampire films, but maybe next year I can cross off the last few Stephen King films, so I don't have to watch the new version of "It" or the recently released "Dark Tower" for another 12 months. Maybe then I can work in "Creepshow" and "The Children of the Corn" or something.
THE PLOT: Hypnotist Dr. Caligari uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murders.
AFTER: Ugh, this one was really hard to follow - and not just because this is a silent film from 1920, and I had to read English subtitles over the German titles, which meant I couldn't do a jigsaw puzzle on my iPad while watching, I had to really concentrate on the film. I tried, I really did, but it was so hard to understand what was going on that I had to really focus, and that usually makes me fall asleep that much sooner. So I guess I took a little nap after about 30 minutes, then I woke up and went back to where I left off, and I tried again. It turns out that in 1920, much of the "language" of film was still being worked out, and they used a lot of techniques like iris shots, where the screen gets dark except for a circle that gets progressively smaller - and the overuse of that technique makes me very tired too.
From what I understand about the plot, there's a framing sequence where a guy points out his fiancee, who's walking around in a zombie-like state, and then the story flashes back to tell us how she came to be in that condition - so it turns out this non-linear storytelling thing has been around for a long, long, time, even though I tend to think of it as a recent trend to ruin biopics with. The narrator, Francis, then weaves a tale about a German village that has an annual fair, or "Jahrmarkt", and a hypnotist named Dr. Caligari applies for a permit to appear at the fair, to put on a "spectacle". His act involves an entranced man, Cesare, who sleeps in a coffin, but is woken up to answer questions from the audience - that's pretty standard side-show, stuff, right? I mean, how do you prove that the assistant is NOT hypnotized.
But then people start turning up dead, starting with the rude government clerk who wouldn't issue the permit at first. Because who hasn't had problems at a government office, am I right? Next up is the narrator's best friend, Alan, who had asked the hypnotized man how long he would live - killing him is a long way to go to make a prediction come true, but I guess if you're running a sideshow act, you do what you have to do. The police apprehend a man with a knife who was trying to kill an old lady and try to pin the other two murders on him, but he denies it.
The hypnotized man then goes after the narrator's girlfriend, and instead of killing her he kidnaps her, which seems to be a strange shift in his M.O. Maybe Caligari told Cesare to not kill the pretty girls? Anyway, there's a strange carry-over from last night's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film, "Scared Stiff", which also featured an underling that had no mind of his own, though in that comedy, the man was called a "zombie". Which shows that this term had a very different meaning decades ago, referring to a mindless slave, not an undead brain-eating aberration. It seems that the worse possible fate that horror fanatics could envision in the 1920's was to be not in control of one's actions, to be bonded to an evil man and forced to do his chores. Only later did someone determine that it might be much, much worse to not be allowed to die, and instead to live on, shuffling across a deserted landscape, looking for flesh to eat.
Another possible interpretation is that Cesare represents the common man, and Dr. Caligari represents the German war government, conditioning mindless slaves into soldiers who will kill all of its enemies. According to Siegfried Kracauer's book "From Caligari to Hitler", we see here the subconscious need for a tyrant in German society, and gain an understanding that the average German would be obedient in the face of authority and unlikely to rebel against it. I don't know about this, because it sounds an awful lot like being apologetic to the citizens of Nazi Germany - oh, they let Hitler take over because standing up to a tyrant isn't a very "German" thing to do.
But then there's a twist in the story, something very David Lynch-like (or probably, more accurately, David Lynch's films are very "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"-like...) because the narrator follows Dr. Caligari to an insane asylum, where he finds out that Caligari is the director. While Caligari sleeps, a look through his diary reveals that he is obsessed with the story of ANOTHER man named Caligari, who also used a hypnotized man to commit murders in another town, some years before. And then the police come to arrest the current (2nd) Caligari, and he becomes an inmate in his own asylum - and honestly, aren't we all just inmates in our own asylums?
But then there's ANOTHER twist, which is also very David Lynch-like, and honestly, this is all starting to resemble the recent season finale of "Twin Peaks", where it was (sort of) revealed that reality can be changed, and that all of the characters were going to be different in a new timeline, umm, I think. Or maybe the point of it was that all of them, and us, are living inside of a dream, and we just don't know who the dreamer is. Or that we're all delusional in thinking that life has meaning, which it doesn't, and nobody should have expected David Lynch to produce something that had a resolution and a coherent point.
Anyway, back to "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" - the Germans apparently have a word for the concept of a framing story, because of course they do - and that word is "Rahmenerzählung". The opening sequence was reportedly suggested by Fritz Lang after he read the script, and the director agreed that adding the framing story would make the film more commercially successful overall - but reportedly, when it opened at the Capitol Theater in New York in 1921, some audience members booed and demanded their money back. I can certainly get behind that sentiment - if this film weren't on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", I think I would have given it a pass.
Also starring Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt (last seen in "Casablanca"), Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (also last seen in "Casablanca"), Rudolf Lettinger, Ludwig Rex.
RATING: 3 out of 10 straitjackets
No comments:
Post a Comment