The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Silent black and white
Sets by Picasso and Munch
Who's the crazy one?
Courtesy of Netflix WatchNow streaming, this 1920 German silent film was a hoot, if nothing than for the sets. Seemingly made from fabric stretched over wood frames bent at all sorts of crazy angles and painted, it was literally like inhabiting a Cubist or Surrealist painting.
Silent films have there limitations, and this one was a lot like watching a play, though one without any real dialogue. There were the usual cutaways to dialogue, but as much as anything it was all about making one's expressions as dramatic as possible and conveying all of the plot in a face.
Interesting also in that at the end you learn the narrator may not be as trustworthy as you would have assumed, a plot device that strikes me as being ahead of its time.
3 comments:
Saw this one in film class in college. Another in a long line of "pre-talkie" films such as "Battleship Potemkin," "Birth of a Nation" and "A Trip to the Moon" that are groundbreaking for one reason or another, but hard to take seriously sseing them now, out of cultural and temporal context.
I found it eminently watchable, even out of context.
That said, I won't go looking to watch it again anytime soon.
"Watchable" is not the same thing as "Takien Seriously"
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