Episode 5: Sleep-Stalking

Today we’re going a little further afield of standard science fiction by looking at the 1920 German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari! The writers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, who are said to have set out to write a story denouncing arbitrary authority as brutal and insane, although that’s under some debate (more on that later). The film’s plot was inspired by several events in the writers’ lives, which included A circus sideshow  the writers saw called "Man or Machine?" in which a man performed feats of great strength after becoming hypnotized The 1913 murder of a young woman near an amusement park in Hamburg, which one of the writers believed he’d witnessed when he saw the woman disappear into the bushes and a respectable-looking man emerged a few moments later The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is considered to be the first German Expressionist film. What’s Expressionism? The site StudioBinder describes it this way:  German Expressionism is a particular artistic style that first appeared in poetry and theatre around 1910. It became popular in film 10 years later after WWI. It comes partly from German Romanticism and gives a subjective view of the world. It visualizes the country's collective anxiety through distorted and nightmarish imagery. Expressionists had little interest in their work being aesthetically pleasing. This style flourished after the horrors of WWI, and the inevitable economic devastation that followed. It’s also one of the first films to employ a twist ending, although the frame tale containing the twist ending isn’t what the writers intended. Janowitz and Mayer claimed that they wanted the story to be told in a straightforward manner without the twist ending. A recovered script proved the film did indeed have a framing sequence, but the last pages of the script are missing, and we don’t know how the frame tale ends. The frame tale and twist ending drew criticism from Siegfried Kracauer, author of From Caligari to Hitler, who felt it undermined the anti-authoritarian nature of the main story. It should be noted, however, that not everyone agrees that the story is intentionally anti-authoritarian; while Janowitz, in 1941, said it was only years after the film was released that he realized exposing the "authoritative power of an inhuman state" was the "subconscious intention" of the writers, film historian David Robinson suggested Janowitz's recollection may have changed in response to later interpretations of the film (kind of like how Groucho’s favorite Marx Brothers film seems to have changed over time).