The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene) (Patreon)

84/100

Third viewing, last seen 1999. Early on, during the fair at which Caligari exhibits Cesare, we briefly see a random extra walk across the frame holding a sign above his head, protest-style. More likely it's an advertisement, given the context—whatever's being communicated is too small to decipher on my TV set, and perhaps even on the big screen. Makes no difference. We've all seen a zillion such signs, and we know what they look like. They're big rectangles. Very occasionally you might see a triangle or a circle, if that shape is somehow relevant to the message. This sign, however, is a trapezoid*. Wiene doesn't call attention to it in any way—it's seen at a distance, amongst a teeming throng of fairgoers, just part of the ambience—and I can't say that I'd ever consciously noticed it before. No doubt my unconscious had taken careful note, however, because it's just...wrong. Casually, irrelevantly bizarre.

This movie just plain looks like mental illness, to an extent that's not been matched in the century since. (Had I waited just two weeks and a day, I'd have rewatched it on the hundredth anniversary of its New York City premiere: 3 April 1921.)** German Expressionism became hugely influential, but in a comparatively moderate way; subsequent filmmakers mimicked the shadow-puppet presentation of Cesare's second murder, for example, or depicted forbidding architecture and general darkness as the extension of a diseased mind. But if there are other films ostensibly set in the real world that visually distort virtually everything—eschewing right angles, reveling in inexplicable swirls and curves, having characters negotiate jagged, cramped corridors en route to quasi-Cubist painted backdrops—I'm not aware of them. (Inform me!) No need to elaborate, since I already detailed Caligari's singular aesthetic in a Scenic Routes column eight years ago. Point is, this isn't one of those films about which one can say "Creaky, but I appreciate that it was radical at the time." It would still be radical today, even with the (equally stylized) intertitles replaced by spoken dialogue. Dogville, oddly enough, comes closest to being comparably bold, even though its chalk-outline Brechtian approach is almost diametrically opposed to Expressionism. And I consider Dogville one of the five or so greatest films of this century, so a silent movie that's even more aggressively anti-realist would have to be criminally dull otherwise for me not to love it.

As it happens, I'd probably still enjoy Caligari—albeit not nearly as much—as a "normal" movie. The narrative's a tad skeletal, even by horror's somewhat relaxed standard; more could have done with the notion of another killer attempting to implicate Cesare by mimicking his modus operandi, for example (the confusion gets resolved almost as soon as it manifests, plus has to compete for red-herring status with the Cesare dummy), and neither our hero/narrator nor his paramour ever manifest a recognizable personality. I'm also skeptical that somnambulism could work as a carnival-style attraction, since I could stand there with my eyes closed, listening to a spiel about how I've been asleep my entire life, and then gaze out at the punters on command. (Admittedly I wouldn't look as creepy as Conrad Veidt.) "See the amazing woman who's been chewing the same piece of gum for over 17 years!" Sez you. But the zombie-like hold that Caligari has over Cesare compels, and screenwriters Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz made a savvy choice in eventually revealing Caligari's backstory (with the satisfying twist that he's actually a mere copycat) but telling us nothing whatsoever about Cesare, allowing the latter to remain both frightening and pitiable. Mayer and Janowitz famously hated the final twist that was imposed upon them (an ideological objection—Caligari's a proto-Nazi whose authoritarianism winds up being imaginary), but it works for me because there's no demarcation between the framing story and Francis' (or Franzis') delusion. We discover the truth at the end, see the "real world"...and it still looks insane, even for an asylum. A more refined, less emphatic version of adding a question mark after "The End."

* Yes, fellow pedants, I know that rectangles (and squares) are technically trapezoids according to a strict geometrical definition. Please tolerate the much more common usage above: a quadrilateral in which only two sides are parallel, creating an ungainly shape.

** Here's what New York Times movie ads looked like back then: