![]() ![]() On Caligari's order, Cesare awakens and answers questions from the audience. The next morning, Francis and Alan visit Caligari's sideshow attraction, where he opens a coffin-like box to reveal the sleeping Cesare. That night, the clerk is stabbed to death in his bed. The clerk mocks and berates Caligari, but ultimately approves the permit. Caligari seeks a permit from the rude town clerk to present a spectacle at the fair, which features Cesare, a somnambulist. Francis and his friend Alan, who are good-naturedly competing for Jane's affections, plan to visit the town fair. Most of the rest of the film is a flashback of Francis's story, which takes place in Holstenwall, a shadowy village of twisted buildings and spiraling streets. When a dazed woman passes them, Francis explains she is his "fiancée" Jane and that they have suffered a great ordeal. In what appears to be a park, Francis sits on a bench with an older man and complains that spirits have driven him away from his family and home. 7.2 Point of view and perception of reality.Considered a classic, it helped draw worldwide attention to the artistic merit of German cinema and had a major influence on American films, particularly in the genres of horror and film noir. Critic Roger Ebert called it arguably " the first true horror film", and film reviewer Danny Peary called it cinema's first cult film and a precursor for arthouse films. The film was voted number 12 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo. Accounts differ as to its financial and critical success upon release, but modern film critics and historians have largely praised it as a revolutionary film. Caligari was released just as foreign film industries were easing restrictions on the import of German films following World War I, so it was screened internationally. Other themes of the film include the destabilized contrast between insanity and sanity, the subjective perception of reality, and the duality of human nature. Some critics have interpreted Caligari as representing the German war government, with Cesare symbolic of the common man conditioned, like soldiers, to kill. Writers and scholars have argued the film reflects a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant, and is an example of Germany's obedience to authority and unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority. The film thematizes brutal and irrational authority. The film's design was handled by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, who recommended a fantastic, graphic style over a naturalistic one. Janowitz has said this device was forced upon the writers against their will. The film makes use of a frame story, with a prologue and epilogue combined with a twist ending. The script was inspired by various experiences from the lives of Janowitz and Mayer, both pacifists who were left distrustful of authority after their experiences with the military during World War I. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist ( Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist ( Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer.
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