Dr Caligari (1919)

I got into watching German Expressionism films through my habit of relating every subject in high school to films. So, when I did Germany in history, I took a good look at the cinema of the time. I especially loved learning about Nazi propaganda, my essays generally read like film reviews. (Still, this is something I'm lookng forward to doing more of.) It came up again when I studied Brecht the next year and we were investigating the cultural landscape of Weimar Germany, a weird and fascinating time for film, theatre and music. I didn't find the experience today completely alien then.

Some aspects were inevitably tricky for a modern audience: the lack of sound means actors had to be theatrically expressive, and it does come across as hammy these days. Also, it's not exactly frightening to see a murder thanks to our general desensitization.

That said, I do think "Dr Calligari" is still a mightily impressive film. Visually, it's braver and more inventive than most big-budgetted films and the skewed geography is brilliantly disturbing. Maybe now there would have been more Dutch angles to show it off even more, but perhaps cameras weren't so flexible, I don't know. The intertitles, too, are a world away from plain black functional ones, evocing the madman's voice.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It still isn't the kind of film I would put on if I was sick, but it holds great fascination and I reckon we can learn from the early filmmakers.