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HI!HAMLET
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – (1920) - Dir. Robert Wiene
One of the most enjoyable aspects of this production is the art and sets. But as a fan of deduction I want to talk about his shenanigans first. Halfway through solving the mystery, I thought it was going to be Lattice reasoning on how to crack the sleepwalker's alibi, but I didn't expect the later reversal to be narrative trickery. Rather than the sets and art, the bureau-within-a-bureau setup of the script appealed to me more and struck me as more subtle, and the attempts to change the frame were great - that's the 1920s
I think one of the most ruthless aspects of German Expressionism is that it doesn't care much for basic spatial perspective. The film is painted by a painter, weakening the main light source to highlight shadows and line contours in a grotesque and bizarre way. The script, although dated, is very much ahead of its time. With its skewed and irregular lines, distorted spaces, high-contrast gloomy lighting, high-contrast gloomy lighting, and the stylised shapes and physical performances of the characters, the film is not only a representative classic of German expressionism in the 1920s, but also a first-person supervisory narrative that allows the camera to enter the heart and see the fantasy and madness of the mind.
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