"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" Revisited

“A reminder, and an example, of how today's filmmakers have forgotten about the overwhelming influence seductive imagery can have on an involving story.” – taken from the original Cinemaphile review of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

Movie horror began not in the minds of Hitchcock or Castle but in the menacing gazes of early German cinema. Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” usually accepted as the first prominent excursion of this distinction, was filmed and released in 1919 against the trajectory of its time, when those elusive few who actually saw films ought to have been far more enamored by the unsullied awe of moving images. What could have driven a single mind behind the camera to abandon the trajectory of his peers and dive headlong into a world so cynical and haunting, especially after many of his early films – now thought lost – contradicted that impulse? Having just been subjugated by more dominant European powers after the First World War, it was the country in which artists freely abandoned the beckoning of idealism and plunged head-first into the dark corners of the human psyche, effectively creating the tormented soul of German Expressionism. And while conventional wisdom suggests that such a compulsion inspired an uprising of dangerous political minds, it can also be credited with writing the language of the most celebrated of all modern film genres, a categorization of pictures made famous by the prospect of instigating fear the hearts of the audience.

Lessons from Criterion:"The Phantom Carriage" by Victor Sjöström

In tracing the origins of Ingmar Bergman’s screen identity back to the Swedish silent fable “The Phantom Carriage” – a movie he claimed was instrumental in his desire to become a director – one also unearths other important revelations within the frames of this puzzling endeavor. Produced and filmed in 1921 at the height of Swedish cinema’s love affair with fantasy and folklore, the movie seemed to write a language from which a future of important filmmakers would be passively influenced. Consider a sequence in which in which the conflicted anti-hero, David Holm (Sjöström), hacks down a locked door in a vain attempt to prevent his wife and children from deserting him – this harkens us immediately back to a key moment in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” when Jack Torrance does the same in a flash of psychological splintering. Other measures are equally striking: the overreaching presence of death as a puppet master directly inspired the core theme in “The Seventh Seal”; the conflicted main character’s reckless and destructive pattern would be later echoed by the likes of “Scarface” and “Taxi Driver”; and the use of redemption in the climax, especially in the face of certain mortality, would become the defining tone evoked in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The Passion of Joan of Arc / **** (1928)

The story of Joan of Arc has been an unsettling chapter in the French's past--a sketchy but ironic chronicle of religious faith, and one of the most perplexing essays in the search for identity. What makes it such a difficult subject is not necessarily the historical angle, but the moral instability of the people involved; very little information has been provided that can determine the sanity of the players (who made decisions that can both garner respective or disruptive judgments). The most puzzling debate is, not surprisingly, centered on the very source herself; it becomes all too unclear when some sources claim that she heard the voices of God, and others try to discredit those remarks by denouncing her as a mere lunatic. Actual documents from the trial that resulted her execution are an immediate defense for the latter conclusion, for they indicate Joan may not have been completely sane when fighting for France's army during an age when England was seeking control over many of the poor European provinces. Yet similar texts paint the portrait of an innocent, misunderstood woman who cared about people, and devoted her life to saving a country from utterly pointless turmoil.