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Dr Caligari

796 Words4 Pages

Adam Slade
Intro to Film
Dr. Nichols
11/17/16

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Book Report

At first glance the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene is a distorted, outdated horror movie that leaves the viewer completely and utterly confused. Once you analyze the film in its cultural context though, and expand your understanding on it’s meaning, you can see the movie reflects Germany’s Weimar Republic at the time of the movies release, and the Avant Garde movement of Expressionism which was a movement that “lasted roughly between 1910-1922” (pg. 35).
At the inception of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Germany’s economy and peoples had suffered a great deal due to the loss of WWI, and the post-war period alone led to 700,000 Germans …show more content…

The brilliance of the art isn’t in how magnificent it looks but more so in how the distorted buildings and objects make us challenge our own preconceived perception of reality. This was a huge theme in the movie as we realize at the end of the film that Francis is a crazy man and the entire frame was of his delusion with reality accusing Dr. Caligari to be a murderer when in fact he was the Insane Asylums Chief Medical Director of which Francis was a patient. This twist at the end of the film was meant to express that we are all biased to believe one perspective of reality (as we believed Francis until we discovered the truth), and that there are so many interpretation of reality we don’t appreciate or acknowledge. The expressionism cinema was meant as a rejection of reality/natural aesthetic. It’s aim was to defamiliarise the conventional vision and constructions we allow ourselves to adopt and it did all this by using depth of field, distortion, high contrast, exaggerated expression, and the emphasis on design and composition to create an uncanny environment.
In conclusion The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a film that was meant to challenge our preconceptions of human nature and condition. As well as that it was meant as a form of expressionism which was also meant to allude to the recent events of Germany’s past, but make those in the present reflect on what had happened during WWI and act as a mirror image of the Democratic Weimer Republic it was filmed during which was portrayed as unstable and

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