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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - 3

CaligariAccording to Elsaesser, the image of Weimar cinema is largely the product of two accounts that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, including Kracauer's, which reads films as products of a national collective unconscious, vulnerable in its “preoccupation with authority and a desire for submission that foreshadows the willingness of Germans to submit to real-life dictator Adolf Hitler.” Alternatively,. Elsaesser suggests, along with many of his contemporaries, that German filmmakers adopted expressionism in film to differentiate their product from the American films that were flooding the market.

“Over the years considerable attention has been devoted to the political, psychological and artistic importance to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but only recently has its perhaps most obvious importance - as horror film - been more fully appreciated. For whatever else it was, the film also represented the latest manifestation of German Romanticism with a pedigree stretching back to the novelist E.T.A. Hoffman, the folklorists Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the dramatist-poet Schiller. It is from these roots that the themes of death, tyranny, fate and disorder, and the subjects of haunted students, mad doctors, ghosts, mummies, vampires and somnambulists spring.” – Lenin Imports

To see some examples of Dr. Caligari today, here are The Red Hot Chili Peppers and their video "Otherside" from 1999 ...

 

... and a YouTube Special which added Marilyn Manson's "I Put a Spell on You" to a collage of Caligari clips.


See also:

Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. Routledge, 2000.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press, 1947.

Robinson, David. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. British Film Institute, 1997.

 

Extensive info made available and used by permission of filmgeschichte. de: Quellen zum Film

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