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Subjective trauma becomes subaltern desire in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s proto-horror silent classic that’s justly, if mostly, celebrated for its Expressionist, practically vertiginous images. By focusing almost exclusively on its pioneering formalism, the more historical and socially neutral readings of the film, aside from the work of scholars Alexander Doty and Harry Benshoff, have lost sight of its thoroughly embedded queer narrative.

Cesare (Conrad Veidt) is a murderous somnambulist under Dr. Caligari’s (Werner Krauss) control. Cesare is first glimpsed, outside Caligari’s tent at the local carnival, as a life-sized drawing that makes a caricature of Veidt’s slender face, to the extent that his cheeks are exaggeratedly shrunken in, perpetuating an effeminate stereotype indicative of physiognomic depiction. Cesare’s actual face is first glimpsed in close up, eyes closed as he furrows his brow and slightly moves his lips. Once his eyes open,...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on October 22 via Kino Lorber. The 1920 silent horror classic has been meticulously restored in 4K by the F. W. Murnau Foundation.

It includes a new orchestral score by Emmy-winning composer Jeff Beal (House of Cards), along with an orchestral score by Studio for Film Music at the University of Music Freiburg and an electronic score by DJ Spooky, both from 2014.

Special Features include:

Audio commentary by composer Jeff Beal Caligari: How Horror Came to the Cinema Restoration Demonstration

In the film, a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community.

The quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema is directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, and Rudolf Lettinger star.

The post...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German silent horror film that is widely regarded as a pioneering work of expressionist cinema. Directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, the movie is notable for its innovative visual style, intricate plot, and the enduring influence it has had on the development of the horror genre. This article will delve into the history of the film, its unique visual aesthetic, and its lasting impact on the world of cinema.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari I. The Making of a Masterpiece

The film’s origins can be traced back to the experiences of its writers, Janowitz and Mayer, who were both deeply affected by the horrors of World War I. Inspired by their shared distrust of authority and their fascination with the subconscious mind, they crafted a story that aimed to depict the dark side of human nature...

The horror genre can feel overwhelming for some — it’s full of classics, sure, but also schlock-fests, perfectly average genre exercises and, frankly, more than a few extremely bad knock-offs. But if you’re looking to catch up the essential horror bona fides, we’ve got you covered. Below, we’ve put together a list of 25 horror classics that every serious film fan should see, providing a wide range of influential films from 1920 all the way up to 2017.

This is by no means a complete list — there are so many more great horror films to check out. But if you want an entry point to the best of the best, start here.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) Decla-Film

Robert Weine’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” has been touted as the first true horror film that helped to shape the horror and film noir genre through its dark visual style.

(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)

The Movie: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"

Where You Can Stream It: Shudder/AMC+

The Pitch: A man recounts the story of how a sleepwalker controlled by a mad doctor carried out murders in his village in this creepy 1920 classic.

German silent films: they've stood the test of time. Written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and directed by Robert Weine, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" predates "Nosferatu" by two years and is one of the earliest works of German Expressionist cinema. Film critic Roger Ebert, spotlighting it as one of his "Great Movie" picks in 2009, wrote, "A case can be made that 'Caligari' was the first true horror film."

Told mostly in flashback, this 77-minute story unfolds like a demented dream,...

Projects are from emerging directors Roberto De Feo and Evi Romen.

Rome-based sales agent True Colours has picked up two hot projects from emerging directors: Roberto De Feo’s debut’s The Nest, a horror movie set in an isolated villa where a paraplegic boy lives with his protective parents.

It is produced by Colorado Film and will be released by Sky Italia’s Vision Distribution in Italy in August.

Disco is the directorial debut of former editor Evi Romen and is a drama about the aftermath of a terrorist attack and its impact of a group of disparate characters.

Projects are from emerging directors Roberto De Feo and Evi Romen.

Rome-based sales agent True Colours has picked up two hot Italian projects from emerging directors: Roberto De Feo’s debut’s The Nest, a horror movie set in an isolated villa where a paraplegic boy lives with his protective parents.

It is produced by Colorado Film and will be released by Sky Italia’s Vision Distribution in Italy in August.

Disco is the directorial debut of former editor Evi Romen and is a drama about the aftermath of a terrorist attack and its impact of a group of disparate characters.

Everyone loses their minds when they see the famous Oscar Mayer Wienermobile cruising down the highway. How do you not? A giant delicious hotdog-on-a-bun on four wheels in cartoon bright colors is a delight and has an enduring mojo that never gets old. The fun concept vehicle was initially created in 1936 by Carl Mayer, a Bavarian immigrant who created a hot dog empire in the United States. His kitschy wiener “car” turned heads and promoted the brand like wildfire. Since then there have been several iterations. The 1952 Wienermobile is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, […]

The post Meet a ‘Hotdogger’ who is paid to drive the iconic Oscar Mayer Wienermobile appeared first on Monsters and Critics.

Review by Roger Carpenter

Germany’s Weimar Republic era roughly coincided with America’s Roaring Twenties period. Beginning shortly after the end of Wwi, spanning the decade of the 1920’s, and extending into the early 1930’s Germany’s Weimar era was one of prosperity, decadence, and escapism. And just as American’s prosperous, libidinous decade would end in tragedy with Black Friday’s stock market crash and the beginning of The Great Depression, the Germans would see a tragedy of even more monumental proportions with the rise of Hitler and Nazism which would bring a screeching halt to the Weimar ideology.

The development of early German cinema corresponded with the Weimar era. With the return from the war of men who would pioneer German cinema, the decade is perhaps arguably the most creative and innovative in the history of world cinema. 1920’s German films are essentially synonymous with expressionism and...

The cream of German Expressionist filmmaking of the 1920s is increasingly accessible to modern audiences. The curated restoration of F.W. Murnau’s expressionist masterpiece is a beauty — we finally can experience the film in its full original form.

The Last Laugh

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber Kino Classics

1924 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 90 min. / Der letze mann / Street Date November 14, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring: Emil Jannings, Georg John.

Cinematography: Karl Freund

Film Editor: Elfi Böttrich

Production Design: Edgar G. Ulmer

Original Music: Giuseppe Becce

Written by Carl Mayer

Produced by Erich Pommer

Directed by F. W. Murnau

Back in the early 1970s film school professors had limited resources. They lectured, assigned readings from a short list of authoritative film scholars and screened 16mm prints of renowned world classics. The only problem is that it was often difficult to correlate the classics described in the texts with the ragged film prints available.

Jim Knipfel Feb 26, 2019

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is almost a hundred years old, yet still casts a long shadow over all the genres it invented.

At its heart, is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari an anti-authoritarian call for rebellion, an object lesson in conformity, or an allegory about how we are all mere pawns lost in a culture gone completely mad? That’s up to you to decide. What’s interesting is that nearly a century after it was first released, the film’s backstory remains such a swirl of misinformation, conflicting memories, urban legends, shaky recordkeeping, and contradictory ego trips. It’s impossible to pin down any solid truth.

How the script originated, how the production went, who decided to tack on the framing story at the last minute, what the framing story means, who decided to go with the Expressionist design, and what sort of critical and...

Special Mention: Un chien andalou

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Written by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel

France, 1929

Genre: Experimental Short

The dream – or nightmare – has been a staple of horror cinema for decades. In 1929, Luis Bunuel joined forces with Salvador Dali to create Un chien andalou, an experimental and unforgettable 17-minute surrealist masterpiece. Buñuel famously said that he and Dalí wrote the film by telling one another their dreams. The film went on to influence the horror genre immensely. After all, even as manipulative as the “dream” device is, it’s still a proven way to jolt an audience. Just ask Wes Craven, who understood this bit of cinematic psychology when he dreamt of the central force behind A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film intended to be an exploration of surreal horror. David Lynch is contemporary cinema’s most devoted student of Un chien andalou – the severed ear at...

Kino Classics refurbishes Robert Weine’s 1920 landmark title The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the film that marked the birth of German Expressionism as well as the flagship of the horror film genre. Tempered by bookends meant to diminish interpretations of parallelism between insanity and authority, its stark, jagged angles and ingenious uses of shadows predates the dark beauty of film noir, featuring fantastic set designs that still rival the ability of contemporary film. Eerie, carnivalesque, and as arresting as ever, it’s a title worthy of this remastered revisit.

The story of Caligari, developed by Carl Mayer (responsible for Murnau’s Sunrise and The Last Laugh) and Hans Janowitz, is incredibly simple. Basically, the eponymous doctor happens to have control of a sleepwalker that does nefarious deeds for his master, namely murdering inhabitants of the small hamlet late at night. There is a slight twist to the proceedings, though it...

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Directed by Robert Wiene

Written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz

Germany, 1920

In the period of Germany’s Weimar Republic, a unique and volatile pre- and post-war era within a window of less than 20 years, the German people were experiencing a torrent of new ideological, social, and political shifts. What was once traditional and normal was giving way to the modern and unusual. What was typically viewed as quintessentially German was now being inundated by outside influences, by strange and foreign people and their imported cultural baggage. Whether or not these elements were as directly and obviously portrayed in movies as some like Siegfreid Kracauer and Lotte Eisner would argue (quite convincingly in many ways), there can be little doubt that film was influenced to one degree or another by this state of the German populous. The times were surely changing, and in no film...

Sunrise

Scenario by Carl Mayer, from an original theme by Hermann Sudermann

Directed by F.W. Murnau

USA, 1927

William Fox had seen Faust, Nosferatu, and The Last Laugh, and on the basis of these German masterworks, he brought their creator, F.W. Murnau, to Hollywood. What he got was a truly distinct cinematic vision, which was what he had in mind: something to set a few Fox features apart from the other studios’ output. What he probably didn’t expect was just how much of that “artsy” European touch he was going to get with Murnau on contract. Were American audiences going to go for this type of movie, with its symbolism, melodious structure, and overtly self-conscious style? At any rate, Murnau’s first picture at Fox was one to remember. Sunrise, from 1927, is one of the greatest of all films. It is a touching, beautiful, and artistically accomplished movie, one of the best ever made,...

We’re breaking form this week and going alphabetical instead of preference order because of the Incredible diversity of product available for you to rent, buy, or stream over the next ten days. How does someone really compare “Sunrise” to “You’re Next”? Why bother?

If you need to know, “Closed Circuit” and “Runner Runner” aren’t really worth your time and “A.C.O.D.” and “Riddick” are flawed but everything else in here comes with varying degrees of recommendation, particularly the quiet beauty of “Sunrise” and the incredible charm of “Enough Said”. We’re also loading you up since we’ll be off next week seeing flicks in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival. There’s plenty in here to tide you over. Pick your favorites.

20 Feet From Stardom

Photo credit: The Weinstein Company

“20 Feet From Stardom”

One of the most crowd-pleasing documentaries in years is likely to find an...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 14, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $29.99

Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

F.W. Murnau's 1927 classic Sunrise makes its Blu-ray debut.

F.W. Murnau’s (Nosferatu) landmark 1927 drama-romance Sunrise earned Oscars at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929 for the being the most “Unique and Artistic Picture,” for Best Actress (Janet Gaynor), and for Best Cinematography (Charles Rosher and Kark Struss).

The silent film classic concerns a farmer (George O’Brien) who plots to drown his wife (Gaynor) so that he can be with a seductive city woman (Margtaret Livingston. After being unable to carry out the crime, he finds his relationship put to the ultimate test by a life-threatening rainstorm.

Sunrise used the groundbreaking Fox Movietone sound system, making it one of the first studio films with a true soundtrack, featuring music and sound effects.

Fox’s new release of the title represents its Blu-ray debut.

The...

In Robert Wiene’s 1920 dreamlike horror classic, veteran German actor Werner Krauss plays the mysterious Dr. Caligari, the apparent force behind a creepy somnambulist named Cesare and played by Conrad Veidt, who abducts beautiful Lil Dagover. The finale in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has inspired tons of movies and television shows, from Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir The Woman in the Window to the last episode of the TV series St. Elsewhere. In addition, the film shares some key elements in common (suppposedly as a result of a mere coincidence) with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2011 thriller Shutter Island. The 1920 crime melodrama Outside the Law is not in any way related to Rachid Bouchareb's 2010 political drama. Instead, the Tod Browning-directed movie is a well-made entry in the gangster genre (long before the explosion a decade later). Browning, best known for his early '30s efforts Dracula and Freaks,...

With the notion of film canonization once again at issue, we thought it might be an appropriate occasion to check in on our staff’s collective opinion of the greatest films of all time. We had no idea what to expect; our contributors come from all over the world and come from vastly different backgrounds and occupations. The results were, appropriately, eclectic, ranging from acknowledged cornerstones to contemporary classics.

A few facts worth throwing in: with five films appearing, Orson Welles is the most frequently-cited director, followed by Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa; the newest film to merit an appearance was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds; animated films made a dent, particularly Toy Story and Snow White; several shorts managed to find their way in, as well.

The list, along with some individual writers’ thoughts on the entries that make up the Top 10, follow including special mention of...

The first in a series of articles in which I select my favourite horror movie from each of the last ten decades, providing some context and history and a look at (some) of the other great horrors of each. It is in no way meant to be a comprehensive history. Some articles are expanded upon from a list I wrote last year.

Few filmmakers in the first two decades of movie-making seemed explicitly interested in frightening the audience, though perhaps the audience soon let the filmmakers know what it craved. There is the famous story of the first screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896), directed by the Lumière brothers, with reports of fleeing, terrified audience members as a train approached the screen. That this never actually happened is almost irrelevant; there is a reason some apocryphal tales persist.

One of the most often adapted horror texts of all time,...

Olga Tschechowa points the finger.

It's a listless country house gathering, broiling with intrigue under the surface: Bertie Wooster might appear, except we're in Germany. The hunt is rained off: nobody has anything to do except read the paper or gossip. And then Graf Oetsch arrives, suspected of murder, and they really have something to gossip about...

I first saw F.W. Murnau's Schloß Vogeloed (1921), under the misleading title The Haunted Castle, on a grey-market VHS bought on eBay. Grey was the word: the washed-out images were devoid of clarity, life and atmosphere, and the only thing that struck me asides from the pervasive theatricality was a double dream sequence which crashed into the plot for no real reason.

The first dream is scary, although the dreamer is the film's comedy relief character, "the anxious gentleman" played by Julius Falkenstein. As he slumbers, the window blows open and the diaphanous curtains blow in the gale.

Conrad Veidt is Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" performer of the day. An international star since the 1920s, Veidt worked in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Hollywood — twice. [Conrad Veidt Movie Schedule.] In the late '20s, Veidt was the star of unusual Hollywood fare such as Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928), in the title role as a man with a grin-like scar where his mouth should be, and Paul Fejos' The Last Performance (1929), as a magician in love with pretty Mary Philbin — a Universal star who also happened to be Veidt's leading lady in The Man Who Laughs. With the arrival of talking pictures, Veidt returned to Germany, but with the ascent of the Nazis he fled first to England and later to the United States. In the Hollywood of the early '40s, Veidt became everybody's favorite Nazi in movies such as Nazi Agent, Escape, and Casablanca.

An ex-swimming star struggles to stay afloat in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's quiet, deeply humane study of family life in Chad

When the name of the landlocked African republic of Chad comes up, most cinephiles will think of the opening of Antonioni's The Passenger. In that masterly 1975 film, playing a reporter at the end of his tether while covering a hopeless civil war, Jack Nicholson swaps his identity with a dead man he finds in a remote Saharan hotel. It seems to sum up the sense of desperation and extreme experience that, rightly or wrongly, Chad incites.

However, as in other troubled, desperately poor African countries, there are a handful of gifted artists of world stature, mostly musicians but also painters and film-makers, and A Screaming Man, the fourth feature film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad's only prominent film-maker, won the jury prize at last year's Cannes film festival. This year Haroun...

Jan 11, 2011

The plot of Sunrise was adapted to Hollywood conventions from a naturalistic novella by Hermann Sudermann. It is wrong, however, to assume the changes were all for the bad, as so many critics have done. The film's plot is neither hopelessly sentimental nor melodramatic. It is true that Carl Mayer and F. W. Murnau, with a free hand from the studio, changed the tragic ending of the novella to a happy one for the film. This change can be viewed as an improvement upon Sudermann's gratuitously ironic ending of having the young husband's death ...Read more at MovieRetriever.com...

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, to give him his full name, died in an automobile accident in California in 1931. The German-born émigré director was 42 years old. His death was luridly speculated upon by Kenneth Anger in his book Hollywood Babylon. Whatever the cause of his untimely end, there are few cinema artists who left behind such an iconic body of work, at such a relatively early age.

Working in Germany in the 1920s, Murnau helmed some of the greatest silent features ever made. His roll of honour includes: Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust (1926). Taking up an offer of work with American producer William Fox, he left behind Germany for good. It would provide a legacy entitled Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and his death.

Murnau will forever be associated with a landmark aesthetic known as German Expressionism. His experimental, highly-stylised, poetic outlook proved highly influential. There is general debate as...

The first notable things about Emil Jannings in F.W. Murnau's 1924 silent classic The Last Laugh are the bushy mustache and his doorman's uniform, an absurdly ornate long coat adorned with a wealth of brass buttons, a mighty collar, and swooping gold braids on the shoulders. It's an absurd get-up, meant to announce in the most ostentatious way possible that the Atlantic Hotel is so luxurious, it's hired a highly decorated officer to haul luggage and whistle down cabs. The 40-minute documentary included on the new two-disc Last Laugh DVD offers the surprising information that Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer intended the film as an anti-militaristic screed, with the message that money, not a uniform, carries real power. But today, the film reads more like a potent working-class legend, chasing the nightmare of any lifelong wage slave with the fantasy of glorious comeuppance. Made entirely without intertitles—except for a.