THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI — SHOCKTOBER!

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Credited as introducing the "twist ending" to cinema, Robert Wiene's 1920 "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is a groundbreaking work of German Expressionism. The early horror film also introduces the frequently copied bookend structure so popular in modern cinema.

Wiene deploys a radical dreamscape of macabre lighting, Gothic make-up, and a boldly disjointed set design to form a twisting suspense story about an evil doctor who exploits a sleepwalker in order to perform serial acts of murder.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” embodies an iconic brand of angular surrealism that defies gravity. The effect is unsettling. The film's ripples of influence can be found in avant-garde, film noir, horror, and thrillers ranging from crime to psychological suspense. Its angular stage sets and long shadows presage F. W. Murnau's aggressive designs for "Nosferatu"--made two years later in 1922.

The script was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer after World War I, a period of widespread violence throughout the country. Insanity is rampant. At an abstract level, the picture presages Hitler’s mad Machiavellian manipulation that turned Germany into a killing machine during World War II.

A ghostly looking Francis (Friedrich Fehér) recounts to an equally pale friend his strange tale of woe involving his fiancée Jane (Lil Dagover). While visiting an annual fair in Holstenwall, Francis and his friend Alan visit a sideshow where Dr. Caligari exhibits Cesare (Conrad Veidt), a zombie-like "somnambulist" who has been asleep for 23 years. Someone has been stabbed to death the night before. Before Dr. Caligari's sideshow audience, Caesar emerges from an upright coffin to answer questions from the crowd. Alan worriedly asks how long he has left to live. Francis and Alan are caught in a love triangle with Jane. The vampire-like Caesar informs Alan he will only live "till dawn." Indeed, Alan's death comes later that night. Convinced that Caesar murdered his friend, Francis begins to follow the strange Dr. Caligari.

The filmmakers use various colored filters to create the effect of a color movie. Tinted shades of sepia tone, blue, and purple add narrative depth to queasy episodes of altered mental states. An ingenious plot revelation involving a mental asylum puts the icing on the cake. With its unusual look and neatly folding method of storytelling “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is an artistically uninhibited silent horror film that still sends chills.

Not Rated. 67 mins.

PANDORA'S BOX — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

     Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Welcome!

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

Eastern European-born Georg Wilhelm Pabst was a socially driven filmmaker of the silent era dedicated to exploring and exposing social dilemmas facing women in German society.

For “Pandora’s Box,” Pabst created a proto-feminist icon for the ages in the guise of a gifted young actress named Louise Brooks, whose bold acting style prefigured modern cinema’s naturalistic acting techniques by decades.

Having studied classical dance, Brooks uses her dynamic physicality to define Lulu, a promiscuous bisexual dancer and prostitute whose inviting smile charms men and women alike.

All exotic image and obtainable commodity, Lulu is an adventurous free spirit; in a phrase, trouble happening. Long before Betty Page struck her fetish pose there was a 22-year-old Louise Brooks wearing a black liquid-looking dress that is pure BDSM. Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles character in “Cabaret” is based on Brooks’s Lulu. Needless to say, “Pandora’s Box” was a controversial movie at the time of its release. The movie can be construed as the first international LGBT film ever.

That Brooks brought her own history of sexual abuse to Lulu’s lap-sitting courtesan allows for a raw yet focused sense of carnal awareness that is delightfully transparent. Lulu is a sensuous creature whose omnivorous appetite for affection leaves a trail of ruined men in its wake. Brooks’s charismatic on-screen persona is put in perspective against her inviting lips via the tiny bob hairstyle of black hair that she wears during much of the movie.

Pabst co-wrote the screenplay for “Pandora’s Box” by combining two plays by Frank Wedekind, a German playwright reflecting Germany’s hypocritical mores regarding freedom of sexual expression, especially for women. The “Box” of the film’s myth-related title fulfills a crass ironic pun related to its uninhibited heroine, but it can also be interpreted to represent the metaphorical box in which the male-dominated Weimar Republic sought to contain its definition of womanhood. In no way is the film intended to represent any literal translation of the Pandora myth. The association is purely an allusion.

Pabst seamlessly shifts through generational and economic shifts in Germany’s Weimar Republic in relation to Lulu’s hairstyle. Although Lulu’s hair always remains short, Lulu matures over the film’s novelistic seven-act structure via changes in her hairstyle. The film’s episodic form allows for repetitive character traits to take hold and for varying social conditions to lend an epic quality to Lulu’s not-so-romantic story.

Its themes express Pabst’s involvement in Germany’s post-expressionist New Objectivity that rejected “romantic idealism.” There is an underlying irony in the fact that it was this exact brand of capitalist aspirationalism that created the space for Hitler’s reign of German expansionism and genocide.

Pabst shows the power of the female image to disguise the model even to herself. Lulu’s fate takes on a tragic, albeit renowned quality, when she meets up with none other than Jack the Ripper. Lulu strays so far beyond social norms that even the serial killer who takes her life seems drab and dull by comparison.

Not Rated. 109 mins. 

THE KID — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

  Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Welcome!

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

In 1921 Charlie Chaplin struck out on his own as a filmmaker. He wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a movie that contained the seeds of his comedy-inspired humanitarian vision for the kind of stories he wanted to tell. He also wrote and performed the music for “The Kid.”

By this time Chaplin had thoroughly developed his iconic alter ego character, the Tramp. His mastery of mime, broad comedy, slapstick, and vaudeville shtick informed the unique physicality he put into the character.  

Every film Chaplin made after “The Kid” has some of its influence at its core. “The Kid’s” tagline announced “six reels of Joy.” It was Chaplin’s way of letting audiences know that his first full-length feature film (it runs 68 minutes) was meant to make them feel good about the society they lived in, and about their neighbors. Another clue came at the beginning of the film. A subtitle informs the audience about what they should expect to experience, “A picture with a smile, and perhaps, a tear.” 

The story for “The Kid” is not as simple as it seems. An unmarried woman with a child was widely considered a social pariah in American culture in the early half of the 20th century, especially if she was poor. However, Charlie Chaplin thought differently about such conditions. Just such a woman (played by Edna Purviance) abandons her newborn son in the back of a classy car with a note for the ostensibly wealthy owner to raise her socially doomed baby. In keystone-cop (or "Raising Arizona") fashion, the car is stolen and the thieves put the baby out on the street. Along comes Chaplin’s happy-go-lucky Tramp to rescue the boy and give him a name, John. The story jumps five years. Now, John works as the Tramp’s little criminal partner, breaking windows that Chaplin’s glass repairman is soon hired to replace.

During this time the boy’s mother becomes a successful actress. If anyone can possibly reunite the child with his mother, it must surely be Chaplin’s physically vivacious, industrious, and emotionally caring little tramp.

Chaplin discovered the child actor Jackie Coogan working in vaudeville, not long after Chaplin’s firstborn son died, just three days after he was born. As much as Chaplin might have transposed the heartbreak and affection he felt for his deceased son on the bright-eyed Jackie Coogan, his casting choice could not have been better founded in the boy’s natural talent. At just four years old, Jackie Coogan’s acting skills were light-years ahead of his age. The naturalistic chemistry that Chaplin and Coogan share is as authentic as such a thing can get. It brings a lump to your throat just seeing how instinctive and responsive their characters are to one another. Indeed, the two remained friends for the rest of their lives.    

“The Kid” is significant in cinema history because it is one of the first films to combine comedy and drama as a succinct filmic form. It is a nurturing comic movie that never gets old, regardless of how many times you watch it.  

Not Rated. 68 mins.