Zwanghaften Kunst: How Caligari Ended German Expressionism

Zwanghaften Kunst: How Caligari ended German Expressionism

By Damon Griffin

War does two things for art; it begins art and it ends art. An arguable exception is the

German Expressionist movement. Expressionism was introduced in Germany as early as

1905 and continued through the First World War before exploding once again—first artistically, then commercially—after the war. It is one of the more long-lasting and diverse art movements the world has seen, encompassing painting, drawing, woodcuts, lithography, photography and sculpture. All works depicted modern urbanity or mystical rural-ness, with similar reasons for exploring both environments (Brandt). If the war effected Expressionism, at first glance one could easily think it was for the best.

But there is a third visual art form to fall under the label of Expressionism, and it is the most commercially viable of them all: Cinema. And with cinema added to the equation, the idea of Expressionism surviving in outlook and style across three decades becomes complicated. There were no Expressionist films made as early as 1905. They came about only when Germany surrendered in the First World War at the end of 1918, a broken, economically turbulent nation. The popular films that are commonly considered

“Expressionist” were mostly made in the mid-1920s; a time when some were calling

Expressionist painting exhausted if not dead (Brandt).

Yet there is one film that outstrips all the others in Expressionist terms. This film is The

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). It was the bridge between the art forms; the traditional arts of painting, drawing and etching and the new, modern art of cinema. It is the only film that might truly be considered Expressionistic in the original sense of the word. But 3 to understand how it acted as the bridge, and why expressionistic content became diluted in films and died in the other visual arts, we must understand first the original definition of Expressionism. Then we can understand the ways in which Caligari impacted movies to the extent that they co-opted a term rather than participated in an existing movement.

To begin with: Expressionistic Imagery. There is—originally, technically—no such thing.

In her essay “German Art 1905-1925: Technique as Expression” Eleanor Hight calls the movement “…more an attitude towards creativity than an actual style...” (Hight). When we consider the force and organization of that attitude, it’s a conclusion that’s hard to deny. The battle cry of that attitude began with Die Brucke (Brandt) . Formed in Dresden,

Die Brucke, plainly translated as “The Bridge,” was an organization of artists founded by

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt Rotluff and Fritz Bleyl. All four of them would go on to produce key Expressionist works. Die Brucke’s aims were lofty, generalized and, in retrospect, not very original. They meant to bring about social change by challenging existing bourgeois conventions in art. Rather than challenge these conventions in directly stated propagandistic terms these artists meant to return spirituality to art as a reaction against the oppression of industrial society (Hight). The goals were to attain spirituality by means of personalized styles rather than one set of aesthetics (Goll) . Some painters, such as Franz Marc, approached spirituality and revolution by depicting rural and fantastical imagery; others, such as Kirchner and

Conrad Felixmuller, expressed intensely different scenes of urban people—most of them common people—in black and white etchings that showed the chaos and bustle of city life. Kirchner’s woodcut Women at Potsdam Square (1914) and Felixmuller’s watercolor 4 painting Markt In Rosswein (Market in Rosswein) (1920) are two such paintings. The

Expressionist movement needed a diverse palette of styles, imagery and subject matter; it was a movement of optimism and inclusion, not one of conformity or exclusivity. It was more than an art movement; in the words of critic Ivan Goll, it was a “worldview” (Goll).

In the more precise words of the manifesto of Die Brucke, it said; “Everyone belongs to us who directly and undivergently tries to express that which drives them to create” (Die

Brucke Manifesto).

The optimism of Expressionism did not derive from nowhere. It took inspiration from the

French Fauve art movement, and from Impressionism (Hight). Several of the early artists of Die Brucke even spent time in Paris before returning to Germany to form the collective. It was a movement that prided itself on youthfulness and progressive social views. The movement itself was at first confined to Germany, though its works were exhibited in other European countries within a few years. Although Die Brucke itself would dissolve in 1913, its dissolve seemed moot; the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) collective, formed in 1911, carried on the same approach, as did the journal Der Sturm, which became the central outlet for creating a theory of Expressionism (Brandt).

But then the war came. As noted, Expressionism did survive the war. Some of its best works were painted during the war. Even still, something happened to it. Something cynical. Something cinematic.

If one looks at an artist such as Max Beckmann, perhaps the most overtly stylized painter of his time in Germany, one can see both cinema and cynicism in the foreground. By virtue of working at the same time and some similar political sensibilities, Beckmann is often lumped in with the Expressionists. But Beckmann himself was opposed to the idea of Expressionism (Hight) and most of his work is decidedly darker in tone. In a painting such as Adam and Eve (1917), Beckmann portrays the two biblical figures as rumpled, ugly and oversized people who seem revolted by one another despite being almost physically conjoined. His more famous work Die Nacht (1919) shows a gaggle of people stuffed in to a room, some physically tormenting each other, all in a state of restlessness and chaos. Beckmann’s paintings reflect a feeling of claustrophobia and alienation that the earlier Expressionists, if they had it, expressed with a positive and progressive angle.

In its inventive use of a rectangular space and its implications of complex motion, Die

Nacht looks darkly cinematic. It is the personal expression of an individual and it may also have been a reaction against bourgeois art, but its outlook feels hopeless. Is it mere coincidence, then, that this painting was completed when the war had recently ended? Is it a coincidence still that it was painted in the same year as the completion of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari should be understood as a landmark in the history of cinema for the simple reason that it was the first motion picture that felt and still feels like art. It feels like a moving version of painting, sculpture, and woodcuts: the traditional arts. The film’s production design by Hermann Warm has been duly lauded for its haunting psychological look. It is a look that undeniably does bear similarities to earlier 6

Expressionist paintings. The distorted perspectives and canted angles of the houses, lampposts and streets draw immediate comparisons to the aforementioned works Women in Potsdam Square by Kirchner and Markt In Rosswein by Felixmuller. The comparison to Market in Rosswein in particular lends an incredibly specific similarity to the film.

Many wide shots in the film show the protagonist Francis and his ill-fated friend Alan walking down the city streets, crowded above by slanted and pointy buildings. These ingredients and their arrangements are the same as the composition of Felixmuller’s painting almost to a tee.

On the other hand, the film’s chock-full compositions in the fair scenes bring to mind

Beckmann, but moreover, so does its plot. At the start, a shell-shocked Francis recounts a tale of a strange aristocratic man entering his small town during fair season with a somnambulist who predicts the townspeople’s futures. A series of killings occurs, including the killing of Alan, and the eventual kidnapping of their mutual love-interest,

Jane. It all leads to a revelation that the aristocratic man, who calls himself Dr. Caligari, is in fact an insane authority figure at a mental asylum who has taken on the persona of an ancient Italian practitioner of black magic. From that point on, the film looks like leftover sketches of Die Nacht. It is hard to deny that director Robert Wiene and his writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, were trying to convey the same cynicism, the same anguish at the unjustness of the world order, as Beckmann’s paintings and other late

“Expressionist” artworks.

All these similarities point to a visual style of Caligari that might be lumped in with late

Expressionism. But when we consider the original tenets of Expressionist Art—the revolutionary, progressive and optimistic principles—the film’s link to the movement feels less convincing. It starts to feel outright unwarranted when we consider its themes and its message.

It is commonly accepted that the message of the film’s original narrative was not simply diluted by Robert Wiene, but perverted (Roberts). The body of the film—in which

Francis, our good-natured and initially naïve protagonist encounters Caligari and eventually unmasks him as the cause of murder and mayhem in his town—comprised the entirety of the original screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Their message was that the old establishment is reactionary, insane and murderous; the young (represented by Francis) are the only ones who can bring down this establishment. But when the film premiered, something had been added to this narrative. A framing narrative begins the film, showing Francis telling the story of Dr. Caligari to another man in an unknown setting. After Caligari is locked in a cell “…for the rest of his days” as Francis tells it, we return to this framing narrative. We witness Francis and his companion leave the bench and return to the same courtyard of the mental institution shown at the end of Francis’ narrative; the institution where Caligari was a director more insane than any of his patients. Francis wanders around the courtyard and encounters the various figures from his story. Cesare, the somnambulist is there, as is Jane, his lover in his story. Dr. Caligari himself then emerges from the hospital. Francis goes ballistic. He tries convincing everybody around him that the man they see is evil. Orderlies come out to restrain him. 8

The doctor calmly looks on. Once Francis is fully restrained, the doctor approaches the young man with a sympathetic look in his eyes. He proclaims that now he realizes that

Francis believes him to be the “mythical” Caligari, and that he knows just how to treat him.

Given that the ending reveals Francis as the actual madman--an unreliable narrator--and casts doubt on the entire story we have just heard, the film has gained the reputation of being perhaps the first corrupted masterpiece in cinema. The common thinking is that it is a result of both Wiene and the studio’s prudishness. Authority could not be presented as being insane; such an idea was simply too radical, and would never be accepted by audiences (Kracauer). Some theorists have taken the tragedy of this manipulated ending to a greater extreme. The theorist Siegfried Kracauer, in his famous book From Caligari to Hitler, argued as his thesis that Caligari and other films aesthetically led to the installation of Fascism in Germany in part because of such messages. Therefore, he argues, Caligari is a “conformist” film (Kracauer). In other words, anti-expressionist.

Yet it must be argued—and has been argued—that this interpretation of the ending and of the circumstances leading to the creation of a new super-narrative and more acceptable ending, is itself simply false. Its misinterpretation first of all becomes evident by looking closely at the final imagery in the film. The final scene ends with a close-up of Dr.

Caligari’s face. Francis has been repressed and the doctor has realized the nature of his delusions. He believes the doctor to be a reincarnation of the Italian magician Caligari.

The orderlies and the subdued Francis huddle in the background; the doctor stands in the 9 foreground. He remarks that now he knows exactly how to cure Francis. The shot lingers on his strange and ambiguous face. The clear implication is that the doctor may, in fact, be up to no good. What exactly he is planning we do not know, but it looks as though

Francis, though perhaps delusional a clinical sense, is justified in his feelings about the doctor. As Ian Roberts, a theorist who takes issue with Kracauer’s interpretations, proposes, the point of the ending is to show the “…cyclical, counterrevolutionary nature of history (Roberts)” and not to show that authority is good and common insanity is poisonous. Others have made similar cases for the ending. Siegbert Prawer, a late professor of German Expressionist film studies, wrote in his introduction to a publication of the film’s original screenplay that Wiene’s added ending simply “relativizes” the anti- authoritarian message of Mayer and Janowitz’s original screenplay by showing that while authority is evil, there is unfortunately no hope in fighting it (Prawer). Seen in this light,

Caligari is entirely in keeping with the true Expressionist ideals of challenging authority and the old order and of a sympathy towards youth.

One thing that cannot be debated, however, is the film’s essential cynicism. It is a cynicism that is more in keeping with the works of Beckmann than with the original

Expressionist optimism of Die Brucke. The perception of Beckmann’s work—that it is almost-but-not-quite Expressionist—is the same perception of much of the art created around the time of Caligari. Ivan Goll decried Expressionist art as dead as early as 1921

(Goll), and 1925 is generally considered the year that it really did die. At that point, the new artistic movement was known as New Objectivity; a more overtly pessimistic reaction to society after the war. 10

As for cinema, the mid-20s were what cinephiles and critics commonly consider the peak of Expressionism in film. Lang’s Die Niebelungen and Murnau’s The Last Laugh were perhaps the two high points in filmmaking around this time; commercially and critically successful films full of shadows, dreams, fantastical superstitions and psychological angst. It is the style of these films—a predominantly visual style, and thematically a pessimistic one more in line with New Objectivity—that is referred to as German

Expressionism when we talk about film. It has little to do with original Expressionism.

For this reason, Caligari, though it comes much closer than other films of its time, is not a purely Expressionist work of art. Still, in keeping with Die Brucke, Caligari became its own bridge: a bridge between films influenced by ideals and art that came before the war, and the films influenced by both ideals that came after the war. Caligari’s bold use of close-ups—of evil faces and groping hands—were the sorts of things that added to the cinematic vocabulary, yet strayed from earlier German visual art. Its use of irises that focused in on important object and dissolved in to new scenes were widely copied cinematic techniques, but that have no Expressionist equivalents (Roberts). Both its

Expressionistic elements and its non-Expressionistic elements were carried over in to the rest of film history and as a result, pure German Expressionism was diluted until a time came when it ceased to be. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was recycled, paid homage, and revisited over and over; German Expressionism was never heard from again.

Bibliography

Note: the translation of Siegbert Prawer’s quote on page 8 is my own.

1. Brandt, Frederick R. “From Frankfurt to Richmond: The Fischer Collection.” From

German Expressionist Art edited by Frederick R. Brandt. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, January 13th-March 8th, 1987 Paintings from the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1987.

2. Hight, Eleanor M. “German Art 1905-1925: Technique as Expression.” From

3. Roberts, Ian. “Caligari Revisted: Circles, Cycles and Counterrevolution in Robert

Wiene’s Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari.” Pages 175-187 in German Life and Letters 57:2

April 2004.

4. Prawer, Siegbert (Introduction). Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (Screenplay by

Mayer, Carl; Janowitz, Hans). Stiftung Deutches Kinemathek, 1995 (Published in

German).

5. Goll, Ivan. “The Death of Expressionism.” Originally published as “Der

Expressionismus Stirbt,” in Zenit 1, 1921. English Translation: Barron, Stephanie.

German Expressionist Sculpture, p. 17 n.7, 1985.

6. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of

German Film. Princeton University Press, 1947; expanded edition, 2004.

7. Miscellaneous. Die Brucke Manifesto, Ca. 1905; quoted in translation by

Reed, Orrel P. Jr. in German Expressionist Art: The Robert Gore Rifkin

Collection (catalogue), p. 30. University of California, Los Angeles, 1977.