A Film Canon

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari represents the point at which cinematic irrealism transcends any mere theatrical residue, partly because it also represents the first film to be shot entirely from the perspective of a mentally deranged protagonist, extrapolating all its characters from those populating the asylum that he inhabits and, more impressively, the small town in which the action takes place from the architecture of that asylum. To this end, Wiene and his various production designers favour spaces whose parameters are both cavernous and claustrophobic, largely thanks to a studied use of diagonals and triangles, which repeatedly puncture the frame, and produce dramatic juxtapositions of tone and texture, in such a way as to transform set design itself from a theatrical to specifically cinematic technique; or, alternatively, into a cipher for directorial and cinematographic innovation, both of which would otherwise be surprisingly lacking for such a foundational text of expressionism. Similarly, Wiene construes the apex of this omnipresent triangle as a perverse bureaucracy, while imbuing everything with a pervasive artificiality that has two basic results - generally, to break down the distinction between outside and inside, ensuring that the countryside (with the critical exception of the scene in the framing device) simply partakes of the claustrophobia of the town, evoking the wastelands of the industrial revolution; specifically, to break down the distinction between animate and inanimate, drawing a common denominator between the characters and the fairground somnambulist around which the narrative hangs, just as the angulated, constricted sets draw a common denominator between their houses and his coffin. This all produces a marked development on Feuillade's pursuit of the narrative 'twist', in which it becomes an uncanny violation of viewer expectations, instead of a delightfully (if vaguely) predictable confirmation of them.