Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari film is a 71-minute running German silent terror movie, which was released during 1920. The movie was jointly produced by Rudolf Meinert, a Bohemian-born German writer, and by a German-born movie maker and executive, Erich Pommer. It was directed by a movie director of the German silent movies, Robert Wiene, and the screenplay was jointly written by Carl Mayer, a screenplay writer from Austria, and Hans Janowitz, a Bohemian-born German writer. The Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari movie is one among the most influential movies of the Expressionist movement in Germany, and it is the first true terror movie of Roger Joseph Ebert, an American movie critic, screenwriter and journalist.

The movie employed stylized sets, with theoretical, jagged structures painted on canvas backgrounds and flats. To promote this odd style, the actors employed an unrealistic method that displayed "jerky" and movements similar to a dance. This movie is quoted as having introduced the twist conclusion in cinema.

The debut of a digitally reinstated version of the movie happened at the 64th International Film Festival in Berlin during February 2014. This reinstatement had its United States premiere at the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco, "Silent Autumn" occasion of the 24th of September 2014 at the Castro Theater.

Development of the movie

Writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz first met soon after the First World War in Berlin. They considered the new movie medium as an innovative type of creative look, visual storytelling that required teamwork between painters and writers, actors, cameramen, directors. They felt that the movie was the perfect medium through which to both call notice to the budding pacifism in postwar Germany and show radical anti-bourgeois skill.

Even though neither had relations with any Berlin movie company, they determined to build up a plot. As both were eager about the works of Paul Wegener, a German writer, actor and movie director, they decided to write a horror movie. The pair drew from earlier period experiences. Janowitz experienced perturbing memories of a night in Hamburg during 1913. Subsequent to exiting a fair, he had marched into a square and glanced at a stranger while he vanished into the shadows subsequent to having mysteriously come out from the bushes. The subsequent morning, the ravaged body of a young woman was found. Mayer was still infuriated regarding his sessions during the war with a despotic, highly graded, military psychiatrist.

At night, Mayer and Janowitz habitually went to a close by fair. One evening, they saw "Man and Machine", a sideshow, in which a guy performed feats of power and forecasted the future while allegedly in a hypnotic dream. Motivated by this, Mayer and Janowitz developed their story that night and wrote it in the next six weeks. The name "Caligari" originated from a book read by Mayer, in which a bureaucrat named Caligari was stated.

When the pair approached Erich Pommer, the producer of the movie, about the tale, Pommer attempted to have them thrown from his undersized Decla-Bioscop studio. However, when they persisted on enlightening him their movie story, Pommer was so awed that he purchased it immediately, and agreed to have the movie produced in expressionistic fashion, partially as an acknowledgment to his studio only having a restricted quota of light and power.

Response of the movie

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari movie is considered by several critics to be one among the best movies ever produced and one among the best horror movies of the silent era, and holds an extremely uncommon 100% rating derived from 37 reviews. The movie had a deep influence on later moviemakers in generating the atmosphere in their movies. Critics all over the world have praised the movie for its Expressionist approach, complete with natural, deformed set design. The movie has been mentioned as an influence on movie noir, one among the earliest horror movies, and a mock-up for directors for several decades.