Curator’s note: German Expressionism

Two films in this archive belong to the strangest movement in early cinema, and one of them is the reason horror films look the way they do.

Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ) was released in 1919 into a Germany that had just lost a war. Its sets are painted rather than built — walls lean at impossible angles, windows are diamonds, shadows are brushstrokes on the floor. Nothing is upright. The film is about a man who may be mad, told in a world that looks the way madness feels.

The technique was partly a choice and partly poverty: painted canvas was cheap and electricity was scarce. Constraint produced a style, which is how style usually happens.

Its influence ran directly into American film noir twenty years later, carried by directors who left Germany in the 1930s. If you watch The Stranger after Caligari, the hard diagonal shadows are the same idea in a different accent.

Watch Caligari at night, and preferably without knowing the ending.