Johnny Deadline: Regarding CALIGARI

 by JB

Last week’s Kino-Lorber 4K release of this essential title gives me all the excuse I need to finally write about it.

I have waxed quizzical on this website and on our podcasts about the mysterious “Samsung Channels” that came with my new TV and are meant to fool the naïve into thinking that they are getting cable for free. The television defaults to these channels once it connects to the internet machine. There are hundreds if not thousands of them, and I’m assuming Samsung itself collects the advertising revenue. One channel shows episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show—and ONLY The Dick Van Dyke Show—on a continuous loop, twenty-four hours a day. Who exactly is that channel for? Dick Van Dyke himself? Last weekend I discovered, quite by chance, a channel dedicated to Portlandia. It's a continuous loop of Brownstein and Armisen, keeping my TV weird.

So it was that I was able to revisit, against my will, the show's sketch about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (Kudos to Portlandia for airing a sketch that revolves around a 100-year-old silent German film.) Fred Armisen plays a mail carrier. Carrie Brownstein plays a woman in love with her Netflix DVD-by-mail subscription. Fred insists that Carrie needs to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. She finally orders the film and it arrives in the mail. Carrie hems and haws: she's about to watch it, but there is something better on network television. She starts the movie, only to fall asleep within seconds. Finally, one night, she watches it and... loves it. SPOILER ALERT FOR A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD COMEDY SKETCH: There is a curse attached to the film! Anyone watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari BECOMES A MAIL CARRIER AGAINST THEIR WILL UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THEY ARE ABLE TO CONVINCE SOMEONE ELSE TO WATCH THE FILM.

Beware.

The Plot in Brief: Franzis (Friedrich Feher) sits on a park bench with an older man and proceeds to tell him a strange story. Franzis had a friend named Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) and they were both vying for the hand of Jane (Lil Dagover). One day a carnival comes to town and the trio happily attend. They make their way into the tent of a sideshow, where the unusual Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) and his somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), tell people’s fortunes. Alan naively asks Cesare how long he will live, and Cesare responds, “You die tonight.” From there, things only get worse.

FILM TRIVIA NOTE: Conrad Veidt, who plays Cesare, would later play Major Strasser in Warner Brothers’ Oscar-Winning Casablanca.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is justifiably famous for bringing the world of expressionist art to the cinema. The sets, the furniture, the costumes, and even some of the actors’ make-up are rendered in stark, high contrast black and white, with painted shadows appearing everywhere in a most disturbing way. This would seem like a gimmick if it were not inextricably bound to the film’s plot and themes. How the Expressionist look of the film is tied to the film’s plot is a spoiler that I will NOT divulge; suffice it to say that the film is like “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I recently purchased the new Kino-Lorber 4K disc for two reasons: I enjoy watching old silent films in 4K and feel that by purchasing them, I am encouraging more video companies to stick their toes into these particular HDR waters; and I was intrigued to hear the brand-new score contained on the Kino disc. Jeff Beal wrote this new score, which premiered at Carnegie Hall earlier this year, and he also provides a score-specific audio commentary on the disc.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I liked Beal’s commentary more than his score. I wish more silent titles on disc offered multiple scores; it really does afford the viewer the chance to watch the film again as a whole new experience. Between the new Kino disc and the previous Eureka! 4K edition, I now have five score options for viewing the film: the Eureka! release includes the 2014 score by Cornelius Schwer and a 2019 score by Uwe Dierksen & Hermann Kretzschmar; and the Kino disc has Beal's new 2024 score, a 2014 score by Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and "music” by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. That is an embarrassment of riches! For the record, my favorite of the five is the 2014 score by Cornelius Schwer. What can I say? I am old school.

AN ANNOYING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PAUSE: This film and I go way back. At the very beginning of the VHS era (Era.) most videotapes were priced for rental: they all cost more than $100 because the studios wanted to soak the video rental stores that would then rent them out multiple times. An exception to this was a series of cassettes I first found at my local K-Mart—Film Classics! These were films that had slipped into the public domain. They were a much more reasonable $10 a pop: It’s A Wonderful Life, The Birth of a Nation, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Night of the Living Dead, His Girl Friday, Metropolis... and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I bought and enjoyed them all.

When the film was first released on laserdisc, it was in a compromised presentation. According to silentera.com (Era.), “This edition’s video transfer utilized a 35mm print struck in Russia, probably from an early generation nitrate duplicate negative. However, in the silent era and from country to country, there was no worldwide standard for the position of the image’s frame in relation to the film’s perforated sprocket holes [...] Caligari was apparently shot with a camera that placed the horizontal frame line centered on two of the perforations. When the Russian print was struck, some anonymous Russian film lab technician failed to adjust the film printer to allow for the difference in frame lines. The result was a print with a visible frame line running through the image; most of the bottom part of the picture was at the top and a sliver of the top of the picture was at the bottom.” I remember buying the disc and being very disappointed by this flaw. Future pressings featured a sticker warning prospective buyers.

The new 4K does not have this framing flaw. How could it? That laserdisc fiasco was over 30 years ago. Will this be enough to make you want to watch (or rewatch) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? You tell me. (Seriously, tell me in the comments.)

Although I have seen this film about a hundred times, I wound up watching it twice this past month—once for fun and once to check out the new Kino disc, transfer, and score. That makes TWO cursed mail carriers that I have now SET FREE!