The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Ebert, Roger. “A world slanted at sharp angles,” 3 June 2009. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-1920#google_vignette

The twisted tale of a mysterious doctor and a man with a chronic sleep-walking condition hypnotized to attend to the doctor’s every sadistic whim, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is the defining film of the German Expressionist movement.

The present lot—a dramatic, black and white still depicting the hypnotized man and one of his unfortunate victims—depicts a pivotal scene from this historically significant silent film.

Dr. Caligari is canonized for its use of film form as a storytelling device—the film mobilizes light shadow, makeup, and costume to their most expressive ends, creating drama through dimension and visual conflict. The film’s surrealist take on production design only furthers this effect, with the “actors inhabit[ing] a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows” (Ebert).

Considered “the first true horror film,” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari represents a significant development in feature filmmaking, as one of the first films to depart entirely from early cinema’s loyalty to the idea of depicting reality (Ebert). The atmospheric darkness developed by director Robert Weine highly influenced later German Expressionist works such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang's seminal work, Metropolis (1927).