The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Wiene · a silent film · 1920 · about 77 minutes in the 2014 restoration · screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer
Mode
Fantastic crime film told by an unreliable narrator; horror, detective story and case history in one frame
Mythos
The master and the automaton; the mesmerist who wakes a sleeper and sends him to kill; the doctor as demon; the fair as the underworld at the edge of the town; a legend chosen and become
Phase
A season in Holstenwall, from the opening of the fair to the straitjacket, held inside one afternoon in an asylum garden
Presentation
Silent feature in black and white with tinting, about 77 minutes in the 2014 restoration, six acts; painted flats, a fixed frontal camera at tableau distance, iris openings and closings, few close-ups, few and short intertitles
Register
From officials on absurdly high stools to a knife raised over a sleeping woman; dread, farce, pathos on a hillside and irony in the last shot
Scale
One town, its fair and its asylum, two minds and a sleeper
Governing Proposition
A young man in an asylum garden tells how a showman came to his town with a sleepwalker who wakes on command and goes out at night to kill, and how the showman turned out to be the director of the asylum. The wager of the film is that a screen can show a world as a mind perceives it rather than as a camera records it, that authority licensed to heal can unmake a will, and that when the teller is found to be an inmate in a world painted like his tale, no one, the viewer included, is returned to a sane place from which to judge.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins as a confidence. Two men sit on a bench in a garden, a young man and an older one, and the young man has a story to tell. A woman in white passes them like a ghost. The young man is Francis, played by Friedrich Fehér, and the story he begins is a confidence about his own past. Everything that follows, for most of the film, is his account.
The account is of Holstenwall, a small town, and of the fair that came to it. The town is painted. Its streets lean, its windows are jagged, its roofs crowd at angles no builder would allow, and the light and shadow that should fall on its walls have been put there with a brush. There is almost no exterior shot and no natural place in the whole film. Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig designed and painted the sets, and Willy Hameister photographed them with a camera that mostly stays fixed and frontal, at the distance of a stage, opening and closing each scene with the iris.
Robert Wiene directed the film for Decla-Bioscop, with Rudolf Meinert producing and Erich Pommer at the head of the company, from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin in February 1920, silent, in black and white with tinting, its intertitles in painted lettering. It runs in six acts inside its frame, about 77 minutes in the 4K restoration of the F. W. Murnau Foundation made in 2014 from the surviving camera negative, with the tinting restored from release prints.
Movement II
A showman comes to Holstenwall for the fair: Dr. Caligari, played by Werner Krauss, hunched and cunning, his body fitted to the bent sets. He goes to the town hall for a licence to show his exhibit, and the officials who receive him sit on absurdly high stools. Soon after, the town clerk is found murdered. The fair opens with its carousel turning and its barkers calling, and death is waiting there among the shows.
Francis goes to the fair with his friend Alan, played by Hans Heinrich von Twardowski. In Caligari’s tent stands an upright box shaped like a coffin, and in it a man asleep: Cesare, the somnambulist, played by Conrad Veidt. At the doctor’s word he wakes. The camera, which keeps its distance through most of the film, comes close, and the eyes open in a face painted white and black. It is one of the great revelations of the silent screen, a dead face coming to life on command.
Caligari offers that the sleeper will answer any question. Alan asks how long he has to live. Cesare’s answer, in sense, is until dawn. In the night Alan is murdered, and the killing is shown only as shadow on a wall. The prophecy has made the friend’s death fated, and the town now has its terror: someone is killing, and a sleeper has said who will die.
Movement III
Francis suspects Caligari and goes to the police, whose station leans like everything else in Holstenwall. The investigation runs on procedure. A second man is caught with a knife at an old woman’s bed and taken for the murderer, and for a while the case seems closed. These scenes of officials and police are the film’s slackest, and they take more time than their point needs. Jane, played by Lil Dagover, whom Francis and Alan both loved, comes to the cabinet at the fair.
That night Cesare comes to Jane’s room. He stands over her bed with a knife, raises it and lowers it, and looks at her. He does not kill her. He takes her up instead and carries her out across the painted rooftops, gliding along the walls as if he were drawn on them. Veidt plays the scene with his whole body, and it is the summit of the film’s terror and of its strange beauty together.
Cesare, who has never had a will of his own, has met a desire of his own, and the instrument fails at the moment it does. On a hillside beyond the roofs he falls and dies. The sleeper who answered any question and killed on command is undone by the one thing his master did not command.
Movement IV
Francis follows Caligari out of the town to an asylum, and there he learns that the showman is the asylum’s director. The doctor who toured the fair with a murderer is the physician licensed by the state to keep the mad. In the director’s study Francis finds his records and his diary, and the film opens a second mind beside the narrator’s: the doctor’s.
The diary tells of a legend: an earlier Caligari, in the eighteenth century, who toured a somnambulist through the towns of Italy. The director read it and chose to become the man in the book. As he walks in the grounds, words are written across the screen around him, in painted letters on the world itself: “Du musst Caligari werden”
“You must become Caligari”.
The film’s central image is that sentence. Madness is shown not as a face but as letters on the surface of things, and possession as a matter of reading. The tale ends with the director in a straitjacket, his authority gone and his madness in the open.
Movement V
Then the iris opens on the garden again, and the frame closes the story. Francis has finished telling it. The garden is the courtyard of the asylum, and the people in it are inmates, each in a private posture. Cesare is among them, alive, gently holding a flower. Francis is not a visitor. He is a patient.
The director comes into the courtyard, a kindly man, and he is the man Francis has called Caligari. Francis attacks him and is himself forced into a straitjacket, as the doctor of his tale was. The courtyard he is held in leans and is painted like Holstenwall. The frame does not return the viewer to a sane world from which the tale could be judged as a madman’s; it extends the same painted law to the place where the doctor works, and so to the doctor.
The director turns toward the camera. He promises, in substance, that he can cure him. The words are reassurance and threat at once, and the film will not say which. Whether the madman saw truly or the physician cures truly is left exactly open, and the iris closes on it. A century of criticism has gone on arguing whether that frame saves authority or indicts it, and the film still holds the question.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, since the words are few. The frame is required: without it the painted world is a style, and with it the style becomes a mind. The fair is required, since it shows the doctor’s power as entertainment before it shows it as murder. Cesare’s prophecy makes Alan’s death fated and gives the town its terror. The flight over the rooftops and the death on the hillside are required: the instrument fails when it meets a desire of its own. The diary gives the doctor his motive. What gives is the middle: the second suspect runs on procedure, the police and the officials take more scenes than their point needs, and Jane’s visit to the cabinet repeats a purpose already served.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: authority in the form of a doctor, licensed by the town and the state, can turn a man into a will-less instrument of murder, and a world in which this is so is not visible as such to those inside it. The frame adds a second disclosure and unsettles the first: the narrator is an inmate, his persecutor is his physician, and the film will not say whether the madman sees truly or the physician cures truly. The image discloses as fully as the plot: a town whose every line leans is a picture of perception that cannot correct itself. What holds the axis below the gate: much of the disclosure is mood rather than meaning, and the film’s own statement is unstable by design.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The register is dread, and it rises often. Cesare’s waking in the cabinet, the eyes opening in close-up in a face painted white and black, is one of the great revelations of the silent screen. Alan’s murder is shown as shadow on a wall. Cesare at Jane’s bedside, the knife raised and lowered as he looks at her, then carrying her across the painted rooftops, is terror and strange beauty together. The words written across the frame around the walking director make madness visible as letters on the world, and the final courtyard, Cesare gently holding a flower, is cold height. Held below the top by long stretches of fixed tableau and procedure between the summits, and by some elevation of design rather than of feeling.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built and bears weight. The master and the automaton: a mesmerist who wakes a sleeper and sends him out to kill, the oldest fear of the will taken from within. The doctor as demon, his authority given by an institution that should heal. The fair as the underworld at the edge of the town, where death is exhibited as a show. The legend of an eighteenth-century Caligari who toured a somnambulist through Italian towns gives the doctor a myth he chooses to become, so that possession is a matter of reading. The particular stays particular: a clerk’s high stool, a cabinet shaped like a coffin, a hillside where the sleeper falls. Cesare has passed into common iconography. Held below the top because the figures are types more than persons, drawn in emblem.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the German studio picture of 1919: the detective serial and the fantastic film of doubles and spells, The Student of Prague (1913) and The Golem (1915), staged in built, naturalistic sets and lit for legibility. The swerve is radical: the whole world of the film painted, light and shadow put on the walls with a brush, perspective broken, the camera asked to record a picture of a mind rather than a place; and a frame that turns the tale into a madman’s account and then refuses to say whether it is false. The stake was real: a modest production in a starved industry, a style untried in cinema, sold abroad as art. Held below the top because the turn imported a movement from the stage and the canvas more than it invented one.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Shot in a real town, it would be a crime story about a showman; painted, it is a world as a mind perceives it, and every lean of a wall is knowledge of that mind. The frame is the instrument: the viewer has been inside the narrator’s perception for an hour before learning he is an inmate, and then finds the asylum courtyard painted and distorted in the same way, so that the frame extends the uncertainty to the doctor instead of returning the viewer to a sane world. The acts move from the open fair to the closed cell, the space narrowing with the knowledge. The cost: the fixed camera is partly the period’s habit, and the procedural scenes are container more than instrument.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A century of return is evidence. Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) read the film as the German soul’s submission to tyranny and the frame as a betrayal of the writers’ story; Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (1952) read its design within German Romanticism; later criticism has read it as war trauma, as a document of psychiatry and shell shock, and as a study of the spectator held under the projector’s spell, and has disputed Kracauer’s account of how the frame came to be. The questions stay open: whether the frame saves authority or indicts it, whether the narrator is mad or right, what the painted world is a picture of. Held below by clustering: the readings gather on the frame and on politics, and the designed surface gives less on return than the questions do.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1920, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the film showed that the screen could present a subjective world rather than record an objective one, and that a feature could be built on an unreliable narrator. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands in the eyes of the world as the founding work of German Expressionist cinema, and its success abroad opened foreign markets to German film; the shadow, the somnambulist and the mad doctor passed into the horror film, through Universal’s cycle of the 1930s, and the lit and slanted city into film noir. The charge: the full painted style had few direct successors and was largely abandoned, and Murnau and Lang worked in other manners.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival weighed in order. Form: the camera negative survives, with losses made good from release prints, and the 2014 restoration recovers the release version complete with its tinting; restoration is repair. Presence: continuous across a hundred and six years, in repertory, in teaching, in every history of the medium and on every home format, and in the public domain in many countries, so that it has circulated more widely than almost any silent feature, and its images are known beyond those who have seen it. The charge: for most of the century that presence was of cut, duped, untinted prints at the wrong speeds, and the silent medium narrows its living audience. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, and the damaged surface of its long presence holds it a tenth below.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The design bears weight throughout. The sets of Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig make every space a judgment, the painted shadows and jagged windows composed with the figures. Conrad Veidt’s Cesare is a performance of the whole body, gliding along walls as if drawn on them; Werner Krauss’s Caligari, hunched and cunning, is fitted to the sets. The tinting is used with purpose. What holds the axis is the command of camera and cut: Willy Hameister’s camera is fixed and frontal, the staging theatrical, the editing largely scene to scene by iris, and the film lags the best moving images of its year. Friedrich Fehér’s Francis is broad, the procedural scenes are stiff, and some intertitles carry what the image could. Sunrise, from a scenario by Carl Mayer seven years later, holds The Made at 9.1 on the command of its moving camera.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the fair, with its turning carousel and its barkers, and the asylum courtyard of the frame, with its inmates and its kindly director. One law governs both: the world is as the perceiving mind makes it, and the lines of the world lean with the mind. The officials on their absurdly high stools, the leaning walls of the police station, the rooftops, the doctor’s study and the courtyard obey the same painted physics, and the frame extends the law rather than breaking it, since the sane world is painted too. The range is wide: farce, terror, pathos on the hillside, irony in the last shot. The strain: some players, Jane above all, belong to a naturalistic picture, and the reassuring last words sit uneasily on a world made untrustworthy.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 77 minutes holds. Consciousness is held fully: the whole film is a picture of a mind, and a second mind, the doctor’s, is opened in the diary. The state and its authority are held: the town clerk, the police, the licence to exhibit, the asylum and the doctor’s institutional power. Medicine is held, as psychiatry and as experiment on a human subject. Love is present in two friends’ rivalry for Jane, friendship in Alan’s death, the crowd in the fair, history in the legend. What holds the axis lowest: the family is barely present, labour is absent, nature is absent from a painted world, the sacred is absent, and the town’s society is a few officials and a crowd. It is a nightmare’s scope, carried to the edge of what that form can hold.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.0, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A turn that made a whole feature narrative inhabit a painted world and a frame that refuses to say whether its teller is mad; a form in which every lean of a wall is knowledge of a mind and the frame carries the uncertainty to the doctor; and a reorganisation of what the screen could present, carried into the horror film, film noir and the export of German film as art.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, the state, medicine, love and friendship and the crowd are held, while the family is barely present and labour, nature and the sacred are absent from a painted world. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.0, where the second suspect, the police and the officials run on procedure; and The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.2, a disclosure that is much of it mood and unstable by design, and a making that bears weight in design and performance but not in the camera and the cut.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 falls three tenths short of it: much of what the film discloses is mood rather than meaning, and its own statement is unstable by design. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Unconcealment at 8.2 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.0, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari as released in 1920, the complete release version in six acts with its frame story, as carried by the 4K restoration of the F. W. Murnau Foundation (2014), made from the surviving camera negative with tinting restored from release prints, about 77 minutes at that restoration’s projection speed: directed by Robert Wiene for Decla-Bioscop, produced by Rudolf Meinert with Erich Pommer at the head of the company, screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, photographed by Willy Hameister, sets and painted design by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, with Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Fehér, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski and Rudolf Lettinger. Prints in circulation for decades ran from about 67 to about 75 minutes; no shorter or altered version is judged. No original score survives as part of the work, so none is judged, and the film is read as image and intertitle. No print, script or title list was consulted. Every axis is judged on the German intertitles; English renderings are the desk’s own and a reader’s aid. One intertitle is held to the word and quoted in the original with the English beneath it; Cesare’s prophecy and the director’s last words are given in substance only. Kracauer’s account of how the frame came to be is contested and is not judged; the work is judged as released. Details that could not be verified, among them the studio in which the film was shot, the dates of its making and the wording of the other intertitles, are not given.