Dr. Caligaris Cabinet

I lent a strange film at the library. Dr. Caligaris Cabinet, age border: 15 years. Instructor: Robert Wiese, photographer: Willy Hameister, manus: Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. It was made in 1919 in Germany, black and white, a silent movie, re-published by BASIC MEDIA LTD. It was like being transported into another time.
The plot: A young man sits and chats with an older man. The young man tells him a strange story: A tent owner in a traveling fun fair displays a sleeping man, Cesare, who can foresee the future, and does everything the owner, Dr. Caligari, tells him to. The doctor takes a dislike to a man, and he is found murdered the next day. More murders happens, and Dr. Caligari is suspected of using the sleepwalker to do the dark deeds. Then the story gets weird, or weirder. Dr. Caligari is the director for a mental hospital, and the young man is his patient. The whole story is a hallucination. 1919! A fifteen-year old child wouldn´t have battened an eyelid seeing this. Well, maybe he would, over the dramatic gestures and pathos the actors were using. And the heavy make-up. And the props.
This story has something, though. First, it is refreshing to watch something so different from modern films. I fell straightaway for the way they had made the background: theatrical drawings, tilted, askew, the fun fair merely some tents in front of a image of a huddled city on a hill. And Dr. Caligari as a small, old man, no grandeur at all, creepy and suspicious. To see Dr. Caligari as a director in a position of power afterwards, was directly unsettling. You got a glimpse of the fear and paranoia the young man felt in the story.