1920s

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

February 26th, 1920

absorbs the inherent staginess of early cinema into its own design by twisting and bending and contorting the spatiality of the frame/stage into this unearthly gothic-surrealist dream of painted shadows and jagged rooftops and oneiric dissociative waking-states echoing into each other with no clear delineation in btwn. while other german expressionist films saw the devastation of WWI seeping thru every layer of reality like a miasmic shade creeping across the splintered face of history, caligari foregoes any strict consideration of reality and delves straight into the fragmentary mind-realm of a traumatized universal consciousness stumbling and grasping wide-eyed for any scrap of meaning to help situate itself in a void of nigh eschatological devastation. falling half-asleep thru endless repetitions of atrocity in long-dead pasts and unwritten futures which are really one and the same. bodies drowsily puppeted by a howling serpentine archon stretching across time/space as it mercilessly burrows thru their synapses and jerks their aching bones along with the motions, shedding its thousand faces like skin at the turn of every epoch. absolutely deserves to be considered the first real horror film.