This is one that we had put off watching for awhile since it's silent and we are usually working while we're watching, so we put everything down and snuggled with Tam, also it was only an hour so we didn't get antsy.
It's pretty crazy that this movie was was released in 1920! ...It's a German and the whole time I was thinking "the Holocaust hasn't happened yet", other than that unpleasant thought I really loved it. Besides so many aspects of it being completely ahead of it's time I just enjoy seeing something so old, the wardrobe, the actors, wondering what their daily lives were like off set, what the conversations between takes were.
If you don't feel like reading the wikipedia article(personally i could read wikipedia all day), here are the bits that I thought were the most interesting.
It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the early times. This movie is cited as having introduced the twist ending in cinema.
Caligari introduces the main narrative using a "frame story" in which most of the plot is presented as a "flashback", as told by Francis (one of, or perhaps, the earliest example of a frame story in film).
Writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer met each other in Berlin soon after World War I. The two men considered the new film medium as a new type of artistic expression – visual storytelling that necessitated collaboration between writers and painters, cameramen, actors, directors. They felt that film was the ideal medium through which to both call attention to the emerging pacifism in postwar Germany and exhibit radical anti-bourgeois art.
If you watch it or have seen it I'd love to know how you feel about it.
2 comments:
Aw, I've seen it and LOVE it! What a great movie! I love watching old movies as well, they're so much fun. :)
I love the movie. I watched it in one of my history classes on college (psychatric history) and it amazing how often the movie is inspiring authors, comic and movie makers.
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