Weimar Cinema

An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era

Noah Isenberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231503853
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the German studio and of Weimar cinema in general. Readers can revisit the careers of such acclaimed directors as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst and examine the debuts of such international stars as Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Marlene Dietrich. Training a keen eye on Weimer cinema's unusual richness and formal innovation, this anthology is an essential guide to the revolutionary styles, genres, and aesthetics that continue to fascinate us today.

[ ONE ]

SUGGESTION, HYPNOSIS, AND CRIME

ROBERT WIENE’S THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920)

STEFAN ANDRIOPOULOS

In February 1920 posters appeared throughout Berlin, addressing city dwellers with the forceful exhortation: “You must become Caligari” [Du musst Caligari werden]. The enigmatic slogan, also printed in several newspapers, was soon revealed to be part of an innovative advertising campaign for a new film. The movie, directed by Robert Wiene, was just completing the last stages of production at the Decla company. Immediately after its release, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was acclaimed a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema; its plot, unknown to the public, centered on a showman and hypnotist who forces a somnambulist under his will, compelling the docile medium to commit several murders.

Yet on the posters and in the newspaper ads no mention was made of the film’s title, plot, or even the fact that the campaign was meant to advertise a film. Instead, only a hypnotic, vortical spiral and a note with the date and place of the opening night accompanied the mysterious command that called for each passerby to transform him- or herself into Caligari. The almost coercive imperative “You must” foregrounded and simultaneously enacted the “suggestive” or “hypnotic” power of advertising, which was still a fairly new mode of shaping social behavior. Just a few years earlier, the American psychologist Walter D. Scott had described the “influencing of human minds” as “the one function of advertising” (Scott 1917, 2).¹ According to Scott, a successful promotional campaign relied less on conveying information than on “suggestion”—a process that he contrasted to a mere proposal. For instead of appealing to rational faculties, “suggestion” was based on surreptitiously implanting an idea in a susceptible mind, without raising contrary or inhibiting thoughts. Scott asserted that “the most perfect working of suggestion is to be seen under hypnosis…. There is no possible criticism or deliberation and so we have the extreme case of susceptibility to suggestion” (Scott 1917, 82).

In this conceptualization of advertising, Scott invoked the medical theories of hypnotism and suggestion as they had been developed in the late nineteenth century by the French physician Hippolyte Bernheim. Around 1900, however, hypnosis was not merely linked to advertising; indeed, structural affinities also connected hypnotism with the newly emerging medium of cinema. Accordingly, numerous films such as George Méliès’s Le magnétiseur (1897), Maurice Tourneur’s Trilby (1915), Louis Feuillade’s Les yeux qui fascinent (1916), Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Arthur Robison’s Shadows: A Nocturnal Hallucination (1922), or Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926) enacted the ostensibly unlimited power of the hypnotist on the movie screen. At the same time, early theories of film described the new medium itself as exerting an irresistible, hypnotic influence on its spellbound audiences. In tandem with Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Walter D. Scott’s Psychology of Advertising, many early-twentieth-century representations of cinema thus appropriated Bernheim’s scientific notions of suggestion and hypnosis, notions that had been introduced to a German readership by medical researchers such as Sigmund Freud, Albert Moll, and August Forel.

Bernheim, who was the leading figure of the so-called Nancy School, had affirmed that not only hysterics but potentially everybody was subject to hypnosis. Whereas the neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Georges Gilles de la Tourette regarded hypnosis as a pathological disease of the nervous system, Bernheim conceived of it as a natural state akin to sleep. In a circular equation of hypnosis and suggestion, he wrote: “I define hypnotism as inducing a specific psychic condition of increased suggestibility…. It is suggestion that generates hypnosis” (Bernheim 1888/1964, 22/15*).² The emerging “rapport” between the hypnotist and the hypnotized subject was alleged to constitute a relationship of unlimited power on the hypnotist’s part. As Bernheim and numerous other physicians affirmed, the hypnotized subject functioned as a sort of medium who could even be compelled to commit crimes against his or her own will. Similar to the plot of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the medical theories of the École de Nancy raised the “terrifying specter of hypnotic crime” (Schrenck-Notzing 1900, 12).

Since there were no unequivocally verified cases of crimes committed under hypnosis, many medical researchers staged simulated hypnotic crimes in order to prove their possibility. August Forel, who taught in Switzerland, described one such experiment:

To an older man of good suggestibility, whom I had just hypnotized, I gave a revolver that Mr. Höfelt himself had previously loaded with blanks only. Pointing to H., I explained to the hypnotized that the latter was a thoroughly evil person and that he should shoot him dead. With utter determination he took the revolver and fired a shot directly at Mr. H. Mr. H., simulating an injured person, fell to the floor. Then I explained to the hypnotized man that the fellow was not quite dead yet and that he should shoot him again, which he did without hesitation. (Forel 1895, 198–99)

In addition to Forel, the physicians Bernheim, Bérillon, Beaunis, Crocq, Schrenck-Notzing, and the young Arthur Schnitzler staged similar “performances” (Vorstellungen) (Schnitzler 1920, 313)—all of this for the ostensibly scientific purpose of proving to their largely judicial audiences that hypnotic crimes were indeed feasible.

One particular fear concerned the possibility of implanting in a hypnotized person the order to commit a criminal action, long after waking from the hypnotic trance. Forel accordingly warned of “posthypnotic suggestions” in which, in addition to a crime and the time set for its execution, the idea of “free volition” was implanted in the hypnotized subject, causing the medium committing the crime to believe in his or her own free will. As Forel put it: “One of the most insidious ruses of suggestion, however, lies in the use of timing [Termineingebung] along with implanting amnesia and the idea of free volition in order to prompt a person … to perform a criminal act. That person then finds himself in a situation that is bound to create in him every illusion of spontaneity while in reality he is only following the command of someone else” (Forel 1889, 184). The belief in perfectly camouflaged suggestions thus produced the powerful paranoia that there might be an unlimited number of unknown hypnotic crimes that could not be recognized as such.

After the turn of the century, scientific interest in hypnosis was initially superseded by the emergence of psychoanalysis and a renewed concentration on physiology within medical research. But in the treatment of war neuroses and shell shock during World War I, hypnosis and suggestion had an unexpected resurgence. August Forel’s and Albert Moll’s medical treatises about hypnotism, first published in the 1880s, thus went through numerous new editions between 1918 and 1924.³ Simultaneously, the extraordinarily successful late-nineteenth-century literary tales of hypnotic crime found an equally popular sequel within the postwar literature of the fantastic, in texts such as Gustav Meyrink’s The White Dominican (1921), Cätty Bachem-Tonger’s Under the Spell of Hypnosis (1922), Otto Soyka’s The Smith of Souls (1921), or Hans Dominik’s The Power of the Three (1922).

Although neglected by most historiographies of Weimar cinema, the intense medical debate about the possibility of hypnotic crimes was also constitutive for Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which opened on February 26, 1920, at the Marmorhaus in Berlin. The first frame of the film shows, in a medium shot, two men with parched white faces, sitting on a bench. As if referring to his own status as a ghostly phantom on the cinematic screen, the older man says to the younger (Francis): “There are ghosts [Geister]—They are all around us.” A woman dressed in white appears, gliding past the two men in a somnambulist trance. Referring to the almost spectral apparition, Francis calls her his “bride,” continuing: “What I have experienced with her is much stranger still than what you have experienced—Let me tell you about it.” And the camera cuts to a film set built of papier-mâché, representing a small town with narrow, winding streets.

From the very beginning the film emphasizes that the moving images on the cinematic screen are a simulation akin to a “phantom” or a “vision” (Mann 1924, 336, 335). Furthermore, the internal plot is marked as the (unreliable) narration of Francis, who is at the same time one of the protagonists of his own story. The pronounced artificiality of the set, in which both frame and internal story unfold, undercuts realist conventions. Painted shadows, dagger-shaped windows, a pale sky against which bare trees stand out in bizarre shapes—these visual markers of instability create a cinematic space of paranoia and distrust. In critical responses to the film, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was therefore instantly hailed as a powerful cinematic instantiation of expressionism (Anon. 1920; Flüggen 1920). “Le caligarisme,” as the visual style of the film was called in France, thus left an imprint on film history, above all in its representation of magnified shadows, which reappeared in Murnau’s Nosferatu and American film noir (especially powerful in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the silhouette of a murderer who stabs his panicking victim with a dagger). But while the film certainly undertakes borrowings from expressionist art, recent scholarship has shown that the designers of the film set, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig, had no direct relation to the avant-garde journal Der Sturm, as Siegfried Kracauer had claimed in his influential interpretation of the film (Kasten 1990, 43–44; Kracauer 1947, 68). Instead, the eclectic mise-en-scène of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari amalgamated high art and mass culture, thereby appealing to a broad audience and ensuring the commercial success of the movie (Elsaesser 2000, 36–51). In addition, the strangely distorted spaces of the film set appear as a materialization of the visual hallucinations that Bernheim generated by means of verbal suggestion in his hypnotized patients, “populating” their “imagination” with “phantoms and chimeras” (Bernheim 1891/1980, 50/37*).

In a further reference to its own status as a spectacle, the film introduces the showman, Caligari, who exhibits a clairvoyant somnambulist at the fairground in the small town of Holstenwall. Aside from freak shows and cabinets displaying somnambulists, the fairground was also the site of the early “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 1990), which often toured in a tent from town to town. According to Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), one of the earliest texts on cinema that was written by a German-born psychologist who then taught at Harvard University, these circuslike performances centered on the “perfection” of the cinematic “apparatus,” thus capturing the “attention” of the “spellbound” audience (Münsterberg 1916, 57, 152).

The film shows Caligari at the fairground, advertising the exhibition of his somnambulist medium by assuring the crowd before his little tent: “Before your eyes, Cesare will rise from the rigor of death.” Displaying the somnambulist inside his “cabinet” to the audience, Caligari transposes Cesare from the state of “lethargy,” in which hypnotized persons present “the appearance of a corpse before the onset of rigor mortis” (Tourette 1887, 91), into the state of somnambulism. As if quoting from Tourette’s description of this third stage of “grand hypnotism,” the sleeper is represented as “a true automaton …, obeying all expressions of his magnetizer’s will” (Tourette 1887, 96). In a close-up, the camera shows the somnambulist’s face as he slowly opens his eyes, which are heavily accentuated by makeup (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). The representation of Cesare’s awakening thereby corresponds to Charcot’s medical nosography of “grand hypnotism,” which emphasizes the sleepwalker’s open eyes, in artificial as well as in spontaneous somnambulism.

The film cuts to a medium shot, showing Cesare’s complete body as he begins to move his arms and legs. The androgynous medium slowly steps forward, like a puppet that is held by invisible strings. His peculiar motions recall Haller’s “automatonlike” (Lindau 1893, 58) walk in Max Mack’s The Other (1913), the first film adaptation of a drama by Paul Lindau, which represented a district attorney who, in a state of somnambulism, commits crimes that he would abhor while awake. The original screenplay for Wiene’s Caligari describes Cesare’s movements: “Caesare [sic] stands motionless for several more seconds. Under the piercing gaze of Calligaris [sic], who stands next to him, something like a shudder quite subtly and remotely shows on his face! … His arms, pressed to his body, rise forward, as if automatically, in small, distinct intervals, as though they wanted to catch hold of something” (Mayer and Janowitz 1919, 65). Under Caligari’s suggestive influence, Francis’s friend Alan, who “concentrates, as if spellbound, on Caesare’s [sic] awakening” (Mayer and Janowitz 1919, 65), poses the question of how much longer he has to live. “Till dawn,” pronounces the clairvoyant medium.

A chain of mysterious crimes ensues, perpetrated not by the original suspect but by Caligari’s somnambulist medium, Cesare. Francis pursues the fleeing showman to an insane asylum, discovering with dismay that Caligari and the director of the institution are one and the same. While Dr. Caligari sleeps (his repose shown from a strangely disorienting high-angle shot), Francis and three physicians from the mental asylum search the director’s office. In a cabinet they find a book on his “special field of study.” The title page is shown on the screen: “Somnambulism: A Compendium Edited by the University of Uppsala. Published A.D. 1726.” Francis skims through the volume and comes across the following story, which is displayed on title cards:

FIGURES 1.1 AND 1.2 Transition from lethargy to somnambulism: Cesare’s widely opened eyes correspond to Charcot’s medical nosography of “grand hypnotism.” (Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

In the year 1703, a mystic by the name of Dr. Caligari along with a somnambulist called Cesare appeared at various country fairs in the small towns of Northern Italy. For months, he wreaked panic in one town after the other, by means of murders that were always perpetrated under the same circumstances—for he compelled a somnambulist, whom he had completely forced under his will, to carry out his monstrous designs. By means of a puppet figure, modeled in the exact likeness of Cesare, which he laid in the chest when Cesare was away, Dr. Caligari was able to disperse any suspicion which fell on the somnambulist.

As in Max Mack’s film The Other, medical evidence supporting the possibility of hypnotic crimes is introduced in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by means of a scientific book, which is read by o...