Madness and Authority in "The Office of Doctor Caligari "
Nildo Viana
The film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari , Robert Wiene (Germany, 1919), is a silent film that has obtained diverse interpretations differentiated. This will be the oldest and first film that we will perform written exposure of critical assistance. To do so, we will put the items we present in the critical assistance procedures and present them in written form. The same procedure will be followed in the following cases.
A) Contextualization:
The film The Office of Doctor Caligari is a work of German silent film of 1919. Germany, in this period, went through several social conflicts. After the defeat in World War I, many soldiers returned to their country and a revolutionary tendency took control of Germany, with the call "Revolution of November of 1918" and formation of the workers' councils and soldiers and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Poverty and unemployment have risen dramatically, as well as inflation and other social problems. This, allied with the defeat in the war and the aftermathsderived from it, produced a huge growth of popular discontent. The emergence of workers' councils took place in 1918 and they were integrated into German society, many of which were corrupted or hegemonized by social democracy and in some cities and regions they remained strong and created republics or councils in this direction.
The Weimar Republic led to social democracy the government, together with the Social Democratic Independent and the left opposition represented by the League Spartacus, dissident tendency of social democracy, the main leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebneckt, who were murdered in February 1919. New attempts at proletarian revolutions occurred during 1919 until 1921, and social struggles continued strong until 1923.
In the artistic sphere, expressionism that had emerged before the First World War, and took a critical stance towards bourgeois society, becomes politicized and radicalized even more, as it occurred mainly in the theater, but also in poetry and other forms of art . Expressionism was the main German artistic movement of the early 1920s. Various expressionist groups emerged after 1918, such as the November Group (reference to the Revolution of November 1918), The Council of Artists (inspired by the workers' councils) and the Red Group . Expressionism was a critique of capitalist society and social conventions and formalism, as well as expressing the desire to achieve social revolution.
B) Preliminary Information:
The film was produced from the idea developed by the writers Hans Janowitz and Karl Mayer (also spelled as Carl), and the latter will be one of the main writers of the German film expressionism time accounting for other important works such as Tartuffe, (Friedrich Murnau ,Germany, 1925). The chosen director was Fritz Lang, who, however, due to the production of another film did not take the project forward and the director ended up being Robert Wiene . It is even common to see statements that he would have participated in the script, which is not true of the original script and what was actually filmed, it only contributed by suggesting an early scene to introduce the film but not its content (Robinson, 2000).
One important information is that the original screenplay was changed in the filming process by director Robert Wiene [1] , which will even provoke a process on the film by the writers. The opening scene and the final scene of the film, which create a frame and a kind of film within the film, did not exist in the opening script and reverses the message the writers wanted to pass, as we will show later.
C) Movie Plot Identification:
The plot of the film involves the question of madness and authority. The narrator of the film - The character Francis - shows that Doctor Caligari is a madman who is both a psychiatrist and uses psychiatric knowledge to achieve his goals. However, at the end of the film, it is evident from the frame of the initial and final scene that the true madman is the narrator. In director Wiene's version , as the film was actually produced, the Caligari story is just the invention of a madman. Of course, in the writers' version, Caligari would be the madman and representative of authority, of psychiatry, of the German government. In the writers' version, madness and authority identify themselves, whereas in the director's version, they are opposite things. However, since the film was "framed" by Wiene , and that is the version that has come down to us, then the correct interpretation of the plot of the film is the question of madness and who is the madman in history.
D) Situation Identification Problem and Central Message.
The problem situation is, initially, the crimes of the madman called Caligari , who, in the end, is discovered to be a psychiatrist. However, there is the final scene of the hospice movie showing that the narrator is the one who is crazy, so the problem situation happens to be the madness of the narrator and his inventions. The central message of the movie is the dangers of madness and the need for sanity, psychiatry, to understand and help the crazy. The truth is on the side of authority and on the side of the mad is insanity, delusions. The narrative, the longest part of the film, is a mere hallucination that is later recognized as such at the end of the film.
E) Identification of the resolution (or non-resolution) of the problem situation:
The resolution of the problematic solution is revealed in the final scene, in which the psychiatrist and the context show that the narrator is crazy and, therefore, that all history is his invention. Thus, due to the simplification made by the director, the film itself lost its strength. The history of criticism of authority has turned into a story of a madman and the truth that was on the side of contestation comes to be on the side of authority and order.
F) Relationship of the Fictional Universe and Social Relations:
Apparently such a film has no relation to social reality. It would only reveal the delusions of a disturbed mind. Undoubtedly, in the writers' version the film was a metaphor of German society, but in the director's sugary version, the film became a work that shows the delusions of a madman. Of course, the social process of production of the film shows the dispute in the production team and the victory of the director's version, which was also in accordance with the dominant interests and the financiers of production. This version is the one that arrives for the assistants and it is based on her that one can relate fictional universe and social universe.
The fictional universe shows a story that unfolds from a narration. The film begins with two characters sitting on a bench with one of them finishing a story and Francis - the narrator of the film - beginning another narration. The narrator recounts how he and his friend, Alan, learned of the arrival in his town of Holstenwall of an itinerant fair whose greatest attraction was Doctor Caligari , who showed the somnambulist Cesare , who would have the power to guess the future. Since the arrival of Cesare , mysterious deaths have occurred, including that of the friend of the narrator, who had asked Cesare what day he would die and he said it would be that night, which actually happened. Then the somnambulist kidnaps Jane, a woman coveted by the two friends, but ends up dying. Francis sought the police to denounce Caligari , but he had no evidence.
He sets off for evidence and, after some failures, manages to get to the hospice where Caligari would have entered. There he and the other psychiatrists were able to discover that the director of the hospice had a book on sleepwalking and, through his notes, that he had been hospitalized for a sleepwalker, just as he planned to use it in his experiments, medieval mystic called Caligari . Caligari is hospitalized after this.
In the final scene, the narrator reappears sitting on a bench and continuing his narrative until other characters appear and thus reveals the atmosphere of the conversation: a hospice and all the characters (Alan, Jane, Cesare , etc.) are present and are interns. Until the director appears and Francis attacks him saying that he is, in fact, Doctor Caligari . After being safe and controlled, the director says he finally discovered the evil that plagued him, which was to confuse him with the medieval mystic Caligari , and who would also have discovered the cure.
In this sense, the main characters of the film place an opposition: the normal narrator and the crazy psychiatrist who reveals himself, at the end of the film, being another: the crazy narrator and the normal psychiatrist. This opposition between madness and normality reveals a certain conception of science and authority. The values objectified in the film are authority and science (or, more specifically, psychiatry) and the depreciation is madness, the irrational. Behind this the film reveals an ideology that is objectified in it: the conception that madness and the irrational are maleficent and that science and authority are beneficial and that madness is accompanied by hallucinations and science by truth. Common sense, rationality, order, security, which has as its preconditions authority and science, are defended. The rest is pure madness, hallucination. In this sense, the values and conceptions presented in the film are conservative and reflect certain class interests, in contradiction with the original version of the writers.
The social consequences of the film are evident: conformism and respect for authority, however much it may be suspicious of it or the insane to denounce it. This is all the more evident if we recall the historical context in which the film was produced and watched: in the troubled years of attempted proletarian revolutions in Germany, the quest for the proletariat to overthrow authority, government, capitalism through workers' councils and of the Republics of Councils created in certain regions and of the struggles and attempts in others. Therefore, the social consequence of the film is to contribute to the stagnation of the social transformation, being, therefore, a conservative film [2] .
G) Reflection after Assistance:
Once the assistance is finished, the assistant can reflect on the film with more time and depth. It is important to highlight the formal aspects of the film, since the scenarios were produced by expressionist plastic artists, although there is controversy over who was the idea , whether of the writers or not, being that they show a deformed vision of the objects, being an expression of the vision of a crazy. This served for many to characterize the film as expressionist and to delimit whether or not a film was made in the molds of expressionism. However, expressionism is not a formalism, but rather an anti- formalism and this interpretation does not hold (Viana, 2009a). In any case, the film has formal merits and expresses expressionism formally, relating the madman and his distorted perception of reality.
Thus, the Office of Doctor Caligari is an expressionist film in a rather ambiguous way. The Expressionist aspect comes from writers and their original intention, the scenarios, the formal aspects [3] but does not possess a fundamental aspect of this artistic movement, the critical character. Thus, the film opposes madness and authority and in this opposition reveals his preference for authority. This process reinforces the power relations established at the time and this dated conservatism transcends its time, valid for the present day, since the current situation is not much different.
H) Evaluation.
Doctor Caligari 's Cabinet is a movie fraught with contradictions. There are two stories, one inside the other, and this enables certain assistants to misinterpret the film, assigning it a critical character. The positive aspects of the film are the part of Francis's narrative about Caligari and the innovative and well-structured formal aspects. The fictional universe can also be seen as the manifestation of the dominant's perspective on the perspective of the dominated. In this sense, the film has as merit the formal aspect and historically fulfilled the role of making room for other similar experiences and for strengthening expressionism, although it was only partially Expressionist.
The negative aspect of the film is precisely the frame made by Wiene , revealing that this director did not share the same perspective as expressionism. From Expressionist art he only took advantage of his capacity and formal wealth. In this way, the film, despite the contradictions and the conservative frame that it received, is an important work with a certain quality, which is due to the writers (who allowed the existence of the contradiction in the film and the critical narrative that was the totality and transformed into a part and for his participation in the production of the scene), expressionist painters and their formal collaboration, to the actors (Werner Krauss , Conrad Veidt , etc.).
A good film, although nothing spectacular and having problems and well below the great majority of other expressionist films, despite the attempt of many to try to make it the model film of expressionism. No doubt, if the director had been Fritz Lang, certainly the film would have been different and with better quality. In any case, it is a work that has historical importance in the development of cinema and, despite the negative points, opens important questions to think about modern society.
No doubt, for those who come from critical assistance, it is a good example of how a defiant cultural production can be disfigured and how a class perspective (the writers' perspective) can be recovered and deformed by another perspective (the director's) transforming it into conformist cultural production. The screenwriters started from the perspective of Francis and the director of Caligari's perspective . In this sense, the transformation is understandable and the film can be seen as the dominant narrative about a critical discourse of authority.
(Excerpt from the book: VIANA, Nildo, How to Watch a Movie, Rio de Janeiro: Corifeu, 2009).
[1] This information is available in some books on film history, as well as in more detail in Kracauer (1988) and especially Robinson (2000). It is also possible to get some preliminary information on the Internet, but with due care and caution in this case, as many misleading and false information is displayed on blogs and other sites. For example, there are several websites that claim that the film was "written" by director Wiene or based on his work, which is absolutely untrue and that it is an invention that does not know where he left off, since this director was never screenwriter and / or writer. It is also common to see the claim that it is a horror film, which is completely false (Viana, 2009 a), although this misinterpretation is based on the writings of Kracauer and Eisner , who created a certain consensus in everyday representations about this. Therefore, information acquired via the Internet should be analyzed critically and the source should be verified.
[2] Obviously, this is a correct interpretation, that is, of what the film actually passed on to the assistants. This, however, can be subverted by projective or assimilative assistance, transforming what is conservative into something contentious. Robinson (2000) states that the outcome of the film is not as clear as Janowitz , one of the writers, andKracauer (1988) put it, because at the time dominated skepticism about authority and the public would not readily accept such a version, understand that the end expresses that Caligari , with his cleverness, managed to deceive to all and to imprison Francis like crazy. This type of interpretation, of course, does not stand up to an analysis of the film and what it reveals, deep down, is not what the outcome of the film presents, but what the audience wants (or might want) to see, can perceive the film. In this way, Robinson confuses the outcome and his character with what the public could interpret, arbitrarily.
[3] Formal aspects are products of the expression of the character who is crazy and therefore sees things in a distorted way and therefore it does not make sense to seek to demand such forms in other expressionist films, because each one expresses something different.
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