The Story Archive

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene · 1920 CE · Film · German · Modernist

At a fair in a north German town a showman exhibits a somnambulist who has slept twenty-three years and who will answer questions about the future; that night a student is stabbed in his bed. Three Expressionist painters brushed the shadows, leaning walls and streets that taper to nothing flat onto canvas, so the sets carry their own lighting. The founding work of German Expressionist cinema, and the origin of its whole vocabulary of warped space and doubled identity.

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