Halloween Video Playlist Part 2
The first time I ever saw “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, it was in a U of T, Film History class. The teacher, Joe Medchuck (who later went on to be an Executive Producer on “Ghostbusters”) saved his comments for after the screening. He repeated the standard citations about the film. That it was daring in design and revolutionary for its time but added with his typical good humour that although it was revolutionary, there are virtually no films that have been made since that look even remotely like it. He added that its style of acting is now more of an historical curiosity which the film captured rather than presented as the way of the future.
Still, it worked for me. A German Expressionist painting come to life, a serpent’s egg wherein a monstrous future could be glimpsed half formed but fully potent. Scary? Not so much where it thought is was scary but more as an image of the mood of post-World War One/ pre-Hitler Germany. Monsters are always more frightening at what they model than what they are in themselves.
While researching images of the film, I looked at what was available of online and amidst a 1919 English language version , a longer, tinted version with titles and intertitles in style of the German original, and various trailers, I came across a trailer for a 2006 remake. An odd project by David Lee Fisher, starring Judson Pearce Morgan. It’s a frame by frame remake of the original adding only spoken dialogue. A strange project and maybe not something that works for a first time viewing if you haven’t seen the original. If watching it over the internet or on DVD doesn’t appeal to you there will be a pre-Halloween screening at the TIFF/Bell Lightbox with a live soundtrack performed by Andrew Downing.
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