Canonically Weird (The List)

366. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920)

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Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

“Isn’t it true—it’s the Director who’s insane!”–The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Friedrich Feher, , Lil Dagover

PLOT: A young man, Francis, sits on a bench in the garden of an insane asylum; when a woman walks by in a trance, he explains to a bystander that she is his fiancée, and launches into the strange story of how she ended up here. He tells the tale of how a mesmerist, Dr. Caligari, came to his town with a sideshow, exhibiting a “somnambulist” who predicted the deaths of citizens who were later found murdered. After his best friend and romantic rival turns up among the victims, Francis launches his own investigation into Caligari, tracking him to the insane asylum where he discovers that the doctor, under a different name, is actually the director of the facility…

Still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

BACKGROUND:

  •  The script was co-written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, two pacifists. Mayer had feigned madness to escape military service during World War I. Despite signing a contract allowing the producer to make whatever changes he deemed necessary, they strenuously objected to the addition (or the alteration; accounts differ) of the framing story.
  • discovered the script and was originally supposed to direct, until scheduling conflicts prevented his participation.
  • The early days of cinema were highly nationalistic. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was initially banned in France; not because of its content, but because it was German, and French distributors did not think they should have to face competition from a country they had just defeated in a war. But Caligari made such a sensation when film critic Louis Delluc arranged for it to be screened for charity that the French removed their ban on German pictures. The French even took to calling Expressionism “Caligarisme.” Caligari‘s release was also protested in the U.S. solely on the basis that it was a German production.
  • In screenings in the United States, Caligari was sometimes presented with a live theatrical epilogue explaining that the characters had fully recovered from their madness.
  • Among its many honors: ranked 235 in Sight & Sound’s critics’ poll of the greatest movies of all time; listed in Steven Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s no really a single frame of Caligari that stands out; it’s the cumulative effect of its Cubist settings, the spiky windows and dark alleys winding at weird angles, that gets under your skin.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Slanted city; greasepaint somnambulist; you must become Caligari

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s arguably: the first classic horror movie. The first classic Expressionist movie. Cinema’s first twist ending. The first movie shot from a perspective of radical subjectivity. The godfather of Surrealist film. And it still creeps you out today. It’s the first weird movie. Caligari‘s blood still flows through everything we love.


Blu-ray trailer for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

COMMENTS: The entire plot of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari could be thoroughly summarized in one medium-sized paragraph. There is little Continue reading 366. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920) →

Miscellanea

FROM 366 TO INFINITY: WHAT’S NEXT

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I’d like a vacation.

For ten years now, I’ve tried to make sure that there’s been content on 366 Weird Movies every day. Even if someone else wrote it, I still had to format it, edit it, and introduce the embarrassing tpyos you’ve come to expect as part of the 366 Weird Movies experience. This means that I’ve usually done some work on the site every day for the past ten years, even if it was only an hour’s worth of editing. I have generally been able to take Thanksgivings and Christmases off, and work half-days or just a few hours on Christmas Eve. But I haven’t taken three consecutive days off in ten years.

I’d like a vacation. Even a three day one.

To answer the question everyone’s been asking for years now—yes, we’re going to keep going past #366. But you can expect a bit less content here in the coming year(s). With the 366 milestone achieved as of tomorrow, we’re going to be focusing more on new releases… but since older movies are always being re-released on home video, there will be a good sprinkling of vintage titles, too. And every now and then we’ll get a hankering to decrease that ridiculously-long reader-suggested review queue by one more title (although I expect it will continue to fill up faster than we can empty it, as long as we keep that suggestion page open).

This is a milestone, not a farewell, so I’m not going to get sentimental, except for a bit of personal revelation at the end. For one thing, I don’t have the time. I still have a review to write, then I have screeners I’ve committed to review, and then Sundance/Slamdance is upon us before you know it… I refer you to Alfred Eaker‘s fine not-farewell post, Reflecting on a Decade of 366 Weird Movies, for the sentimental stuff.

I echo his sentiments about every contributor listed in the sidebar, even the ones who got mad at me and stopped contributing because I said something silly or thoughtless. I’d like to thank each of you personally… although, let’s face it, that’s probably not going to happen. So all of you can fill in the blanks for yourselves: thank you, _____ _____, for your ____ contributions to 366 Weird Movies! Your writing was ____! _______ was my favorite; no one else would have come up with ______.

For readers, here’s what you can expect in a post-366 world in terms of recurring features:

  • As previously announced, Alfred Eaker’s Fringe Cinema will now appear irregularly.
  • “Weird Horizon” will continue indefinitely on Fridays.
  • Cameron Jorgensen has agreed to continue curating Saturday Shorts for the foreseeable future.
  • Sunday’s “What’s in the Pipeline” will disappear as a separate column, but we’ll announce upcoming reviews as part of “Weird Horizon” instead.
  • Reviews will be published whenever they are submitted by our contributors. I personally plan to scale back to one capsule review a week, with the occasional longer article. We’ll see if I can restrain myself.
  • We plan to continue publishing print and digital copies of the Yearbook annually, although we reserve the right to tinker with the format.

And here are some new projects we may or may not be taking on, in Continue reading FROM 366 TO INFINITY: WHAT’S NEXT →

Miscellanea, Top 10 Lists

WHERE’S THE WEIRDNESS?, PART 2: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES NOT (YET) ON HOME VIDEO

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Here’s a (long-awaited?) update on a list we first published in 2011, back when DVD was the king of vintage movie viewing. (At the time we published it, it was our most commented-on post, and actually contributed to this site’s growth). Now, in the Netflix binge age, changes in the movie market have made DVDs, and even their HD successor, the Blu-ray, less significant—although we don’t think they’ve yet fallen in status to “quaint.” Any movie most people can think of—Captain America: Civil War, Pulp Fiction, Casablanca—-can be bought on DVD; unavailability, or even restricted availability, in that format is a clear indicator of obscurity.

We prefer promote films that are readily available either on physical media, or at least on legitimate streaming platforms, to the List, and hold off on those that don’t have a release. There are a couple of exceptions where we’ve added films that are still to this day only available on used VHS copies (Toto the Hero and Marquis being prominent examples). In the early days of the site, there were a couple of times (The Reflecting Skin comes to mind) when we wrote a movie up, only to find a lavish physical disc released a few months or years later. Although there are some advantages to being an early champion of an unavailable film—like the satisfaction of receiving a pat on the back when it finally gets released (again, The Reflecting Skin) —we’d still rather spend a List spot on a movie people can easily find and own. It’s easier to review and select a List entry from the vast pool of movies we can actually buy, rent or stream. And holding off allowed us to add surprises like Belladonna of Sadness, the nearly-lost 1973 psychedelic Japanese rape-revenge witchcraft anime, to the List the minute they become available.

For that reason, we held off on a reviewing and/or approving a handful of movies that almost certainly could have ranked alongside their listed brethren, had they had a release. It’s not a 100% thing, but being able to be purchased is definitely an advantage for a weird film, in our minds. When you’re dealing with the very last items on a large list, and you’ve already selected the can’t-miss titles, that small advantage can make a difference to a movie making our final cut or not.

Yeah, we know: today, everything is available on the Internet. You can probably find all of these “unavailable” titles in digital format with the help of Google and the willingness to accept the risk of downloading a virus from a shady pirate website. Our preference for legitimate releases is legitimately old-fashioned, but we’re not ashamed of it. We like prints that have been restored to reflect the director’s original vision, extra features that expand our understanding of the film, permanent ownership of a real physical object we can actually touch, and the idea of money going into the pockets of the people who made the film and/or assembled the product. Sue us.

Just to show that all hope is not lost, five titles—Arrebato (1980), Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968), Eden and After (1970), Death Laid an Egg [La morte ha fatto l’uovo] (1968), and Kin-Dza-Dza (1986)—showed up either on DVD or on streaming platforms since we wrote the first list way back in 2011. Four of those went straight to Certified Weird (the other one we have yet to see). We have tracked down five new obscuro titles to take their place.

These ten movies are all “honorable mentions” of a particular kind. Any of them could have made the List, but for the vicissitudes of distribution. And who knows: maybe the Criterion Collection will add Continue reading WHERE’S THE WEIRDNESS?, PART 2: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES NOT (YET) ON HOME VIDEO →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

REFLECTING ON A DECADE OF 366 WEIRD MOVIES

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I had somehow stumbled on a film forum in 2009, and I don’t even recall the name of it. Reading through it, I saw a post about and the poster was asking … something, I don’t remember, but it was something I knew the answer to and offered it. A discussion snowballed and, as I was jabbering about Greed, bitching because it had never been released on DVD (it still hasn’t), another user piped in. I don’t even remember the user name he was using; only that he had from Night of the Hunter as his avatar. Over the next couple of days, Mr. Mitchum and I bandied back and forth about a number of topics, including , , , etc. In the course of the convo, I believe I mentioned that I used to write essays on films for an art gallery magazine called “The Fringe,” had taken countless classes on film aesthetics, and dabbled in surreal indie films. Mr. Mitchum asked to see samples of my writing and I believe we exchanged emails, and… his name wasn’t Mr. Mitchum after all. It was Greg Smalley. He told me that he was starting an e-zine called 366 Weird Movies and he needed another writer, as he was the only one, and asked me to join him. I agreed, thinking it’d be fun, but on one condition: I didn’t want to get pegged into writing only about weird movies because my experience has been that, no matter what topic is chosen, once it’s named people start mantling a fundamentalist attitude to it. In other words, I wanted to remain stubbornly iconoclastic. Agreement made, I started with a reevaluation on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and my Fringe Cinema subcategory was born.

Alfred EakerMy writing echoes my paintings. I go through many phases and I do not like to look back at old work, only being interested in what I’m working on currently. Greg plugged away at his List Entries, secured other writers, and it was years before I even submitted an official List entry myself. I was merely doing my own thing, week after week, and suddenly, years had gone by. Coming up for air, I often found that many movies I wanted to write about, Greg (or others) had already covered, goddammit. (Most of the reviews I had indeed read, but forgotten).

Still, it’s been a helluva decade with Greg, and I not only loved writing, but reading my peers in this family of misfits. I picked up a reputation, however, of being the site’s provocateur. I will say that I rarely set out to push people’s buttons. I just don’t give a hoot or a holler if I do, and I believe it’s an artist’s ethical responsibility to have the balls to write without inhibition and to always take an attitude of saying to hell with the status quo (and everything has the potential to develop its own status quo, even weird movie aficionados). Over the years, I’ve earned a few haters who, in their either/or mindset, wanted to label me as a liberal. I’ve never considered myself liberal Continue reading REFLECTING ON A DECADE OF 366 WEIRD MOVIES →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: #366 EVE

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Only one more movies to Certify Weird! Many of you have already guessed the title, but feel free to try again in the comments.

Next week, we’ll be taking time out from reviews (with the exception of our 366th choice) for some reflections, starting with thoughts from  our gadfly Alfred Eaker. We’ll also bring you an updated list of the top weird movies not yet released on home video, and G. Smalley will add some thoughts on the 366 milestone, looking back fondly on what we’ve accomplished—and looking ahead to where this site will be going in a post-366 world.

Some things will be changing here in the coming weeks. We’ll let you in on the first change right now: we’re no longer going to list the upcoming reader-suggested review queue every week. (You can always see the complete list, alphabetized, on our Suggest a Weird Movie page). We will allow you to continue making suggestions for new movies, however.

Another change is that we will no longer be tracking the Weirdest Search Terms of the Week, since we’re seeing diminishing returns and a lot of repeats. If you’re disappointed by that, rest assured that at least we’ve been holding some very weird searches back—and we’re now going to dump them on you all at once, as a farewell to the series. These searches all came about because we link Pussy Goes Grrr in our sidebar. “Pussy” is, for some reason, a popular internet search term. Combine that with our high Google rank for the search term “weird” and you get a lot of strange, and often disturbing, searches combing “weird” and “pussy.” We’ve been saving some of these searches for almost a decade now. You can now finally enjoy them. Be warned, however: some of the items below contain pussy-related concepts you never thought of, and quite likely, never wanted to think of. Broad-minded, mature adults only, please. Try to keep the snickering to a minimum and do not attempt image searches on any of the following. This list may be illegal to access in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Utah; check you local laws. Peruse at your own risk; 366 Weird Movies will not be responsible for any arousal, distress or insanity caused by reading the following list.

Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: #366 EVE →

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