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THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI
Friday, October 3 | 7:30 p.m.
(New restoration)
Madness, sleepwalking and murder intertwine in one of the most visually striking and influential of all silent films. While its eerie tale of a sinister sideshow mesmerist (Werner Krauss) who uses hypnotism to compel his assistant (Conrad Veidt of The Man Who Laughs and Casablanca) to perform somnambulist acts of murder and abduction helped form a template for countless horror films that followed in its wake, it was the film’s dramatic lighting, stylized performances and particularly the outlandish production design that have made the greatest impact. With its jagged lines, claustrophobic spaces and impossible angles, the film’s look initiated a new visual language that was originally referred to as “Caligarism.” Today, we know this darkly ornate style of rendering waking nightmare-scapes as German Expressionism. This new digital restoration, completed over two years and using the camera negative, brings back the original color tinting.
1962, 95 minutes, black and white, 35mm | Directed by Roger Kay; written by Robert Bloch, based on the motion picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene; with Glynis Johns, Dan O'Herlihy, Richard Davalos, Lawrence Dobkin, Constance Ford, J. Pat O'Malley.
THE CABINET OF CALIGARI
Friday, October 3 | 9:00 p.m.
Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho and one of the most popular horror screenwriters of the 1960s, penned this offbeat and seldom-seen Hollywood remake of the 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Tony Award winner Glynis Johns plays Jane, a young woman on a carefree road trip who winds up trapped in the high-modernist home of the sinister Caligari – played by the great Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy, whose career encompassed everything from an Oscar-nominated performance in Luis
Buñuel’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe to a late career triumph as “The Old Man” in the original RoboCop. This Caligari, radically reconceived as a woman-in-jeopardy thriller with a Buñuelian flavor, also features modish production design, striking widescreen and crane-mad black-and-white cinematography from Psycho’s John L. Russell, and a romantic yet eerie score by Gerald Fried, later nominated for an Oscar for Birds Do It, Bees Do It.
1962, 95 minutes, black and white, 35mm | Directed by Roger Kay; written by Robert Bloch, based on the motion picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene; with Glynis Johns, Dan O'Herlihy, Richard Davalos, Lawrence Dobkin, Constance Ford, J. Pat O'Malley.
