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The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari Essay

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German Expressionism is film movement of darkness, madness, and fear and few films personify German Expressionism as the Robert Wiene 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Considered the quintessential work of the German Expressionist era, Dr. Caligari demonstrates many of the stylistic and thematic elements of the aesthetic movement. In the sequence used for this paper many of these elements such as editing and mise en scene are seen.

Mes-en-scene is widely considered the main draw of German Expressionism. Rather than focusing on the realism of the real world, German Expressionism counters the principle of realism and practises extreme distortion as means to communicate inner emotional reality (Johnson, 2010). Generally this distorted reality expresses the dark and twisted themes of the narrative through it’s Me-es-scene.

Throughout the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Wiene use specific lighting techniques that are characteristic of German Expressionism to demonstrate themes of horror and madness and this sequence is no different. Much of the sequence, as well as the film, uses very flat lighting. This was …show more content…

Chiaroscuro lighting is described as “a form of lighting depicting stark contrasts between light and shadow” (Yvonne Njuguna). Throughout the sequence, very defined shadows are being created using very strong contrasts between darkness and light. A good example of this is seen during the scene depicting the murder of Mr. Alan. During this scene Wiene uses sharp defined shadows to not only push forward the narrative through a silhouette of Mr Alan being stabbed but it is also used to instill fear in the audience as well as distort their perspective. Strangely enough shadows and streaks of light are painted directly onto the sets, further distorting the viewer's sense of perspective and three-dimensionality. (John D. Barlow.

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