THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Fedogan & Bremer

  Introduction and stories in this volume copyright © 2016 by the respective authors

  Cover artwork copyright © 2016 by Harry O. Morris

  Interior artwork © 2016 by Nick Gucker & Gahan Wilson

  FIRST DIGITAL EDITION

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. Address all queries to Fedogan & Bremer Publishing, 3918 Chicago St, Nampa, Idaho, 83686

  ISBN: 978-1-878252-70-8 (trade edition hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-878252-71-5 (limited edition hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-878252-72-2 (paperback edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-878252-81-4 and 978-1-878252-82-1 (ebook editions)

  Hardcover Book Design by Michael Waltz

  This book is dedicated to,

  Philip Rahman,

  gone far too soon! !!

  Du musst Caligari

  werden

  Du musst

  Caligari WERDEN

  Du musst Caligari werden

  Du musst Caligari werden

  Du

  musst

  Caligari

  Werden

  Du must

  Caligari

  werden

  ACT I: Casting

  Dear Screenwriters,

  You know the film (maybe all 4 of them; Wiene’s original, 1920 black & white, silent masterpiece; Bloch’s fun, but in name only, from 1962; Stephen Sayadian’s wonderfully-crazed, psychosexual, surrealistic, florescent eye-candy from ‘89; David Lee Fisher’s intriguing 2005 Redux/Remixed/Reimagined/Reopened Caligari, with its new actors and dialogue), and, one hopes, the scores, by In the Nursery, Bill Nelson, or Supersilent, or John Moran’s 1989 opera. Perhaps you have explored David Robinson’s book, DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI, and maybe even Siegfried Kracauer’s theories from From Caligari to Hitler, or spent time with Mike Budd’s DVD commentary? So, what does The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (‘The purest expression of Expressionism on film…’) and its themes and its immeasurable influence mean to you?

  Film critic Roger Ebert said Caligari is “a film of delusions and deceptive appearances, about madmen and murder, and characters exist at right angles to reality. None of them can quite be believed, nor can they believe one another…Caligari creates a mindscape, a subjective psychological fantasy…the world itself is out of joint.” I concur, but what do you see?

  Screenwriters—architects of derangement, a landscape—there’s Holstenwall ahead, a dream—its angles and confessions and knots, and/or the sleepwalker and The (mad) Puppeteer, that’s what I ask, desire, from fantasies sparked-to-life by your inventive writing appliances.

  ACT II: The Script and the Production

  The writers listed in the Table of Contents were quick to say, yes, they’d take on Caligarian roles in our production and gleefully step out on the boards to present their expressions of madness. And with delirium-warped enthusiasms decorating every page, they have—they have… with true tales of Dr. Caligari (the movies’ first mad psychiatrist/doctor); and Holstenwall; and psychosexual deviations; and somnambulists aplenty; with themes of brutal and irrational authority; and the subjective perception of reality; and the destabilizing contrasts between derangement and sanity; and the shadows and legacy of World War; and modernist assaults on conventions; with the haunting and sinister instruments (and shadows) of psychological thrillers; and slanted premonitions of coerced conformity; and doctors, confident authority figures with framed credentials and catalogues of observations.

  It’s a wrap! Our production has been designed, cut and edited. Here, between the covers (like the cabinet, now open), in articulations ‘jagged, nightmarish, and distorted,’ our players, stage designers, screenwriters, directors, and patients, range far and wide (as all minds that see what the madman sees musst) (to Holstenwall; to Berlin; to asylum cells; to Hollywood; and finally, to your living room) in tribute to Robert Weine’s massively-inspirational (to horror—this was, arguably, the world’s first horror movie, to film noir), classic, and beloved film.

  ACT III: Opening night

  Dear audience,

  The film canisters are stacked, the reels loaded in the Peerless twins, the carbons trimmed. Everything in the projection booth is ready.Our patients

  ELECTROSHOCK? INJECTIONS? HYPNOTISM?

  Directors have such mesmerizing dreams (and nachtmahrs) to show you.

  Your heart rate quickens… you’re ready to go to the funfair, ready to see exhibits of every kind! Roll up! Roll up!

  To answer your question, yes, Cesare will answer your questions.

  Please take your seat—for you, FRONT ROW CENTER, of course!

  LIGHTS! Roll camera… and ACTION—

  Du musst Caligari

  werden

  Du musst

  Caligari werden

  Ssssh… the restraints are only for your comfort… and safety…

  Du must Caligari werden

  Du musst Caligari werden

  Joe Pulver

  Caligariplatz

  Berlin, Germany

  May 2016

  Ross might have spoken as the lights came up in the auditorium, but he heard Alan say “Those films should have had a trigger warning.”

  Dr Craig raised his eyebrows high above his roundish spectacles. “Why would that be?”

  “Someone may have needed a psychiatrist like the ones in the films.”

  “If they disturbed anyone because of that then I apologise.”

  The tutor was gazing beyond the students, and there was silence until Samira said “I don’t understand why you had to show them both together.”

  “Because Fritz Lang claimed it was his idea that the narrator of Caligari should be a patient in the asylum.”

  Ross saw a chance to display knowledge. “Most historians don’t think Lang was responsible.”

  “It’s what he said that counts, Mr Ross. That’s why I showed The Ministry of Fear as well. When Ray Milland leaves the asylum he finds the world is a paranoid fantasy, which is how Lang often seems to view it.”

  “Maybe he was mad himself,” Mahmood said.

  Craig laughed, though only once. “I think we’ll find it’s one of his recurring themes. Our next two films are his.”

  All this was delaying Ross from writing down his ideas about The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. When Craig said “I’ll look forward to hearing everybody’s thoughts tomorrow” Ross was first out of the auditorium. Under the pale blank February sky the boxy concrete buildings of the campus looked more colourless than ever. Most of the students crowding the pavements between them stepped aside for Ross readily enough, and it wasn’t far to the accommodation block. Sometimes living in the ground-floor bunker of a room made him feel reduced to studenthood, a cramped version of his old self, but at least the distance didn’t give him time to lose his hold on the film.

  Except for their black plastic numbers, all the doors along his corridor were featurelessly white, but now they’d acquired a trace of colour, a copy of a flyer poking out from beneath each one. Ross picked up the flyer, having unlocked his door, and felt driven to explain his disconcerted laugh to a passing neighbour. “Shows how committed I am to my studies. For a moment there I thought this said Cesare.”

  Though the student wasn’t half his age, he gave Ross a look he might have turned on an intruder. “That’s Caesar’s Pizza.”

  Since he wasn’t even
on the film course, he could hardly be expected to know the name of the somnambulist controlled by Caligari. “I did realise,” Ross informed him before shutting himself in his room.

  He’d made it his own as much as he could, papering the walls above and opposite the narrow single bed with posters for Marx Brothers films. He hadn’t previously noticed how expressionistic the caricatures were, the angular bodies on the edge of growing geometrical. No doubt Caligari had shown him. He hung his fat coat on the hook behind the door, over a suit the stingy wardrobe had no space for. Once he’d found some comfort on the chair that matched the equally scrawny desk at the window, he unfolded his laptop on the desk.

  Caligari was an absence, and not just of sound and colour. Not only did he never appear in the film, there was no reason to think the cabinet was his. The carnival showman played by Werner Krauss only aspired to be Caligari and to imitate his crimes by sending somnambulist Cesare—Conrad Veidt—to commit them, while the murders themselves grew increasingly meaningless. The false Caligari proved to be an asylum director possessed by the dead mystic, or had the identity been imposed on him by somebody else’s obsession with Caligari? In the film Caligari represented tyranny and chaos, a disembodied concept determined to become incarnate. On the screen he consisted of nothing but words: the paragraph about him in an old book that shared its title with the film itself, the intertitles that didn’t name him until after he’d appeared in several scenes, the commands that formed in the air around the asylum director, compelling him to become Caligari. Caligari’s influence had already deformed the straight lines of the world, and it was surely a sign of his power that he could imprint language on the world. The words that made him up were eager to take shape on his behalf.

  If all this led to a conclusion, Ross couldn’t think what it might be. As the keyboard chattered at his fingertips he hoped he was capturing his thoughts. Whenever he glanced up in search of insight he saw students passing his window. Some of them waved or raised a thumb, and more than one mimed typing to encourage him. Ross gave each one a smile that made his face feel not quite under his control. When straining to resolve his thoughts began to make his head throb, he shut down the computer and went out for dinner.

  The Snuggery pub was in the nearest of the terraced streets that hadn’t been ousted by concrete. It was a warren of small rooms, some already occupied by couples. The smallest was deserted, and Ross took his pint of Burly Barrel there, having ordered shepherd’s pie. Behind the bar along the corridor he could see a poster for an annual fair, which didn’t help him to think about the film. By the time his meal arrived a young couple had as well, reminding him of the kind of relationship he’d decided he could do without, and he did his best to ignore them while he ate. Being on his own let him watch his choice of films with nobody to undermine his appreciation, and he’d come to believe there was only room inside his head for him.

  Streetlamps shed a stark white light on the pavements of the campus, blackening the grass in concrete tubs around a few thin trees. A chill breeze brought an abandoned flyer slithering towards him, advertising some event that would continue Till the break of dawn. In his room he switched on the laptop and searched his mind for extra thoughts, but somebody was listening to music in one of the rooms, just distant enough for only the drums to be relentlessly audible. He might have remonstrated with the culprit, but didn’t want to earn himself a reputation for intolerance. Being a mature student shouldn’t mean that, and he took his headache to bed.

  In the morning a thought wakened him and instantly slipped out of reach. He was sure it had to do with Caligari, and strove to recapture it until his body made it plain that he needed to be somewhere else. He grabbed his towel from the meagre radiator and his toiletry bag from the desk before hurrying bathrobed to the communal facilities along the corridor. Once he’d found an unoccupied cubicle he did his best to mute his prefatory fanfare but couldn’t keep his odours to himself. He lurked in the cubicle, waiting for silence to surround him, then dodged into the nearest shower.

  He had time to watch Caligari again before the morning session, in case it revived his thoughts. The online copy that he found had been transferred at the wrong speed, and he felt as if it were trying to outrun his comprehension. Once he almost grasped the words that had wakened him that morning, but couldn’t locate them in the film. YOU MUST BECOME CALIGARI—he certainly hadn’t thought that. He couldn’t imagine anything he was less likely to admit to his head.

  Caligari or the asylum director left him with a final enigmatic gaze before Ross had any new ideas. As he tramped across the campus he glimpsed a newspaper placard outside a shop beyond the Law block. At that distance MURDER was all he could be sure of, and the word was such a common sight these days that he didn’t bother venturing closer. The headline wasn’t anything he had to know.

  His fellow students hadn’t much to say about expressionism, let alone its influence on film noir, but they were anxious to object to elements in Caligari—the passiveness of the heroine Jane, her violent abduction that trivialised violence against women, the belittling of mental problems… Dr Craig argued for the film but seemed to be looking to Ross for support. Eventually he said “We aren’t hearing from you, Mr Ross.”

  “I’m saving my ideas for my essay. I’m just afraid saying them out loud might kill them.”

  “We’re meant to be brainstorming here, you know. We shouldn’t hoard our thoughts.” The tutor frowned and looked away. “Well, let’s carry on with Lang,” he said. “I’d better mention that The Testament of Dr Mabuse deals with mental issues too.”

  It was Caligari all over again, Ross thought—another psychiatrist possessed by a dead criminal. There was no need to find the repetition disturbing, since it was part of the tutor’s plan. When quite a few students laughed at the spectacle of Mabuse’s pursuers scurrying like silent actors speeded up, Ross giggled despite knowing that it was a convention of the early thirties; he couldn’t help welcoming the relief of mirth. As a car chase that turned trees white as bones brought everybody back to the asylum, he saw students in the row ahead of him mouthing words at each other. Was Fergus saying “We’ll leave the choice up to her”? Perhaps he already had once, because it seemed familiar.

  The film had given Ross ideas for his essay, and he hastened to his room. By the time he finished clattering the keyboard he had to sprint to the afternoon’s film, in which Edward G. Robinson’s involvement with a femme fatale proved to be a hallucination or a dream. In that case, what was the point? All films were unreal, and Ross didn’t need to be told twice. Had Donal mouthed “We shall remain friends” at Fergus during the film? Even if he’d said something of the kind, that seemed oddly formal.

  Ross went back to his laptop with ideas he’d salvaged from the film, and then he headed for the Snuggery. As he ordered fish and chips and a pint of Lads & Ladies Lager he looked for the fairground advertisement, but couldn’t see it among the posters that surrounded his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “What’s happened to the fair?” he said.

  “Not with you,” the barman said.

  “I know it isn’t, not remotely.” Ross felt as if his words had hindered sense from reaching him. “I meant the poster you had up,” he said. “A poster for a fair.”

  The barman made a face like a suppressed snigger and jerked his thumb at the mirror. “There’s the nearest you’ll get, chum.”

  For a bewildered moment Ross thought this meant his own cramped reflection, and then he saw that the barman was indicating a sign that said FAIR TRADE PRODUCTS USED HERE. Ross took his drink to the smallest snug and peered along the corridor, but even at that distance the sign was perfectly legible. He could only think he was so preoccupied with Caligari’s fair that the meaning had lodged in his head.

  Now that he’d brought the film to mind, it was reluctant to leave. He managed to give up mouthing lines from it once a young couple came into the snug. He f
inished his dinner as soon as he could, and was on his way out of the pub when several students from the film course crowded in. “Will you take a drink with us?” Donal said, but Ross felt some insight was close to making itself clear, and went back to his room.

  He should have taken time to find words for his notion before opening the computer. Reading the essay didn’t bring the idea to the surface of his mind, and lying on the bed failed to shift the blockage. Straining to raise the idea kept him awake, and so did striving to relax. Sleeplessness amplified every sound—an argument so distant he couldn’t even be sure that he was hearing more than one voice, the barking of a dog that sounded tiny as a mouse but suggested somebody was up to no good in the night, a hint of surreptitious footsteps in the corridor. At least he was able to use the communal facilities before anyone else was about. He tried to watch Caligari again in the hope it would bring back his inspiration, but kept nodding until his face bumped into the computer screen.

  He couldn’t stay awake for Phantom Lady either. His intermittent awareness left him with a sense of searching for someone who mightn’t exist. The people in the film were, not him. Whenever he lurched awake he saw faces flickering black and white around him in the dark. Sometimes he caught them mouthing about him—“He’s asleep” or “He was asleep” or “Wake him up,” though a nudge from his neighbour already had. No doubt they wanted to save him from antagonising their tutor, and perhaps concern for him made Donal approach him after the film. “We’re off out for a drink tonight,” Donal said, “if you fancy joining us.”