Dr. Caligari’s Lasting Mark on the World of Film
Warning: Contains Spoilers
If you were to discuss German Expressionism in film circles, it’s doubtful the conversation would go more than two minutes without someone mentioning The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In addition to the fact that it’s one of the earliest films of the genre, it’s one of the most marked examples of German Expressionism’s propensity for focusing on the darker aspects of the human psyche. Moreover, the film utilizes what is perhaps the most extreme example of the dramatic, stylized aesthetic that became a calling card of the German Expressionist genre.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (directed by Robert Wiene) is the story of a young man named Francis, who goes with his friend Alan to a carnival. While there, a presenter named Caligari introduces a man, Cesare, who has supposedly been sleeping his entire life, but who is capable of answering any question put to him. When Alan asks what the date of his own death will be, Cesare responds, “At first dawn.” Sure enough, Alan is found dead the next morning, and what follows is a horrifying thriller in which Francis puts himself and his fiancée Jane in danger as he tries to expose Caligari’s secrets.
I recently read the book Fist Stick Knife Gun by Geoffrey Canada, who has received national acclaim as President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone and founder of the Promise Academy charter school. In his book, Canada describes his experience as a young African-American growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 60s. After getting through barely one chapter of the book, I felt as if someone had slapped me in the face. What’s more, I felt as if I’d needed it.
I am a licensed clinical social worker who spent four years counseling in several forensic environments. These settings varied and included crisis counseling in the administrative segregation unit of a women’s prison, leading educational groups to men found incompetent to stand trial, and assessing sex offenders in the death chamber of a maximum-security state prison (it turns out prisons lack conference rooms!) I look back on that work and am still struck by the profound depth of desperation found within those walls.
This spring, at the age of thirty-four, I went back to college to finish my undergraduate degree. I already had a decent career as a web developer and filmmaker, but given my age, and the fact that I’ll most likely have kids sometime in the next few years, I decided that if I ever wanted to go back to school, now was the time. 
