Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
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Post by Capo on Jul 23, 2007 0:29:07 GMT
Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Robert Wiene 1919 Germany A madman tells the tale of the director of his lunatic asylum who used a somnabulist to murder his victims. Endlessly studied, artistically significant, incredibly influential film, not so much part of a movement (German Expressionism) as a cinematic imitation of one. On the one hand, the camera doesn't quite enter the hermetic world it captures, but on the other, the meticulous, distorted set design and crammed mise-en-scène evoke a fully credible world of immorality and perversion and underlying darkness. It's visually excessive throughout: streets zig-zag into endless oblivion; the walls on either side of alleyways lean toward one another with claustrophobic menace; streams of light and shadow are painted directly onto objects; houses are built as if a bomb had gone off long ago, and, instead of blowing up, the whole town just tilted on its axis. There's a satisfying twist to things to, bringing a bleak axe down on the already deranged nihilism.
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Post by troyanderson on Jan 28, 2010 8:26:10 GMT
I went as the Somnabulist for Halloween once. Everything you wrote reads like it was dipped in downers.
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