Centennial: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 8:00AM by Tony Ruggio
1920... Eerily and surprisingly, wasn't so different from 2020. A new generation had upended social norms, a deadly pandemic had spread throughout the world, and a major western democracy was in the throes of a post-war identity crisis. A country in search of a tyrant, Germany was a mere decade away from learning the name Adolf Hitler, and the nation’s artistic output reflected as such.
It’s astonishing to realize that feature films have been around for more than a hundred years, that our grandest medium of pop art has endured for so long. The cinema has persevered through war, competing technology, and economic calamity. Such questions of perseverance are ripe for discussion again in the midst of our current pandemic, one that has shuttered movie theaters around the world. A film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, currently streaming on Criterion and now 100 years young, makes clear to us that movie-making will never go the way of the dinosaurs...