Caligari Sideshows
Caligari and his sideshows: mental and representational instability
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Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari) 1919 Ages 15+ The German bombshell that continues to confront, amaze and irritate audiences, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari is as schizophrenic as any of its protaganists: an avant garde horror film with quirky and surprisingly complex Freudian overtones. A murderous doctor and his somnambulist-puppet (the Laurel and Hardy of German expressionism) invade a fairground and kill people. Lurking behind one of the most evocative films ever made, critics have found resonances to ETA Hoffman’s story Sandman, philiospher Arthur Schopenhauer, Adolf Hitler and cinema itself. Sat 8 Nov 3.00pm / Cinema A |
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Genuine: The Tale of a Vampire 1920 All ages Trouble starts when an artist falls asleep and his painting comes to life. Genuine, a female vamp, walks out of her frame to pursue her lust for blood. Robert Wiene made Genuine directly after The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, grafting that film’s graphic expressionist style onto an exotic fairy tale and motif of the female predator. Only this fragmented condensation of the film survives. Thu 18 Sept 12 noon / Cinema A |
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Von Morgens Bis Mitternacht (From Morn to Midnight) 1920 All ages This flamboyant adaptation of Georg Kaiser’s classic expressionist play was never shown in Germany, but sold to a Japanese distributor and became a runaway success in Japan. A bank teller, fed up with the monotony of his life, flees to the wild side and pays the price. Wed 10 Sept 4.00pm / Cinema A |
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Raskolnikov 1923 All ages Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s universe is made over into an expressionist city in Robert Wiene’s most successful post-Caligari feature. The sets and characters act upon each other through what Lotte Eisner called “a sort of reciprocal hallucination…The staircase, with its jagged laths and battens and steps peopled with ghosts.” Thu 18 Sept 1.00pm / Cinema A |
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Schatten - Eine Nächtliche Halluzination (Warning Shadows)1923 All ages In this rarely seen expressionist classic told without intertitles, characters are revealed through shadows and mirror images. A passing shadow puppet master with hypnotic talents finds raw material for theatrical mind games when he entertains at the court of a jealous count and his flirtatious wife. Sat 13 Sept 11.00am / Cinema A |
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Kurutta Ippêji (Page of Madness) 1926 All ages Set entirely inside an insane asylum, Page of Madness follows an elderly seaman who has become the asylum’s janitor in order to be near his demented wife. With no intertitles, Teinsosuke Kinugasa conveys the fantasies and memories of the insane with multiple exposures, oblique angles, swish pans, and rapid editing. A bizarre blend of expressionist and Soviet Montage styles, Page of Madness is a one-of-a-kind cinematic tour de force. Sun 14 Sept 3.30pm / Cinema A |
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La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House Usher) 1928 All ages A painter obsesses over giving his images life and ends up draining away the lifeblood of his model and adored wife. Jean Epstein folds together several tales by American writer Edgar Allan Poe to experiment with Gothic-Impressionist techniques – slow motion, complex superimpositions, and oddly lit landscapes. Thu 11 Sept 2.00pm (with The Life and Death of 9413 - A Hollywood Extra) / Cinema A |
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The Life and Death of 9413 - A Hollywood Extra 1928 All ages This Florey/Vorkapitch short was made by two Hollywood filmmakers eager to adapt French avant-garde and German expressionist techniques to satirise the regimentation of the Hollywood studio system. Thu 11 Sept 2.00pm (with The Fall of the House Usher) / Cinema A |
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The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T 1953 All ages An original Dr Seuss musical about what happens to a nine year-old boy who hates practicing the piano and dreams about the horrors it can breed. Hans Conreid plays the terrible Dr. Terwilliker, a demonic piano teacher who rules a castle with dungeons and secret rays, and who through enchantment turns mothers into witless allies. Thu 25 Sept 3.00pm / Cinema A |
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The Night of the Hunter 1955 M A crazed and deadly preacher (Robert Mitchum) chases two children across a Gothic southern landscape in a story saturated in allegory and shimmering, poetic atmosphere. Lillian Gish stands as the children’s protector, fighting off one kind of old-time religion with another. A box office failure on its release, Laughton’s film is now widely considered his masterwork. Wed 24 Sept 6.00pm / Cinema B |
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La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children) 1995 M The City of Lost Children is a hyper-inventive pastiche with the poetic cohesiveness of a fairy tale. A mad scientist, yoked to a disembodied brain that floats in a fish tank, kidnaps vast numbers of children for their dreams while a fairground strongman (Ron Perlman) and a streetwise kid (Judith Vittet) navigate a nightmare fantasy city. No one, not even the Coen Brothers, spin tales like Jeunet and Caro, and by the end we sense we've been channelling Jules Verne, Nosferatu, H.G. Wells and Dune. Sun 28 Sept 3.00pm (with The Heart of the World) / Cinema A |
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The Heart of the World 2000 All ages Furious energy and motion is captured in Guy Maddin’s brilliant parody of Russian and German silent cinema battling it out for the soul of the universe. Sun 28 Sept 3.00pm (with The City of Lost Children) / Cinema A |
