Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

he says, when Expressionism ended, bringing to a close, therefore, certain phenomena in
style and motifs in the films of the Weimar Republic. These are Der Student von Prag (The
Student of Prague), which was first released in 1913, Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), Genuine (1920), Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (From
Morn to Midnights, 1920), Torgus (1921), Raskolnikov (1923), and Das
Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924). 27 The author argues that these films display the
Expressionist traits present in painting and drama, the main criteria put forward to justify
such a selection. In contrast, I would not include Hanns Kobe’s Torgus in this list as I do
not consider it to be totally Expressionistic. It lacks for me the internal stylistic coherence
that is so particular to this artistic movement, or to be more precise it does not have the
kind of Stimmung that I will be commenting on later, which makes Expressionism easier to
pin down. Rather it concentrates on the character and the plot, which, in turn, are too plain
and easy to follow. The only “golem-like” part of the film is actually Torgus, the coffinmaker,
who keeps Anna sequestrated with his mother until the birth of the child.
Some consensus is nonetheless reached among the various authors, such as Thomas
Eisner, Tom Gunning and David Bordwell, who have investigated the origins of works that
belong to that particular style. Directed by Robert Wiene in 1919, The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari is nearly always brought forward as the most renowned and influential film of that
era. The film narrates the fascinating and frightening encounter of two students with Dr.
Caligari (Werner Krauss), a hypnotist with a twisted mind, and his victim, a somnambulist
named Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who carries out the doctor’s evil orders. The characters
move about in claustrophobic studio settings, in a hallucinatory landscape of illogicallyshaped
mountains and fields and places with the most bizarre forms and angles. This
symbolic commixture of imaginary fractured shapes and chaotic lines contribute to the
disorder inside the lives of the characters, turning them literally into a madman’s nightmare
(fig. 19).
27 This list of films is part of a rather controversial article written by Salt titled “From Caligari to Who?” and
which was published in the Sight and Sound magazine, vol. 48, nº2, spring 1979, p. 119. In it, the British
Cinema historian intends to deliver a clearer definition of the notion “Expressionist film”. The majority of the
text is actually a fierce criticism of Siegfried Kracauer’s thesis.
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