(German, 1919)
Director
Robert Wiene, but don’t give him another thought: He was a one-shot and he got the job only because Fritz Lang was tied up making something called The Spiders. Instead, be mindful of the screenwriters, a Czech named Hans Janowitz, who’d happened to witness a sex murder in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, and an Austrian named Carl Mayer, who’d been examined once too often by army psychiatrists during World War I; the set designers, a four-man contingent headed by Hermann Warm, who used expressionist principles and techniques to create the movie’s warped, angular look, going so far as to paint in, rather than throw, those eerie lights and shadows; and even the producer, Erich Pommer, who financed the whole crazy package and hoped the public would bite.
Story
Check out the frame-tale setup: Patient in mental hospital tells elaborate and horrifying story of weird, heavily bespectacled carnival-circuit hypnotist (Werner Krauss), who controls lurching somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), inducing him to commit series of murders. His story told, patient freaks out and is taken to office of mental hospital’s benign director, who, in the course of examination, puts on pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and …
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
German intellectuals liked the sick settings, the way a madman’s fantasy life had been translated into visual terms; French intellectuals went one step further and coined the term caligarisme, which they used to describe cinema that was abstract, like a “painting in motion,” rather than realistic narrative of natural events in natural settings—a useful enough idea in a postwar world that was striking almost everyone as sinister and unworkable. This sort of distortion was not unknown in the theater, of course. The amazing thing was that now a movie camera was eschewing reality, apparently no longer interested in recording the “look” of things, the very purpose it had been devised for. But apart from getting the intellectuals going and setting a certain standard for future “art” films, Caligari would not seriously influence the course of movies.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
For horror-movie aficionados, this is the granddaddy, happily fleshed out with mental illness (persecution, hallucination, breakdown) and the chilling ambiguities generated by the tale-within-a-tale format. More than mere horror, however, Caligari purveys the kind of weirdness that fuels cultism: Here’s a way to get the jump on friends who are still gaga over Kafka or, what’s worse, Twin Peaks. Then there’s the movie’s inherent appeal for painters and set designers: Unlike other classics of the cinema, this is one in which stagecraft and painted flats, rather than camera movement and dynamic editing, do the job—and get the credit. Finally, it’s a traditional favorite of sociologists and portent readers: German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, sees in it the beginnings of a “cortège of monsters and tyrants” that would eventually culminate in Hitler. NANOOK OF THE NORTH
(American, 1922)
Director
Robert J. Flaherty. Boy with a camera (and a Jean-Jacques Rousseau streak), intent on revealing the essence and the quality of life as it was then being lived in such exotic outposts as the frozen Arctic (Nanook), the South Seas (Moana), the barren, storm-tossed islands off Ireland’s west coast (Men of Aran), and the bayous of Louisiana (The Louisiana Story). The first—and most legendary—of the documentary filmmakers, he sidestepped studios and story lines for what he could observe out there on his own. Intense and gentle; paragon of integrity; like Renoir (whom he helped smuggle out of France and into America during the war), a “poet” among directors.
Story
Eskimo family—stalwart Nanook, jolly wife, Nyla, two small children, plus infant in pouch of Nyla’s sealskin parka—survives elements and sculpts nature as best it can on the shores of Hudson Bay. Very cold, the shores of Hudson Bay. And crawling with seals. Sequences to note: Family emerges from kayak, one by one, like circus midgets from a tiny car; Nanook, at trading post, goes wild over phonograph and tries to eat phonograph record; Nanook, on big ice floe, stands alone at edge, spearing fish; Nanook builds igloo, from (just as you’d always suspected) blocks of compacted snow. But we bet you didn’t know he was going to install a chunk of frozen river as a window.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Unpredictably, a big commercial as well as critical hit. Of course, it helped that the picture opened in New York in the middle of one of the hottest Junes on record, but beyond that, viewers couldn’t get over the way they were invited not only to travel to a distant clime, but to look into somebody else’s mind and heart. Plus, everybody wanted to know how Flaherty had done it, had lived for months in subzero temperatures—a thousand miles from the nearest restaurant, photographic supply store, oral surgeon, whatever—and had gotten all these Eskimos not only to trust him, but to take direction (a matter that bothered some critics so much that they charged Flaherty with misusing “facts”). Then there was Nanook himself: the bright eyes, the continual smile, the weather-beaten face. Within a matter of months, Eskimo pies were being sold on both sides of the Atlantic, and words like “igloo,” “kayak,” and “anorak,” formerly known only to anthropologists, were popping up in grade-school civics tests and sporting-goods store windows. Too bad Nanook couldn’t have basked in his new fame: He died of starvation, out there on the ice, shortly after the film was released.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Three things. First, the documentary tradition, of which Flaherty is held to be the father; how it was discovered that dramatic content could be derived from the depiction of fact, how documentary is both more “real” and more “respectable” than the fiction film. Second, Flaherty as counterpoint to Hollywood, as the great director who, unlike Griffith and Stroheim, wasn’t crushed by it; and who, unlike Sternberg, didn’t collaborate with it; but who simply abandoned it for places where he couldn’t be reached by phone. Third, the final product, a triumph of structure, editing, and sympathy, even if he did force all those Eskimos to wear skins and furs that were more Eskimoish than anything they’d ever have picked out for themselves. THE LAST LAUGH
(German, 1924)
Director
F. W. (Friedrich Wilhelm) Murnau. Most revered director of Germany’s Golden Age, which was conceived in the rubble of World War I, thrived through the heady days of the Weimar Republic, and withered away in the early Thirties, the result either of Hitler’s crackdown on creative types or of Hollywood’s buying them all up, or both. A pupil of Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theater impresario, Murnau jettisoned the expressionism and eerieness of Caligari days and began serving up bratwurst-and-boiled-potatoes realism. (Even his 1922 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, used everyday, business-as-usual, port-city-of-Bremen settings.) Hollywood got its hands on Murnau, too: He made Sunrise, about a young wife threatened by her unbalanced husband, for Fox in 1927, then collaborated with Flaherty on a quasi-documentary South Seas drama called Tabu (1931). Only forty-three, he died in a car crash a week before Tabu’s premiere, thereby affording film historians a favorite example of directorial careers nipped in the bud.