What you're watching now is a scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Made in 1920 by director Robert Wiene.
In Germany. Just after the First World War.
It's one of the all-time great horror films.
Even if you haven't seen it,
you've likely seen its influence.
But how influential was it in its own time?
And more frightening question,
What do movies reveal about the society that creates them?
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the story of a tyrant and slave.
Dr. Caligari runs a booth at a fairground.
There he displays a somnambulist.
A sleepwalker named Cesare.
A thin, white skinned, dark-eyed being.
But what the audience doesn't see is that Caligari is a murderer
though he never commits murder himself.
Cesare, his amanuensis, acts out Caligari's dark will, unquestioningly.
The film's hero tracks Caligari down into an insane asylum
and discovers that Caligari is the director, gone mad.
He's caught, and made a patient.
Or perhaps not: the film ends when our hero is revealed as a patient in the asylum
and the man whom he sees as Caligari, is his doctor.
So where does the madness lie?
In the people, or in the powers-that-be?
In 1947, a renowned film critic made this perceptive observation:
Whether intentionally or not, Caligari exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos,
and facing a desperate situation:
any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of utter confusion–
Quite logically, the film spreads and all-pervading atmosphere of HORROR.
That was the reading given by the Frankfurt born critic Siegfried Kracauer,
in his popular and essential study
From Caligari to Hitler
Which he wrote in the United States in exile from Germany.
If you've ever studied film history, or the philosophy of film, it's likely that you've heard of it.
It's a classic of film criticism, and still a controversial one.
In Germany, Kracauer was a film critic with the Frankfurter Zeitung,
and as a German film critic working in America during and after the Second World War,
You would think he would have something to say about the use of film in the Nazi propaguanda machine.
Films like the Eternal Jew, Jud Süß, the works of Leni Riefenstahl, the usual suspects
But Kracauer didn't dissect the obvious propaganda pieces.
Instead he turned his eye to the films before Hitler:
The popular blockbusters, crowd-pleasers, the kinds of movies that most people would consider escapist.
Fundamentally apolitical, or so many thought at the time.
Kracauer's thesis was simple: movies are a mass medium.
It takes many people to create and many people to fund.
Since the moving picture is a collaborative art form, working through creative forces shaped by market demands,
film as a medium was uniquely suited to reveal the subconscious mind of the masses.
It was a thesis quite largely influenced by Kracauer's close friends,
philosophers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.
Because Siegfried Kracauer was part of a generation of German intellectuals who fled Germany after Hitler's rise.
The famous Frankfurt school.
They were students of Marx and, as Western Marxists shocked by the perversions of Stalin in the East,
they worked to consider a more liberating form of Marxist thought,
that sought to examine the myriad forces that shaped individual psychology.
Specifically, how cultural institutions reinforced class identity.
They were Marxists interested in the study of culture.
And yes this is a video giving a sympathetic portrayal of "cultural Marxism" if you don't like it I don't give a shiiiiiii--
Kracauer's friends expand on this thesis better than he did, giving him a solid theoretical framework.
For example, in Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
he postulated that mass-produced artwork–which includes film–no longer retains the "aura" of its connection to a human artist.
Instead, it is passively consumed.
Aesthetic quality is rendered insignificant next to its potential as a political force.
Horkheimer and Adorno were even more pessimistic.
In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they diagnosed the rise of fascism
as the inevitable result of the ideals of Rational Enlightenment philosophy.
Through the guise of pure scientific reason, all subjectivity is stamped out in the service of standardization.
This standardization was also enforced by what they termed the "Culture Industry"
which prioritizes formulaic artwork solidified by public ideals of quality, imperiling subjectivity, and therefore individuality.
But these men were speaking in broad terms.
Kracauer took these principles to a place–Weimar Germany–and a time–1919 to 1933.
An artistic scene still lauded by film critics around the world for its creativity, passion, and depth of expression.
But when Kracauer looked at these screen legends, he saw an endless love-hate relationship with the idea of power.
After Caligari, he saw screens filled with similar sleepwalkers, hypnotizers, omnipresent tyrants.
Characters like Count Orlok in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu, a German remake of Dracula.
Orlok is a wealthy figure, with a long nose and sunken eyes, living amongst the rats.
He lurked in the shadows, bringing people under his sway, especially women.
Another great director, Fritz Lang, had his own horror villain: Dr. Mabuse, a master criminal.
Like Nosferatu, he lives in the shadows. And like Caligari, he compels his underlings to enforce his will.
A master of disguise and hypnotist, everywhere and nowhere.
Lang also did more light-hearted works like his films based on the Nibelungen,
all about Siegfried, an early German superhero.
A raw force of nature, masculine, powerful.
German film at the time often looked to the past for its less horrific fare.
The actor Otto Gebühr became famous in a long series of films
where he played the Prussian King Frederick the Great, the model of a strong enlightened ruler.
But aside from the past, the Weimar screen German always seemed happiest in the countryside:
films like People on Sunday depicted country getaways taken by bright, beautiful youths.
Or, more thrillingly, there were Mountain films.
Nature adventures where strong men and women scaled mighty Alps, asserting the purity of Nature,
waiting for the great men to conquer it.
But in the Weimar screen city, the human was stifled.
This is Murnau again, working closer to everyday life.
In The Last Laugh, Murnau's hero is a simple hotel greeter. He loves his job, and his neighbors love him for it.
But he gets too old to do is duty; so, he's demoted.
And humiliated.
Kracauer noted that, again, we see chaos in the loss of authority.
He also noted that the hotel greeter's symbol of authority isn't wealth, or moral character, but his stately ornate uniform.
The Weimar screen city ruined men and women alike.
Modernity unhinged from history. Moral chaos.
Which brings us to Weimar Germany's most spectacular rendering of the modern city.
In Metropolis, Fritz Lang's masterpiece, the fears of Weimar Germany blend together.
Once again we see tyrants and slaves.
Joh Fredersen, and industrialist, uses economics to make machine-men,
while C. A. Rotwang, a mad scientist, makes a machine-woman.
Rotwang was played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who also played Dr.Mabuse,
and again, we see a mad tyrant making an unquestioning slave to work from the shadows.
Metropolis is ostensibly optimistic.
Lang seems to suggest a solution to Marxism: class struggle is simply caused by misunderstanding.
If labor and capital were mediated–if they were to understand their common goal–all would prosper.
As the film's moral put it: the mediator between the head and the hand must be the heart.
But in the sound era, Lang seemed more frightened of this utopia he had envisionned.
M was one of the first great sound films. And it carried the best of the German silents with it.
Another vast city, another killer lurking in the shadows. A killer of children.
And again, a slave. To his own passions.
But this time, it's the criminals who bring him in.
The omnipresent Mabuses of the city using their power to capture Nosferatu.
And in a chillingly prescient gesture, the underworld captures this social degenerate by marking his clothing.
How far is it to go from a white M to a yellow star?
Let me be clear, these artists were not fascists.
The majority of them fled the country before Hitler came to power.
Murnau left, so did Lang. Just look at Caligari.
Robert Weine's last film in Germany was banned, shortly before he fled the Nazis.
Though interestingly enough, Werner Krauss, who played Caligari, stayed in Germany.
And made a rabbi into an infamous screen villain.
Conrad Veidt, who played Cesare, fled to America, and made a Nazi into an infamous screen villain.
And yet, Kracauer seems to implicate all of them as if by turning the collective dreams of post-war Germany
into focused light and shadow, visions of the Reich became clear.
Kracauer didn't place the blame on individuals but on the masses.
How through their fears and their values, they shaped the coming decades.
Considering symbolic interpretation of their problems and in their imaginings, finding potential solutions.
And I can guess what you're probably thinking.
And it's probably some evocation of Godwin's Law or the reductio at hitlerum,
but there's a reason comparisons to the Nazi Party became cliché over the past 70 years.
It's because of the influence of Kracauer and his colleagues.
This small group of intellectuals desperately trying to solve this very problem.
They lived through the rise of fascism, they too wondered how a liberal society could fall to the forces of autocracy.
They wondered how they could choose their own destruction.
How they could imagine tyrants into existence, even in seemingly apolitical fluff pieces.
Kracauer's work would inform later schools of thought such as Cultivation theory:
the hypothesis that the media you consume shapes your view of the world.
It's a common assumption, though there have been well-documented backlashes to it.
"How can media about killers make you into a killer?" Right?
It's an oversimplification of the argument, but it's common enough to evoke here.
It's led to the popular insistence that entertainment is escapism.
That to discuss politics in media is artificial.
Look at the common phrase "Keep politics out of it!"
That to be open about the political content of films and other media is to invite accusations of propaganda.
But that was Kracauer's point. That was the Frankfurt school's point.
In the guise of neutrality, it's all propaganda.
It's all a reflection of the values of society at large.
Again, these artists were not fascists.
And it's not like any amount of censorship or cultural policing would have stopped the rise of the Nazi Party.
It was, after all, what the people wanted. They imagined the tyrant.
And we still imagine tyrants.
But it's not like our society would fall to fascism again, right?
Even if we reject Kracauer's thesis and see art as purely escapist, we know tyrants when we see them.
Sure we fear the tyrant, just as we fear the chaos.
I mean, better the certainty of the tyrant from the anarchy of the horde, right?
I mean, we know that the horde is at our gates.
Yes, take away the authorities and violence will be unleashed but that's why we have authorities, right?
Because we know they can stop chaos.
So what if they tell a few white lies to keep the peace?
They're not the bad guys, we all know who the bad guys are.
They are the bigots. The ones who use people.
The ones who make empty promises of prosperity just to make sure we're dependent on them.
They're ones trying to get other people to fall in line.
The ones who work for a shadowy government. The ones that try to stop us from living our lives.
The ones that don't represent the true will of the people.
They're only out for themselves. They're only there to advance their own power.
These fluid men. These deceitful, smirking women.
They're strange, perverted.
They're not like us. We know who we are.
Sure, we may be flawed, we may be immature, and carefree.
Sure, maybe we've sinned, maybe we're dangerous, maybe we are the danger.
But dammit, there is love in our hearts.
We are smart and capable, and that's more important than any of our sins.
And even if our place in society is shrinking, goddammit we'll survive, because we know we're not special snowflakes.
We're badasses. We can go underground, fight the system from within.
There are millions of us, we can fight back, because we have heroes.
We know who the heroes are. They're smart, and rich, and beautiful,
and they're always there with a quick grab and a dashing display of strength to defeat the invading hordes.
They flaunt decorum, they upset the stuffed shirts, and they know how to kick ass.
They don't waste time with talk. Because they know in their gut that they're here to do the right thing.
Even if it means destroying the crooked establishment to do it.
Even if it means compromising a few things in the name of freedom because dammit our way of life is at stake.
We can have order. We can have peace. We can imagine a safer future as long--
- The choice is made! - Whoa! Whoa!
- The Traveler has come! - Nobody choosed anything! Did you choose anything?
- No! - Did you?
- My mind's totally blank! - I didn't choose anything!
I couldn't help it. It just popped in there!