The Big Screen by David Thomson

to discover the framing Pommer and Wiene had put on their story. But this sanitization actually had so little impact. For the “derangement” in the décor, the rather studied, art-school attempt to make everything in sight look like something seen by a madman, is pervasive and infectious. So it doesn’t really matter whether the madman in question is Francis, “our hero,” or the Director. As it is, both Caligari and the Director are played by the same actor, Werner Krauss, and he is so creepy that we assume a natural affinity between the two figures. “Correcting” the action does not repair the suggestion—and this is an important point in film appreciation. Stories lead film and shape them, but atmosphere is the character—and the atmosphere is a matter of the chemistry between us and the film. No one can watch Caligari without uneasiness mounting, just as no one can experience Citizen Kane without hearing Kane’s sigh, the lament of “Rosebud” that hangs over every frame and all the regrets of his life.
    So what was meant as a reassuring, hopeful last shot is actually a rather nasty conclusion—it is the clear implication that Caligari has won the day by his ability to pass as both a fairground performer and a respected doctor. This amounts to a trap: in this kind of cinema, no character can be identified with or simply written off to villainy. Every figure is part of the phantom elasticity that partakes of the opposed aspects in any human being. The difficulty in placing trust brings us to that essential enigma in German cinema, Fritz Lang, “Herr Director” to those he wanted to impress, but something far more dubious or disconcerting.
    Lang lied about both his parents, but he existed in a dangerous world where the lie might be taken for granted. He said that his father, Anton Lang, was an architect, whereas he seems to have been just a construction chief who worked with architects. As for his mother, he said she was from the country and the farming class, but Paula Schlesinger was Jewish and part of a family in the clothing business.
    Friedrich Christian Anton Lang was born in Vienna in December 1890. He was raised in bourgeois comfort, and he got fragments of education in studying architecture, painting, and design. But he was also a womanizer and a wanderer, and quite early on he was working in Viennese nightclubs when he told his parents he was doing more serious things. He claimed later that he had roamed over most of the world, but no one who knew him could determine when he had done this. When war broke out he joined the Austro-Hungarian army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, saw a great deal of action, was decorated and wounded. One injury affected an eye and encouraged him to wear a monocle, which he learned to use to intimidate others. It was while in hospital, recovering from his injuries, that he began writing movie scenarios.
    There is a group of movie people born, like Lang, in the 1890s (as the medium was born). It includes King Vidor, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, and Jean Renoir. As kids growing up with the new sensation, they became founding fathers of film, but so many of them were drifters before film found or retrieved them. Lang would hardly have been willing to risk losing his sight to become a master of things seen, but he was sharp enough to see the publicity appeal of his disability once he was getting established—thus the monocle and the way he used it to send a flashing message to his actors and crew.
    Once recovered and established as a scenarist, Lang rose quickly; it was part of the glamour of the movies that people could be “made” so fast. Erich Pommer did offer Caligari to Lang, but the novice was tied up on Die Spinnen (a big adventure film), so, by his own testimony, he did “no more” than suggest the framing device, the very thing the writers hated!