[Budd is an American film scholar and educator who has written extensively on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In the following excerpt, which summarizes much of his previous scholarship on the film, he places The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in its historical and artistic contexts.]

Films, like other cultural products, are made and received within particular historical situations. Thus close analyses of film texts will be most revealing when they demonstrate how textual operations and processes are implicated in larger historical processes. Rather than reified objects dissected by the critic, films are dynamic processes in which we as viewers make meaning and pleasure and knowledge—help make our own lives—but not under conditions of our own choosing. These conditions include the discourses and institutions that construct the complex matrix of alternatives within which we make history; they also often determine and disguise our choices. A truly democratic culture requires a critical history, which expands and clarifies present alternatives by reconstructing their bases in the past. This essay aims to contribute to such a critical history through an examination of the production, textual, and reception processes of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920).…

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari was made within a commercial studio system and shown initially in commercial theaters. But the production of such an unusual film only became possible through a special set of historical conditions within the institutions of classic realist cinema in Germany. Dependent on exports, German film executives constantly looked for ways to sell in foreign markets. They were aided in this in the late teens and early twenties, when a period of inflation and currency devaluation followed Germany's defeat in World War I and further encouraged exports by making its products relatively cheap. But during the war Hollywood had become dominant internationally; in order to compete German films would have to be different. An artistically oriented cadre of studio personnel made possible one kind of product differentiation: an artistic stylization that contrasted with the usual realism of U.S. films. "Artistic" films never constituted more than a small percentage of Germany's total output. Yet to bolster exports the German film industry for several years after the war was unusually open to experimentation labeled "artistic" and thus ordinarily excluded from the discourse of classic realism, with its rigid demands for the largest possible market.

In postwar Germany, "artistic" often meant expressionism, a movement in many arts that was part of the larger movement of cultural modernism. In the early decades of the twentieth century a revolution of international modernism took place in virtually all the arts. Cubism and surrealism in France, expressionism in Germany, futurism in Italy, and constructivism in the Soviet Union were all diverse and cross-cultural movements in themselves but part also of an international assault on traditional artistic processes and styles. Painting as a window on the world, poetry as a genteel mirror of cultural order, the well-made play with its plausible characters and naturalistic situations, the realist novel—these and other time-honored forms and conventions were attacked, ridiculed, and ignored by modernist artists. In quite divergent ways they often promoted disunity over unity, montage and collage over continuity, and shocking and subjective new styles over the conventional representation of an "objective" external world.

Yet as a modernist movement German expressionism was a profoundly contradictory, unstable, and transitional phenomenon. It was strongly influenced by the subjectivist traditions of nineteenth-century German romanticism, which glorified the unified vision of an isolated and rebellious artist. On the other hand, it developed the radical disjunction and abstraction of emergent modernist forms. Expressionism carried these contradictions within itself. It combined an intense desire to overthrow authority and change the world with a rejection of and retreat from the world into a grotesque realm of subjective expression. Many artists and writers hated the bourgeois forms of their political and cultural fathers, yet in their romantic idealism were often unable actively to support contemporary social (and socialist) movements for democratic change. Influenced by expressionism, many of them, including Caligari's scriptwriters, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, registered their political ambivalence in their work, often unintentionally.

The expressionist movement began in painting and poetry around 1910, spread first to literature and the theater, then to the most expensive arts—opera, architecture, and film. In the years immediately following World War I, wealthy art patrons, theater audiences and critics, government sponsors, and advertising and the mass media began to accept and promote expressionism. Yet at the precise moment of this acceptance, expressionism as an avant-garde phenomenon was dialectically transformed into its opposite and successor, the Neue Sachlichkeit, the new sobriety or sanity. The destruction and trauma of the war, cooptation by established institutions, and its own internal contradictions by 1924 transmogrified expressionism in the art world just as it found its public everywhere else. In the visual arts, for example, the characteristic distorted and angular shapes and bright, almost deranged colors gave way to the cool, geometric forms and subdued colors of the new sobriety. More generally, expressionism's anguished protest against authority and its subjective expression of intense emotion became rationalized, calm, "objective." The tensions and contradictions of expressionism were the preconditions for its historical change; as an institutionalized discourse its gaps and stress points would appear especially in its intersection with other discourses.

One of these discourses was the classic realist cinema, and in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligar this dominant mode comes into incompatible juxtaposition with a carefully limited version of expressionism. We can specify Caligari's relation to expressionism and explore the consequences of the film's uneasy place between dominant and oppositional discourses and institutions by locating three areas of differential influence by expressionism: theme, narrative form, and setting. Thematically, Caligari seems to be characteristic not only of expressionism but also of older and more popular German cultural traditions. Insanity, the grotesque and uncanny, the outcry against an older generation and against authority—expressionism, and Caligari, drew these themes largely from traditions of German romanticism in literature, theater, and the visual arts.

But it is only when we leave these thematic generalities, these results of interpretation, and examine the bases for interpretation in the specificities of narrative and setting that we approach Caligari and expressionism concretely. In 1919 and 1920 literary expressionism was changing. The world war that lasted from 1914 to 1918 shocked many writers and others with its new scale of mindless technological barbarity. The abortive, compromised revolution in Germany that ended the war embittered many who had sought peace and social justice. Disillusioned, writers like Franz Werfel, Hanns Johst, and Paul Kornfeld rejected not only the socially activist themes of their earlier work but also their innovations (or imitations of innovations) in form. Late expressionism became antisubjective, antiromantic; following Goethe in rejecting modernism as sickness, all but a few writers by 1920 had either rediscovered the conservative forms of German literature or moved toward the sober style of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

At the same time that the romantic rejection or political critique of society by the modernist artist was becoming untenable for many expressionist writers, the movement was being accepted by the cultural establishment. At this moment expressionism began to find a carefully limited place in the commercial discourse of cinema. This acceptance was only possible because Caligari,, like most other films influenced by expressionism, ignored the (largely antinarrative) avant-garde in favor of a conventional narrative form. In fact, Caligari's unconventional aspects—the expressionist settings and plot reversal at the end—emerge from and are dependent on the largely conventional form of the film's classic realist narrative. Before it is anything else, Caligari is a story, told in the "invisible" discourse of classic realism for smooth consumption. Viewers may experience some disorientation because of the strange images, yet editing and cinematography help construct a reassuringly stable space and time where recognizable characters act out a story. (Indeed, when the film opened in New York in 1921, several reviewers noted how the initial sense of strangeness passed as one settled into the story.) Francis's tale, which comprises most of the film, is that most typical of realist narratives, the detective story. Thus it includes diversionary subplots (the attempted murderer imprisoned by the police), suspenseful chases (Francis following Caligari to the asylum), and the female character, Jane, used as token of exchange and power by the male characters. These strategies help subordinate style to narration and to produce what seems to have been for many exciting, largely commercial, and patriarchal cinema. But as narrative form, all this is very far from expressionist literature or drama, which was highly disjunctive, episodic, and modernist.

Whereas the narrative form of Caligari places it among the most advanced developments of the commercial realism of its time and seems virtually untouched by expressionism, the settings, derived from expressionist painting and theatrical set design, introduce the most disturbing and modernist elements. For whatever reason, the visual design of Cailigari shows clearly the cubist influence on expressionism, specifically the styles of Robert Delaunay, Lyonel Feininger, and the painters associated with the Briicke (Bridge) group. In France the aesthetically radical principles of cubism would be applied to the overall formal design of a film in Ballet Mecanique (1924), for example. But from its inception the modernist qualities of Caligari were largely confined to its settings—to the angular, splintery shapes, the tilted houses, the distortions that can seem to infuse the world of the film with strangeness and dread. Disturbing, yet able to be coopted, Caligari exists in that anomalous cultural space between a modernist avant-garde and the capitalist institutions of mass-produced culture.

At the same time, Caligari's visual style resembled what was appearing elsewhere in the German mass media. The film's designers—Hermann Warm, Walter Rohrig, and Walter Reimann—were part of the group around Der Sturm, Herwarth Walden's commercially successful Berlin magazine and publicity apparatus then riding the crest of the expressionist wave. How logical, then, for them to work for Erich Pommer, the film's producer, another businessman with an eye for exploiting a fashion. The capitalist corporation that Pommer supervised could exploit expressionism as international modernism, carefully containing its more radical dimensions. This was the corporation's way of differentiating its product as "artistic" though still (barely) within the relatively narrow parameters of a commercial cinema.

As a part of making history, film viewing is an active and dynamic process in which people construct their experience and their relation to the text in different ways. And as a model for and part of the historical process of generating (and closing down) emancipatory alternatives, film viewing is a reading, a working on and playing with a text that is nothing but the encoded traces, the mediations of the historical conditions and conflicts of its own production. Thus reading as making meaning and pleasure underlies usually unexamined processes of film viewing, and a crucial aspect of this activity is the revision of the narrative's past (what has been read) and predictions for the narrative's future (what will be read) in light of a changing present (what's being read); to read is to reread. Limited to being always at only one point in the temporal progression that is the phenomenal event of a film, viewers' minds nevertheless range constantly across their experience of the film so far and across expectations of what it will be. They compare, correct, specify, place, and predict, noting patterns of similarity and difference, of rhyming and progression. The classical narrative cinema attempts to rationalize and administer this process of consumption as it does the production of films. The management of such a closed system demands the projection of a semblance of continuity and coherence, so gaps and contradictions are for most viewers contained in a seemingly smooth production and consumption of narrative questions and answers. The rereading performed while viewing the film the first time can thus become a justification for not viewing it, not rereading it, again. In general, commercial films are made and presented as products that seem to be used up or consumed in the experience of "entertainment." For the film to become a commodity consumable in one viewing, rereading must be carefully contained, minimizing unsolved narrative or other puzzles that might prompt reflection or critical examination.

What then of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, which near its end throws into question the status or truth-value of what has come before by revealing that its protagonist-narrator is mad? With its twist ending and expressionist settings the film virtually demands rereading. Although realist and commercial films, especially mysteries, commonly provide minor shocks of revelation that may prompt some more ambitious viewers to reread for narrational clues and deceptions, such rereadings usually seem to confirm and augment the managed pleasures of consumption. A film like Caligari, on the other hand, can radically activate rereading, can make it more than the tying up of loose narrative ends. One might try to explain, for example, the expressionist settings as the visions of the mad narrator, Francis. But the same settings are present in the frame story! Indeed, the more one tries to make everything fit, reconsidering the film retrospectively, the more difficult and problematic it becomes. These difficulties may prompt a more thorough, critical, and active rereading, even with the first viewing. Such an active rereading would be a re-cognition, a radical problematization of the first, consumerist rereading.

A restrospective rereading of Caligari might take this radical path, or it might stay within the safe boundaries of the consumer of narrative. Insofar as it is a classical narrative, the film tries to guide us into the latter course. In order to do this it must accomplish two difficult things at the same time. It must fool us into believing that Francis is sane until the end of a first, "naive" reading. Yet it must also avoid any narrational inconsistencies or contradictions that might become apparent with the closer inspection of a retrospective rereading. The following analysis will show, however, that such contradictions are unavoidable in Caligari and thus can lead to a more radical rereading. Crucial aspects of the film are necessary in order to make both the first, "naive" reading and subsequent retrospective readings possible. Neither wholly conventional/classical nor simply transgressive/modernist, these aspects intimately intermingle the two. [In a footnote, Budd states: "Few film 'landmarks' have been so thoroughly associated with a single influential reading as has The Cabinet of Doctor Caligai with Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler. Supposedly added against the screenwriters' wishes, the frame story for Kracauer simply cancels out the attack on authority in Francis's story: 'A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one … by putting the original into a box, this version faithfully mirrored the general retreat into a shell.' Noting but failing to account for the continuation of expressionist settings in the frame story, Kracauer claims the hypnotic and tyrannical Caligari to be a premonition of Hitler.

In implicit opposition to Kracauer, Noel Burch and Jorge Dana (in their 'Propositions,' Afterimage, Spring 1975) propose a modernist reading of the film. For them, Caligari becomes 'the first self-reflexive filmic work' through a subversion of codes of illusionist representation that in 1919 were newly established. I propose to shift the terms of analysis in order to subsume these readings within a consideration of what processes and structures set the historical conditions of possibility for these and other readings and interpretations."]

The contradictory demands of advancing and retrospective readings center on settings, since these are the most obviously modernist or transgressive aspects of a film that is primarily classical.… In classic realist cinema, dream sequences or stories told by the insane are usually clearly marked internally through stylistic elements such as setting, color, or acting in order to differentiate them from the naturalized, self-effacing discourse of realism. But the unexamined assumption that because setting functions to support narrative, the setting's level of stylization should be consistent with the narrative's "degree of reality" is precisely what Caligari makes problematic. And it becomes so problematic because, unlike more radically modernist films like the surrealist Un Chien Andalou (1928), disturbing anomalies appear in what otherwise appears to be a relatively conventional narrational system.… [We] can identify stresses that prevent this system from attaining equilibrium and harmony.

1. In order to help explain Francis's story retrospectively as fantasy, the level of visual stylization of the frame and narrated segments must be as different as possible. This helps explain, for example, the relative bareness of the garden decor in which Francis tells his story. The garden contrasts with the deranged perspectives of Holstenwall that immediately follow it in opening the tale. The film begins again causally at this point to help create a "naive" first reading, to induce forgetting of frame and telling; it seems also to start over visually, but in support of a retrospective reading.
2. Regardless of whether or not one sees the settings as motivated by Francis's madness, the implicit classical principle of consistency and homogeneity must keep the various settings of the frame story—garden, courtyard, and cell—on the same level of stylization, since they are proximate within the story space. This principle is even stronger in a reading that visually separates frame from framed, since that separation depends on the consistency of opposed parts.
3. Finally—and it is at this point that major stresses within the system of decor in Caligari emerge—a third contradictory stylistic pressure makes itself felt. The courtyard setting occurs in both frame and tale, thus holding those two levels together and working in diametrical opposition to attempts to keep them apart.

Architectonically, then, the system is unbalanced, out of true, a narrative and stylistic puzzle in which all the pieces don't fit. The film implicitly offers to explain one of its transgressions (the expressionist settings) with the other (the insane narrator), but only at the price of inconsistency. The attempted distinction between settings… is necessarily compromised and inconsistent, since to distinguish clearly between "normal" and "mad" worlds from the outset is to give the game away. In classical narrative most told stories are not stylistically different from their frames. Thus the minimalism of the garden decor—a wall and bench, a few bushes and "branches"—wants to be read, relatively superficially the first time, as suggesting some continuity with the settings that follow while also retrospectively suggesting discontinuity. Of necessity both the same and different from the expressionist settings that follow, this minimalism ends up splitting the difference while trying to avoid salience. Attempting to accommodate two contradictory readings, the text produces a mild but functional heterogeneity, an inconsistency probably overlooked by most viewers in the realist effect of unity and continuity. The analysis here demonstrates that this inconsistency, this aporia of rereading, is not a mistake but a necessary contradiction. Caligari generally follows the realist subordination of style to narration while allowing one element of style, setting, to get uppity; it also promotes an active rereading that may disrupt the positioning of the viewer as consumer. [In a footnote, Budd continues: "Several commentators have pointed out the film's heterogeneity of acting styles, usually assuming it to be an error or inadequacy. The acting ranges from the expressionist stylization of Werner Krauss as Caligari and Conrad Veidt as Cesare, through the conventional silent film histrionics of Francis and Jane, to the restrained and relatively naturalistic portrayal of the white-coated doctors in the asylum. Yet this disjunction of acting styles is no accident, but like the settings a symptomatic contradiction produced by the conflicting projects of the film. On the one hand, there is the necessity for stylistic consistency between setting and character (as defined by acting, costume, and make-up). This consistency is limited to Caligari and Cesare, whose sharp, angular gestures, furtive lines, and stylized costumes and make-up mark them as one with their expressionist surroundings. On the other hand, there is the necessity for stylistic inconsistency between setting and character. The text needs a stable reference point of sanity in a narration that suddenly reverses itself, shifting its ascription of madness from Caligari to Francis. With no stylistic relation to their surroundings, the asylum doctors, and especially the older one, constitute this reference point, since they are the only characters whose psychological traits are the same in both Francis's story and the frame that encloses it. Thus escaping from a reading of the film's expressionist aspects as motivated by the narrator's madness, these icons of objective science become virtually the last alibis for the invisible authority of classic realist narration itself; they become the stable ground that makes intelligible the sudden reverses of figures reread."]

We may restate the problem of Caligari by pointing to another, compounding contradiction. If the relation of garden setting to Holstenwall setting is, as argued, a kind of strategic compromise covering a contradiction, visually both similar and different, then we might expect that the courtyard in the frame story would appear different—but not too different—from its appearance in Francis's story, in order to support both advancing and retrospective readings. The difference would help suggest, retrospectively, that Francis had constructed his mad tale by transforming his "real" environment. Why, then (asks your narrator), is the courtyard setting unchanged on its reappearance in the frame story?

The answer lies again in the difficult demands of a retrospective narration. Narratively, the final courtyard scene is a crucial one: the film's very intelligibility depends on the clear reversal and revelation that Francis has lied, that he is an inmate in the same asylum he virtually directs in his own tale. This point prevents any ascription of the setting to Francis's madness. But in order to ensure that the audience understands that this is the asylum, the courtyard must look the same in both frame and tale. The moment of shock in the realization of the narrator's unreliability, the temporary vertigo that may disturb the secure, knowing processing of the viewer as customer—this effect demands that the courtyard be immediately recognizable. Consider the alternative: if the courtyard were different, our difficulty would be increased intolerably; we would be genuinely puzzled as to the relative statuses of the parts; we might ask if Francis were right, the frame a lie; we might even begin to see the inadequacy of character as an explanation and move toward problems of how character is represented. But the film for most viewers probably contains these speculations, unless those viewers already have some theoretical and historical knowledge. It can still shock and disturb, not only in its relatively conventional elements of horror and the uncanny (as one of the links between the iconography of German romanticism and the Hollywood horror genre) but also in the stresses of an architectonic that must be traversed again, reconsidered, "where something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly accomplished as something to be completed." That "something past" includes unexamined realist assumptions about narrational authority and neutrality, about a fixed and unchanging relation between segments designated "telling" and "tale," and about "the narrative's degree of reality."

Perhaps because of the heightened conflict of dominant and oppositional discourses that became the conditions of its production, Caligari condenses and mediates those conditions with unusual force and clarity. Yet production and text do not exhaust the moments in the history of a film; with Caligari the conflict of institutions is rearticulated in its conditions of reception, producing a fascinating reception history, only part of which we can sketch here.

As perhaps the most difficult and modernist of the German expressionist films of the twenties, Caligari was advertised and sold on the basis of its artistic innovations and prestige. In Paris it was an immediate and long-lasting success, playing for years there and even inspiring the term "Caligarisme" to designate "a postwar world seemingly all upside down" (Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler). In the United States the film was distributed by Samuel Goldwyn, opening at the Capitol Theatre in New York, one of the largest and most prestigious houses, on 3 April 1921. After breaking house records there for a week it played at a number of theaters in other cities, but it did not enjoy the general commercial success of the more conventional German imports of the time—Ernst Lubitsch's historical dramas Madame DuBarry (released in the United States as Passion) and Anna Boleyn (Deception).

Three aspects, three discourses of the publicity apparatus of the culture industries became important in the U.S. reception of Caligari: advertising, exhibition, and reviews. First, ads aggressively attempted to shape the film's reception in their own image, foregrounding characters and stars, making expressionism into a novelty, touting the suspenseful story, and trying to keep the whole thing dignified, as befitted a European art film. They also obsessively reproduced images of Cesare threatening Jane and tried to make Caligari's expressionism into a continental clothing fashion with which to sell Goldwyn's new female stars to U.S. women. These strategies took up the film's construction of Jane as object of desire for the male characters (and perhaps viewers), trying to assimilate it to the discourses of publicity.

Because of widespread anti-German prejudice, advertising called the film's origins "European," obscuring Caligari's artistic as well as national context. Expressionism's extreme subjectivism attributed its representational distortion, abstraction, and fragmentation to the pure emotional expression of a transcendent artist. Thus it was of all styles in the modernist pantheon perhaps the most vulnerable to a naturalization and psychologization in which the transcendent artist becomes a character, whose pure expression becomes, in turn, madness. Mystification of the film's origins prepared it for insertion into the culture of commodities, but still word got out that it was a German film, a product of the diseased Hun mind, as some reviewers implied. [In a footnote, Budd quotes a reviewer who stated that Caligari "is one of those screen dissipations to be indulged in only once in a lifetime. The Germans, who seem still convinced that they won the war, are getting morbid over it. We've got more evidence on our side, but we want to get away from ghastliness as much as possible. Any second picture of this type would be like artistic slime"]. Thus, ironically, the naturalization of expressionism helped make possible the irrational attribution of madness to a whole nation.

But to make the film consumable, advertising was not enough. The text itself had to be changed in the exhibition situation. This was the age of the picture palace, the industry's attempt to attract more middle-class viewers and to make moviegoing itself a stable, profitable institution beyond the success or failure of any individual film. Fragments of high and mass culture were melded together in the larger theaters into presentations of which the feature film was only one part: selections from classical music played by a live orchestra, ballet or other dance numbers, newsreels and film shorts, and staged prologues and epilogues to the feature were all part of these presentations.

As organized by Sam "Roxy" Rothafel, who managed the Capitol Theatre and was one of the leading impresario-exhibitors in the country, the presentation for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari was typically lavish but also somewhat unusual, with a live, narrative prologue and epilogue that essentially placed a second frame onto Francis's story. The curtain opened on two characters, Cranford and Jane, sitting in front of a cozy fireplace. Cranford tells a story of walking through thick foliage into a garden where he encounters Francis ("like a man sleepwalking in a horrid nightmare"), who begins to tell him the story of "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." Then the curtains close, the lights fade, and this staged prologue slides seamlessly into the opening of the film. At the end, after the doctor has examined Francis and exclaimed in the final title, "I think I know how to cure him now," we return to the stage, where Cranford reassures (?) us that Francis, cured, today leads a happy, normal life, unable to remember his hallucination.

It's difficult to imagine a more blatant attempt to force a problematic text into conventional form, to contain its excesses in a frame of authoritarian and commodifying realism. The character who listens to Francis's story in the film is a potentially problematic one, since he seems to be an inmate of the asylum but must also serve as stand-in for the viewer at the crucial moment of the revelation of Francis's madness, when he recoils at the protagonist's ravings as a cue for our own response. The added second frame attempts to contain the sliding of this function, probably invisible to most viewers anyway, by making the listener a sane "anchor," an authoritative reference point outside the original text. The discourse of the film is attributed to a responsible source, since doubt is cast from the outset on Francis's sanity. With the problems and disturbances of the film not so much solved as enclosed, reframed, the limits of the culture industry's cooptation of Caligari were seemingly reached: the ruthless functionalism of this second frame tries to reestablish the hierarchy of discourses in realism, with style subordinate to (and dissolving into) narration, fantasies subordinate to (and demarcated from) a narrow, ideological concept of the real.

Though the trade paper Motion Picture News claimed that the prologue and epilogue "were used by practically every exhibitor who has shown the picture," reviewers ignored the second frame and wrote about the film. Not that reviewers' comments were any more enlightening or less formulaic than they are today: in keeping with the pseudohigh culture milieu of the Capitol and other picture palaces, many reviewers and critics tried to spiritualize and mystify Caligari. Imitating the discourse of quasi-religious celebration used by reviewers of the higher arts, they posited a realm of gentility for this film, blessed by its separation from the material world of commodities and exchange. Yet as Herbert Marcuse has pointed out, this "affirmative culture" is not so far from the mundane world of capitalism:

As in material practice the product separates itself from the producers and becomes independent as the universal reified form of the "commodity," so in cultural practice a work and its content congeal into universally valid "values."

The ideas of the powerful are often the most powerful ideas. During this period the U.S. cultural establishment began to take a serious interest in the movies, and Caligari, like other German imports, became evidence for arguments by reviewers and others that film could be an art form, with all the prestige and mystification that nomination entails. In the stock exchange of cultural legitimation, Caligari's deracinated expressionism and its limited modernist innovations became values that encouraged cultural "investment" in the new medium of film. Thus valued, such innovations also reciprocally added to the "cultural capital"—the power to define aesthetic value and status—of dominant social groups.