There are a few things that stood out to me in my viewing experience.
1. Pure color. The film was released in 1920, while the world-recognized color film was released in 1935. It shows that this film is in the groping stage from black and white film to color film, which should be the method of film dyeing. There are 4 colors in the film, yellow represents day, blue represents night, pink appears twice in the heroine's room, and the last one is green for the subtitles. The director's choice of these highly saturated colors adds to the film's distinctive character and creates a ghostly sense of the mentally ill world.
2. Irregular viewfinder frame. At the beginning of the film, the male protagonist is talking with an old man. Whether it is a medium shot from the side or a close-up shot of the two of them alone, within the total 16:9 frame, the viewing frames of the two are irregular. At first I thought it might be the old film that was damaged, but when I saw that there was a complete picture behind, and the viewfinder frame at the back was more changeable, there were viewfinder frames such as diamonds and circles, so it could be judged that the director did it on purpose. The large clips in the middle are actually pictures in the mind of the male protagonist. These irregular frames also imply the true identity of the male protagonist. He is a neuropathy. The imagination in his mind is full of strangeness and no rules. .
3. The set in the movie. There are two very sharp contrasts in the movie, namely, the town in the male protagonist's mind, where the rooms are full of irregular graphics, the houses are off the horizon, and the roads are irregular. However, when the male protagonist came to the mental hospital in pursuit of Dr. Calibri, the style changed, the ground was flat, the patterns on the walls were regular, and the pictures on the ground diverged. Again, remind the audience that the world in the mind of a mentally ill person is completely different from that of a normal person.
As a representative work of German Expressionism, Dr. Caligari has a lot to learn from. Through some external changes, more emphasis is placed on expressing the inner world. The twists and turns of the plot plus the reversal and reversal make the audience think about how to judge which of the world you see is true? Which one is fake again? "Shutter Island" starring Xiao Lizi also pays tribute to the film to a certain extent.
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