As a flagship work of German Expressionism, every element of color, set, makeup, performance, and story exudes a strong avant-garde temperament today. The bizarre architectural layouts in the film, the artificial background of postmodernism, the eerie soundtrack, the variety of picture colors, the distorted and irregular houses and furniture, the graffiti-like walls and many other "distorted" elements are really It is too avant-garde, but it also better explains what "nightmare" is, a subconscious spiritual activity that comes from reality, distorts reality, and shows reality. After such subconscious processing is visualized in film, a combination of the above subjective elements is formed. But such a combination is empirical and subjective. Just like the innate cognitive form proposed by Kant, objective things can only be manifested if they conform to people's innate cognitive form, and this film is obviously completely different from the innate cognitive form of other films, which also reflects what expressionism is.
The film begins with Francis telling a story about himself and his girlfriend to a stranger, and the entire film is based on Francis. He and his friend Alan watched a hypnotism performed by Dr. Caligari. During the performance, Allen was invited to ask the doctor's partner and sleepwalker Nishizawa how long he could live, and the answer was early tomorrow morning. And Ellen was killed in his sleep the next morning. Francis and friend Jenny and police then launched an investigation. During the investigation, the sleepwalker Nishizawa tried to kill Jenny who was sleeping, but was moved by Jenny's beauty and took Jenny away. Under the pursuit of everyone, the sleepwalker left Jenny and fled. Meanwhile, Francis saw Caesar the sleepwalker lying in a wooden coffin in Dr. Caligari's hut. This made him think that the killer who killed Ellen and kidnapped Jenny was not Caesar. But in the end, when police searched Dr. Caligari's hut, they found a human-shaped puppet resembling the sleepwalker Caesar lying in the wooden coffin. Later, Francis found that Dr. Caligari was the director of the mental hospital, so he sneaked into the mental hospital to investigate, and found that the director was due to the study of a "Dr. Caligari's Cabin" in a document called "Sleepwalker". The article went into trouble, and the murderer behind the use of sleepwalker Nishizawa in the literature was Dr. Caligari. The Dean was bent on getting into Dr. Caligari's heart and becoming him. When I thought the truth of the story was revealed, there was a reversal at the end. It turned out that the place where Francis told the story to the stranger at the beginning of the film was in a mental hospital, and the fiancée he said was actually a mental patient. The sleepwalking in the story Nishizawa is also mentally ill, and Francis himself is a mentally ill... The story he tells is actually his fantasy. In the end, Francis, who was mad at the sight of the dean, was subdued by everyone. The dean said that Francis had always regarded him as Dr. Caligari. He finally knew the delusional object of Francis' paranoia, and he also knew how to treat it. ........Such a reversal pattern influenced a large number of later genre films, especially suspense films. The film unfolds through the narration of a character, and at the end it is not uncommon to reveal that the narrator is lying or delusional fantasy and so on. Such as "The Usual Suspects", "Shutter Island" and so on.
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