Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 12.

As in The Birth of a Nation, Griffith uses the structures of Victorian melodrama to make his political points. Intolerance is examined through the lens of tragic love, which lends emotional energy and pathos to the narratives. In the Babylonian story, Belshazzar and his beloved Attarea (Seena Owen) commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of the victorious Cyrus the Persian (George Siegmann), and in the French story a young couple, he Catholic and she Protestant, are unable to escape the massacre.

Intolerance is a monument to Griffiths talent for screenwriting, directing actors, designing shots, and editinga one-of-a-kind masterpiece on a scope and scale that has never been equaled. Meant to persuade, this film exerted more influence on the Soviet revolutionary cinema of Sergei Eisenstein and others than on Griffiths American contemporaries. RBP

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1910s

DAS KABINETT DES DOKTOR CALIGARI (1919)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the keystone of a strain of bizarre, fantastical cinema that flourished in Germany in the 1920s and was linked, somewhat spuriously, with the Expressionist art movement. If much of the

development of the movies in the mediums first two decades was directed toward the Lumière-style window on the world, with fictional or documentary stories presented in an emotionally stirring manner designed to make audiences forget they were watching a film, Caligari returns to the mode of Georges Méliès by constantly presenting stylized, magical, theatrical effects that exaggerate or caricature reality. In this film, officials perch on ridiculously high stools, shadows are painted on walls and faces, jagged cutout shapes predominate in all the sets, exteriors are obviously painted, and unrealistic backdrops and performances are stylized to the point of hysteria.

Writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz conceived the film as taking place in its own out-of-joint world, and director Robert Wiene and set designers Hermann Warm, Walter Roehrig, and Walter Reimann put a twist on every scene and even intertitle to insist on this. Controversially, Fritz Langat an early stage attached as directorsuggested that the radical style of Caligari would be too much for audiences to take without some explanation. Lang devised a frame story in which hero Francis (Friedrich Feher) recounts the storyof sinister mesmerist charlatan Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), his zombielike somnambulist slave Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and a series of murders in the rickety small town of Holstenwalland is finally revealed to be an asylum inmate who, in The Wizard of Oz (1939) style, has imagined a narrative that incorporates various people in his daily life. This undercuts the antiauthoritarian tone of the film as Dr. Caligari, in the main story an asylum director who has become demented, is revealed to be a genuinely decent man out to help the hero. However, the asylum set in the frame story is exactly the same unreal one seen in the flashback, making the whole film and not just Franciss bracketed story somehow unreliable. Indeed, by revealing its expressionist vision to be that of a madman, the film could even appeal to conservatives who deemed all modernist art as demented.

Wiene, less innovative than most of his collaborators, makes surprisingly little use of cinematic technique, with the exception of the flashback-within-a-flashback as Krauss is driven mad by superimposed instructions that he must become Caligari. The film relies entirely on theatrical devices, the camera fixed center stage as the sets are displayed and the actors (especially Veidt) providing any movement or impact. Langs input did serve to make the movie a strange species of amphibian: It plays as an art movie to the highclass crowds who appreciate its innovations, but its also a horror movie with a gimmick. With its sideshow ambience, hypnotic mad scientist villain, and leotard-clad, heroine-abducting monster, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a major early entry in the horror genre, introducing images, themes, characters, and expressions that became fundamental to the likes of Tod Brownings Dracula and james Whales Frankenstein (both 1931). KN

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1910s

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919)