Screening times:
Friday, October 27, 7:30 PM - Full-capacity screening
Friday, October 27, 9:30 PM - Full-capacity screening
Robert Wiene | Germany | 1920 | 74m | German intertitles with English subtitles
with Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt
Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) casts a shadow across film history as a masterpiece of German Expressionism and a keystone of horror cinema. It delivers a nightmarish vision in monochrome: Werner Krauss is the insane Dr Caligari who claims a somnambulist, Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, can predict the future - in fact, Caligari is using him to commit murder.
The cinematography and sets aim to provoke a nightmarish vision of bizarre lines, jagged angles, distorted perspectives and chaotic imagery, with shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the backgrounds - the entire film shot in studio. The filmmakers experimented with light, shadow, and the special effects technology available to plug into the audience's subconscious and elicit the mind of a madman.
Film critic Roger Ebert called it, arguably, "the first true horror film."
New Hermitage is Andrew MacKelvie, woodwinds; India Gailey, cello; Ross Burns, guitar; and Ellen Gibling, harp. All highly accomplished musicians in their own right, the quartet birthed in 2017 in Halifax, Nova Scotia out of their shared connection to Jerry Granelli and the Creative Music Workshop. Since then, New Hermitage has shared bills with artists such as revelatory composer/improviser Angel Bat Dawid, jaw harp innovator chik white, pi'pa virtuoso Liu Fang, and prolific noise explorer i d m theft able. Among their six live recordings are two performances with renowned bass clarinettist Jeff Reilly, one of which won Music Nova Scotia’s “Classical Recording of the Year'' award. New Hermitage’s first studio album, Unearth, was released in 2020 to much critical acclaim.
"[That Wiene], this outsider, with no knowledge of studio customs, no reverence for studio traditions, should have turned out The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seems a thing almost too strange for belief." -CA Lejeune, The Guardian
"I recommend heartily this somewhat daring Teutonic dive into the troubled waters of ellipsoids, parabaloids, conic sections, and chiarscura, the terminology of which is quite sufficient to indicate that the bars are up to the normal mind." -Edwin Schallert, Los Angeles Times
"The cubist settings in this picture are not only interesting because they are fantastic; they are also extraordinarily impressive when the effect of horrible beauty or of terror or imminent doom is desired." -Ruth Boyle, New York Daily News
Tickets $16.50 ($15 cash at the door if available).
