The Making of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

To say that Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an unusual movie for that time period would be an understatement. The way that the idea was conceived is enough to make the film stand out. Hans Janowitz (pictured below), the writer, was visiting a carnival where he saw a suspicious looking man hiding in the shadows of the tents. The next day it was publicized that a young girl was murdered at the carnival. Janowitz attended the girl's funeral and saw the same creepy man skulking around. While he had no reason to believe this man was her killer, he created the whole film based on this experience. 

The technical aspects also drew a lot of attention to the movie. It was filmed with the intention of making the audience feel unsettled at which it succeeded. With its odd camera angles and and strangely shaped set pieces such as windows and doors, its claustrophobic lighting effects, and the design of the intertitles, a kind of schizophrenic feeling is created. While this very explicitly reveals the influence that German Expressionism had over this film, the visual attributes came to be as they are for another reason. It was simply that the creators of this film were running on extremely limited resources. Robert Weine actually painted the light beams onto the backdrops used in the movie because at this time, the use of electricity was heavily regulated throughout Germany.