I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.

AM I LIVING IN A BOX? [496]

For as much as the film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920) is celebrated for bringing German Expressionism to cinema, while providing the foundations on which the horror film genre were built, the first thing it brings to my mind was its having been filmed entirely inside a studio whose floor measured only six by six metres, or about twenty feet each way – I don’t know if it was a cube.

Finding the space to make a film is never a concern for anyone watching the finished work, but it may dictate if that film can be made at all, whether by availability, permission or cost. However, knowing it is perfectly possible to produce a multi-layered work of art, encompassing many locations and actors, within the dimensions of a large living room, means that nothing is impossible, so long as you can scale your production to that space.

To that end, the theatrical painted backdrops of “Caligari” work to provide setting, mood, light and depth, although not necessarily depth of field – if it were not for actors appearing in front of them, the backdrop props and floor could have appeared to be one painting. They are surreal, almost medieval, and designed to unsettle, appearing like stark, monochromatic prints from woodcuts.

There is conjecture about how “Caligari” came to be portrayed in a German Expressionist style, as it was not stipulated in a surviving script, just as there is conjecture over whether its framing story, planting the tale of a doctor using a somnambulist to murder people into the mind of an asylum patient, was mandated to make the story easier for audiences to handle. To me, it doesn’t matter: the film’s imagery is burned into my retinas, just as the eyes of the somnambulist Cesare look through you.

Few other films look like “Caligari”, but its constricted studio size and low budget adds to a notion that the film’s bold artistic choices were made due to the practical concerns of when it was in production from 1919-20. Lighting effects were also much harder to achieve in the silent film era, making the painting of contrasting blacks and whites onto the backdrops – and, through make-up, onto the actors – an easier path to achieving contrast. 

The small Lixie-Film studio, located in the Weissensee area of Berlin, was originally built in 1914, at a time when many film studios were still essentially greenhouses, trying to catch as much natural light as possible, in any way possible – attempts in chiaroscuro in early silent films would have been made with natural light. Carbon arc lights were only introduced in 1912, entering theatres before being adapted for filmmaking, and with film stock at the time being insensitive to red light rendered tungsten-based incandescent lighting as useless. The manufacture of film stock sensitive to the whole colour spectrum would begin in 1927, just as adding sound to motion pictures became a further headache for studios to overcome.

The expressionistic effect of “Caligari” has taken on a different meaning for me on more recent viewings. I initially saw it in rather poor public domain prints, the outlines of what the art direction intended reducing details down to shades and impressions of light and darkness. Subsequent restorations of the film, and Blu-ray and 4K home editions, means that individual brushstrokes can be properly admired, painting light as much as painting with light.

THEN FIRE, MAKE YOUR BODY COLD [387]

I had wanted to buy a copy of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” for a while. I now have the Eureka Entertainment "Masters of Cinema" series edition, making it part of an excellently-produced series that includes the definitive versions of silent films like "Metropolis," "Nosferatu," and "The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari," along with later films like "Nashville" and "Grey Gardens" - although, if you are a serious film collector and scholar, you will be already aware of this.

 

My reason for buying this film is, like "Citizen Kane," it is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Both films also suffered the fate of the original camera negative being destroyed in fires. However, with the reputation of "Citizen Kane" only being firmly established after the critic Pauline Kael wrote about it in the 1970s, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" was seriously studied from the start, even if everyone was watching the wrong version of it.

 

As befits a religious-themed, pre-"Life of Brian" film, and one not made by a French person, "Joan of Arc" was subjected to cuts mandated by French film censors and the Archbishop of Paris. The fire happened after that, and in a time when copies of films were easily discarded after use, and when those copies were routinely made from the original negative, the original film was as good as lost.

 

What do you do from here? Carl Dreyer was able to stitch together a second version of the film, using alternate takes, and other shots not originally used.

 

That version was also destroyed by a fire in 1929. "Safety film" was not introduced until the 1940s, meaning an entire art form had to rely on nitrate film stock, combustible when stored or even moved wrongly.

 

Until 1951, the only widely-available version of the film was a cut-down version with a commentary from an American radio personality. The rediscovery of a print of the second version consigned the bastardisation to the bin, but this version had a Baroque-style film score and subtitles added by the person who found it. All the while, the director had to look on and object to what happened to what was left of his work.

 

This is where it gets weird, if it didn't feel so already. In 1981, a copy of the original version was discovered, in its original wrapping from the Danish film censor, in a janitor's cupboard in a mental hospital in Oslo - in 1928, the director of the hospital asked for a copy, as they had written about French history. The Norwegian Film Institute was contacted to see if they wanted it. They took it, then stored it for three years without watching it. When they finally did, it was found to be perfect.

 

This sort of miraculous discovery is not new - two episodes of "Dad's Army" were rescued from a skip, some Patrick Troughton "Doctor Who" episodes were recently found in Nigeria, and the now complete version of "Metropolis" used elements found in Argentina and New Zealand. The simple thing is never to throw anything away, as you may not be the one who realises how much it is worth.