CALIGARI
165
the body of the original story is put into a framing story which intro–
duces Francis as a madman. The film
Caligari
opens with the first
of the two episodes composing the frame. Francis is shown sitting
on a bench in the park of the lunatic asylum, listening to the con–
fused babble of a fellow sufferer. Moving slowly, like an apparition,
a female inmate of the asylum passes by: it is Jane. Francis says
to his companion: "What I have experienced with' her is still stranger
than what you have encountered. I will tell it to you.'' Fade-out.
Then a view of Holstenwall fades in, and the original story unfolds,
ending, as has been seen, with the identification of Caligari. Mter
a new fade-out the second and final episode of the framing story
begins. Francis, having finished the narration, follows his companion
back to the asylum, where he mingles with a crowd of sad figures–
among them Cesare, who absent-mindedly caresses a little flower.
The director of the asylum, a mild and understanding-looking per–
son, joins the crowd. Lost in the maze of his hallucinations, Francis
takes the director for the nightmarish character he himself has
created, and accuses this imaginary fiend of being a dangerous
madman. He screams, he fights the attendants in a frenzy. The
scenery is switched over to a sickroom, with the director putting on
hom-rimmed spectacles which immediately change his appearance:
it seems to be Caligari who examines the exhausted Francis. After
this he removes his spectacles and, all mildness, tells his assistants
that Francis believes him to be Caligari. Now that he understands
the case of his patient, the director concludes, he will be able to
heal him. With this cheerful message the audience is dismissed.
Janowitz and Mayer knew why they raged against the framing
story: it perverted, if not reversed, their intrinsic intentions. While
the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene's
Caligari
glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness.
A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one-follow–
ing the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome
individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum. This change
undoubtedly resulted not so much from Wiene's personal predilec–
tions as from his instinctive submission to the necessities of the
screen; films, at least commercial films, are forced to answer to mass
desires. In its changed form
Caligari
was no longer a product ex–
pressing, at best, sentiments characteristic of the intelligentsia, but
a film supposed equally to be in harmony with what the less educated
felt and liked.
If
it holds true that during the postwar years most Germans
