I. The scene I chose in the film comes at around the 10 minute mark, when the first murder is revealed, that of the town-clerk The part I am referring to is actually three scenes - the first time the carnival is shown and Caligari introduces Cesare. Right after showing the scene of the carnival, in which is everything seems light and airy, the camera cuts to a very dark and expressionistic scene of three men who find the body of the town-clerk. The music immediately changes to a funeral dirge and rather than the gay scene, it is dark and introspective. The angles are sharp and the scene sinister. But right after, the scene cuts again to the carnival, of young people dancing and and eagerly going to the carnival to the Cesare, who is about to wake up after a years-long slumber. What struck me about the scene is the contrast between the two - of the really gay carnival and the dark scene of the post-murder.
In the lecture, Professor Murdaco wrote that one interpretation of the movie was that it predicted Hitler. The implication is that Germans have to choose between the chaos of the carnival and the stable leadership of a Dr. Caligari, i.e. Hitler. But I interpreted these scenes a little differently. I actually think that that the film is criticizing the escapism and vapid life of 1920s Berlin. Germans were flocking to materialistic and escapist pursuits of Weimar Germany; this is the metaphor of the “carnival”. Their interests are being taken up by silly tricks like the sleepwalker Cesare. For people like Francis, they are living in their delusions; the rest are merely living in escapist fantasies and carnivals. But underneath all this superficial fun lies a deep, scary underbelly of society; this is the dark scene of the post-murder. I understood the contrast to be a parody of Weimar Germany.
In this sense, I found these scenes to be quite nihilistic. The filmmakers are saying that society is rotten, lost in superficial pursuits and escapism. But underneath is a dark corner of society that nobody wants to talk about until it blows up in people’s faces. Society has to be destroyed and built anew, to get rid of all of this.
II.
“The creative writer is the intellectual per se, for whom objective source materials are merely an arbitrary arsenal of reference of which he makes use, if at all, according to his specifically aesthetic aims. He thus represents the prototype of intellectual behavior and the lively discussion among sociologists about the role of the intelligentsia could perhaps be extended to a more concrete level if it were supported by a historically documented analysis of both the socially relevant self-portrait and the specific functions of one of the oldest groups among the intellectual professions.” - Leo Lowenthal, “The Position of Writer in Society”
Leo Lowenthal was a German sociologist and considered one of the last thinkers of the Frankfurt School. He was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt and became a leading sociologist on researching mass culture, literature, and Marxist ideas. In 1933, he and his colleagues all left Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler. He settled in New York and worked for Columbia University and even later the Voice of America. His primary field of study was the role of literature in popular culture.
One of the Lowenthal’s main ideas is that Marxists and left-wingers have taken a “haughty” approach towards the culture of the masses. They have traditionally viewed popular culture as a manifestation of the ruling class and thought that popular culture is just a way for the bourgeois to feed the working-class myths. But Lowenthal was one of the few who noticed the great power that popular culture has and did not try to denigrate it; he tried to understand it. He said that a great opening has been made in this field of study about how to best understand popular culture.
To me, the quote above means that a writer is not just mirroring reality because there are no real objective truths. These “objective source materials” are just the launchpad for ideas, but these can be interpreted in any way. The writer is therefore an interpreter of reality, not a journalist. He has to take the material that he sees and use them to further an argument that he feels is correct. He should not be limited by objective truths, because such things do not exist.
About The Scene:
ReplyDeleteI did not think about that when I saw the film but it is a really cool way to look at how those two scenes relate to each other. I like how you said that the people in Germany were delusional about reality.