MovieChat Forums > Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) Discussion > A question and a thought

A question and a thought

posted 9 years ago by ben-thayer
2 replies | jump to latest

Reading the threads here, I see that many are saying the ending as shown was not the original ending as written by the screenwriters.

If this ending wasn't the original does anyone know what it was supposed to be? One user in a thread here states:

"Screenwriters Mayer and Janowitz intended Caligari to be a reflection on the state of post-war Germany, commenting on the authoritarian structure and, in Janowitz’s own words, demonstrating that “reason overcomes unreasonable power.” However, director Wiene and producer Erich Pommer were both uncomfortable with blatantly challenging society’s strictures, and constructed the end-caps sections, which were not part of the original script, to soften the blow."

So...has the original ending (or at least, what it was originally supposed to be) been lost to time?

Does anyone have any info on what the screenwriters' original ending would've been?

BTW, I was riveted to the screen while watching this film. So far I've really enjoyed the various interpretations of the ambiguous ending.

If anyone is familiar with Robert W. Chambers' work, such as The King in Yellow, he used the theme of the unreliable narrator in his stories The Repairer of Reputations and The Maker of Moons. They were published in 1895 and 1896 respectively, and I wonder if these stories had any kind of influence (minute, but perhaps a bit) on the screenwriters. Chambers' work was (and still is) well known and did inspire others, such as HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

From Wiki:

In the case of "The Repairer of Reputations," Chambers all but invites the reader to doubt every single detail the unreliable narrator relates. Chambers breaks the basic contract between author and reader by refusing to relate something that is both interesting and truthful (even given the "suspension of disbelief" required of fiction).

[–] PreachCaleb 9 years ago

From what I've read, it seems the frame story was just added on, meaning the original ending would be when Dr. Caligari is captured and placed in a straight jacket cementing the theme of those in power being insane and using others for their own benefits.

This means to me, the original ending is not lost and still plays the same in the movie; it just happens a few minutes earlier than the added on it-was-all-insane-ramblings ending.

Can't stop the signal.

[–] Tartarlamb 9 years ago

The whole production of Caligari, almost every single facet, is debated. In part because it is so difficult to separate what really happened from the familiar historical narrative of Weimar cinema, arising from Caligari and developed after WW2 by German expats like Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer, and also because every person involved in any way with it, however tangentially, disputes who did what, how big their role was, and what the film was about. This includes who produced it (Pommer or Reinert), and who had the idea of the sets (Mayer and Janowitz, or Reimann), who approved the sets (Wiene or Pommer), etc. etc.

It also includes who wrote the framing story. If you want to open that bag of worms, three men have claimed it was theirs; Fritz Lang, Carl Mayer, and Robert Wiene.

But your quote about Mayer and Janowitz claiming it was a sweeping commentary on postwar Germany also indicates this problem. This is certainly the narrative built by Eisner and Kracauer, and in fact almost every major commentator on Weimar culture and arts singles out specifically Caligari as a defining piece of the Zeitgeist. We are talking about an enormous piece of cultural real estate, and that is perhaps why the story will never be clear: all of these men, ex post facto, were trying to put their stamp on the piece and represent in the most flattering way their intentions and contributions.

Curiously, I think it was Janowitz that at one point had suggested the whole screenplay was devised as a parody about how trendy psychoanalysis had become. Which is far from a sweeping critique of collective and sublimated authoritarian urges, etc. Caligari is a monumental film in every way, but its legend might be a little divorced from the intentions of its authors.

The tl;dr—who knows?