silver nitrate notes

Caligari and the Question of Tinting

18 jun 2010

A reader wrote to ask whether The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) qualifies for this site. The reader's reasoning was decent: the film survives in restorations that include tinted sequences, blue for night, sepia for day, amber for the asylum interiors. That is, strictly speaking, colour. By the strict reading of the rule of this site, no.

I thought about this for a week. Then I watched the film twice, once on the 2014 F.W. Murnau-Stiftung restoration with the tints, once on a clean monochrome transfer from a 16mm print. Here is what I think.

Tinting in silent cinema was a chemical process applied to the print, not to the image as photographed. The negative was black and white. The cinematographer, in this case Willy Hameister, lit and exposed for monochrome. The tints were a post-production layer added to indicate time of day, mood, or location. When we read silent-film tinting today as "colour," we are extending a modern definition of the word backwards.

The films that the focus of this blog is meant to include are films where the cinematographer chose lenses, lights, and frame composition in greyscale. Caligari was exactly such a film. Hameister and the designers Walter Reimann, Walter Röhrig, and Hermann Warm (who painted the famous asymmetric sets) made every visual decision in monochrome. The tinted prints we now see are a contemporary indicator, not a creative one. In spirit, the film is a black and white film.

The edge cases are real, and I should name them. The rule of the site still sits out films that used hand-painted frame-by-frame colour as a creative choice (some Méliès, parts of The Last Days of Pompeii) and it sits out everything from Technicolor onwards that was lit and framed for hue. Caligari is not on that side of the line.

Now, the film. The painted shadows on the painted walls. The asylum that turns out to be the world. The narrative frame that turns the whole story into the delusion of an inmate. Caligari is a film made on three small sets at the Lixie-Atelier in Berlin in late 1919, on a budget that should have produced a curiosity and instead produced the film that announced German Expressionism to everyone outside Germany.

Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen devotes most of a chapter to Caligari and the question of who actually came up with the painted sets. The standard story credits the three designers; Eisner argues that producer Erich Pommer made the decision for budget reasons, and the team turned it into a stylistic principle. Either way, it worked. A century on, it still works.

[ « prev: Sherlock Jr · next: Safety Last » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. University of California Press, 1969 ed.
[2] Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton UP, 1947.
[3] Robinson, David. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. BFI Film Classics, 1997.
[4] F.W. Murnau-Stiftung, restoration notes for the 2014 reissue.