The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene’s 1920 silent is the film usually pointed to first when someone says “German Expressionism” about a set rather than a painting — jagged painted shadows standing in for actual lighting, streets that lean because the carpenters built them leaning, not because the camera is tilted.

We run it with a live piano accompaniment, as it would have been shown on its original release, before recorded sound existed to run instead.