ing in
a cell, and smothered by all the oppressions of a weary mind, does not
desert the spectator for a minute.

The play is more important, technically, than in its subject-matter and
mood. It proves in a hundred new ways the resources of the film in making
all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act at all,
the leading actors in the films. But they need not necessarily act to a
diabolical end. An angel could have as well been brought from the cabinet
as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have been a work
of beneficence and health and healing. I could not help but think that
the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could have been
acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case and great
sarcophagus. The wings of Isis and Nephthys could have been spread over
the sky instead of the oppressive walls of the crooked city. Lights
instead of shadows could have been made actors and real hieroglyphic
inscriptions instead of scrawls.

As it was, the alleged insane man was more sensible than most motion
picture directors, for his scenery acted with him, and not according to
accident or silly formula. I make these points as an antidote to the
general description of this production by those who praise it.

They speak of the scenery as grotesque, strained, and experimental, and
the plot as sinister. But this does not get to the root of the matter.
There is rather the implication in most of the criticisms and praises
that the scenery is abstract. Quite the contrary is the case. Indoors
looks like indoors. Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs.
The actors do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to
believe. The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for
the most part expressed in the acting and plot. The fair looks like a
fair and the library looks like a library. There is nothing experimental
about any of the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or
over-considered. It seems experimental because it is thrown into contrast
with extreme commercial formulas in the regular line of the "movie
trade." But compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or
Du Lac or Duerer, or Rembrandt's etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more
realistic. And Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions
of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter. Hundreds of indoor stories
will be along such lines, once the merely commercial m