Even if you’ve nev­er actu­al­ly watched The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it through­out the cen­tu­ry of cin­e­ma his­to­ry since the film first came out, dur­ing which its influ­ence has man­i­fest­ed again and again: in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Dario Argen­to’s Sus­piria, Ter­ry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and Guiller­mo del Toro’s Night­mare Alley — not to men­tion much of the fil­mo­gra­phies of auteurs like David Lynch and Tim Bur­ton. These are just some of the films ref­er­enced by Tyler Knud­sen, bet­ter known as Cin­e­maTyler, in the video essay above, “Dr. Cali­gari Did More Than Just Invent Hor­ror Movies.”

“A case can be made that Cali­gari was the first true hor­ror film,” writes Roger Ebert. In ear­li­er cin­e­mat­ic scary sto­ries, “char­ac­ters were inhab­it­ing a rec­og­niz­able world. Cali­gari cre­ates a mind­scape, a sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy. In this world, unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.”

The tech­niques employed to that end have also con­vinced cer­tain his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um to call the pic­ture “the first exam­ple in cin­e­ma of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, a visu­al style in which not only the char­ac­ters but the world itself is out of joint.” Knud­sen places this style in his­tor­i­cal con­text, specif­i­cal­ly that of Ger­many’s Weimar Repub­lic, which was estab­lished after World War I and last­ed until the rise of the Nazis.

Polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble but artis­ti­cal­ly fruit­ful, the Weimar peri­od gave rise to a vari­ety of new artis­tic atti­tudes, at once enthu­si­as­tic and over­whelmed. “Where­as impres­sion­ism tries to depict the real world, but only from a first glance or impres­sion instead of focus­ing on details,” Knud­sen says, “expres­sion­ism tries to get at the artist’s inner feel­ings rather than the actu­al appear­ance of the sub­ject mat­ter.” Hence the bizarre sets of Cali­gari, whose every angle looks designed to be max­i­mal­ly uncon­vinc­ing. And yet the film is entire­ly faith­ful to its par­tic­u­lar real­i­ty: not the one occu­pied by Weimar-era Ger­mans or any­one else, but the one it con­jures up in a man­ner only motion pic­tures can. 102 years lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a haunt­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence — and one expres­sive of the sheer poten­tial of cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Watch­es The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari & Writes “The Cin­e­ma,” a Sem­i­nal Attempt to Under­stand the Pow­er of Movies (1926)

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

For almost forty years, we’ve been los­ing the French New Wave. François Truf­faut and Jacques Demy died young, back in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; Hen­ri Colpi, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol fol­lowed in the ear­ly years of the twen­ty-first. The last decade alone saw the pass­ings of Chris Mark­er, Alain Resnais, Jacques Riv­ette, and Agnès Var­da. But not until yes­ter­day did la Nou­velle Vague’s hardi­est sur­vivor, and indeed its defin­ing fig­ure, step off this mor­tal coil at the age of 91. Jean-Luc Godard did­n’t launch the move­ment — that dis­tinc­tion belongs to Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows, from 1959 — but in 1960 his first fea­ture Breath­less made film­go­ers the world over under­stand at once that the old rules no longer applied.

Yet for all his will­ing­ness to vio­late its con­ven­tions, Godard pos­sessed a thor­ough­go­ing respect for cin­e­ma. This per­haps came from his pre-auteur­hood years he spent as a film crit­ic in Paris, writ­ing for the estimable Cahiers du ciné­ma (an insti­tu­tion to which Truf­faut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Riv­ette also con­tributed). “It made me love every­thing,” he says of his expe­ri­ence with crit­i­cism in the 1963 inter­view just above.

“It taught me not to be nar­row-mind­ed, not to ignore Renoir in favor of Bil­ly Wilder.” A con­trar­i­an from the begin­ning, the young Godard dis­dained what he saw as the for­mal­ized and intel­lec­tu­al­ized prod­ucts of the French film indus­try in favor of vis­cer­al­ly crowd-pleas­ing pic­tures made in the U.S.A.

“We Euro­peans have movies in our head, and Amer­i­cans have movies in their blood,” says Godard in the 1965 British tele­vi­sion inter­view above. “We have cen­turies and cen­turies of cul­ture behind us. We have to think about things. We can’t just do things.” To “just do things” is per­haps the prime artis­tic desire dri­ving his oeu­vre, which spans sev­en decades and includes more than 40 fea­ture films as well as many projects of less eas­i­ly cat­e­go­riz­able form. But this went with a life­long immer­sion in clas­si­cal Euro­pean cul­ture, evi­denced by a fil­mog­ra­phy dense with ref­er­ences to its works. The weight of his for­ma­tion and ambi­tions took a cer­tain toll ear­ly on: “I’m already tired,” he says in a 1960 inter­view at Cannes, where Breath­less was screen­ing. Did the per­ma­nent rev­o­lu­tion­ary of cin­e­ma sus­pect, even then, how far he still had to go?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Film­mak­ing Mas­ter­class on Insta­gram

RIP Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do: The Actor Who Went from the French New Wave to Action Super­star­dom

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Some assume that the term “nuclear fam­i­ly” refers to the Amer­i­can house­hold as con­ceived of in the 1950s: a work­ing father, stay-at-home moth­er, and 2.3 kids under one sub­ur­ban roof. This is a mis­con­cep­tion — “nuclear” sim­ply implies an exclu­sion of extend­ed fam­i­ly mem­bers — but nev­er­the­less an evoca­tive one. For in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture, the zenith of that fam­i­ly arrange­ment coin­cid­ed with the zenith of nuclear weapon­ry. Nukes, one heard, that had won the war, at least against Japan, and nukes that would thence­forth secure the free world against the Red Men­ace.

Instill­ing this per­cep­tion required the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of no small amount of pro­pa­gan­da, espe­cial­ly in the Cold War. It is out of just such pro­pa­gan­da, drawn from news­reels, tele­vi­sion broad­casts, and oth­er forms of media, that Kevin Raf­fer­ty, Pierce Raf­fer­ty, and Jayne Loader made their acclaimed doc­u­men­tary The Atom­ic Café.

It came out in 1982, when the pub­lic’s assump­tions of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary benev­o­lence — and its patience with the coun­try’s seem­ing­ly per­ma­nent arms race against the Sovi­et Union — were run­ning low. These decades-old clips of stren­u­ous­ly pious politi­cians, drawl­ing bomber pilots, ram­bling Bab­bitts, and civ­il defense-ready nuclear (in both sens­es) fam­i­lies could hard­ly have met with more intense cyn­i­cism.

“I was an exact con­tem­po­rary of those kids in this old doc­u­men­tary footage,” writes Roger Ebert in his review The Atom­ic Café. “Life mag­a­zine ran blue­prints for fall­out shel­ters, and Estes Kefau­ver barn­stormed the nation with warn­ings about stron­tium 90 in the milk sup­ply.” In one scene “girls in home ec class­es dis­play their canned goods designed for nuclear sur­vival, and it is clear from their faces that they have no clue of how they would sur­vive nuclear war, and lit­tle hope of doing so.” The film as a whole evokes a time when the Unit­ed States “spent a good deal of its resources on address­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of nuclear war, how­ev­er use­less­ly.” We no longer hear much about that pos­si­bil­i­ty, per­haps because it has gen­uine­ly dimin­ished, or per­haps because — as view­ers of The Atom­ic Café will sus­pect even today — the pro­pa­gan­dists are busy con­vinc­ing us of some­thing else entire­ly.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

U.S. Det­o­nates Nuclear Weapons in Space; Peo­ple Watch Spec­ta­cle Sip­ping Drinks on Rooftops (1962)

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

Watch Chill­ing Footage of the Hiroshi­ma & Nagasa­ki Bomb­ings in Restored Col­or

See Every Nuclear Explo­sion in His­to­ry: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita — “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds — Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.