Our conversation today takes us back almost exactly 100 years ago to one of the greatest and most

emblematic films of the short-lived Weimar Republic that spanned the ousting of the Kaiser

and end of the First World War to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s.

Intentionally or not, Weimar was a culture vigorously engaged with modernity in all its contradictions and essential conflicts.

It was the director, Robert Vine, who created the flashback and dream structure of the film.

He was the one who added the twist ending, in which it turns out

that Francis is the inmate at the asylum. The writers were actually very horrified by this ending,

because they thought it reversed the meaning of the script. Crackauer writes,

While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Vines-Calligari glorified authority.

A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one. I'm curious, what do you think of this,

Luke? It's interesting because the original script sounds like it would be politically better, but I'm not

sure if, I mean, we wouldn't be discussing the cabinet of Dr.

Caligari as a film emblematic of the time that produced it, um,

without the twists ending, right?

I mean,

Krakauer's, uh,

Frankfurt school influenced reading,

uh,

German cinema draws on the idea that once film becomes a mass medium or once anything

becomes a mass medium, it's driven by commercial imperatives and other kind of collective

imperatives that mean it ultimately reflects the cultural subconscious. This is the famous

cultural Marxism that you hear conservatives complain so much about,

...