A cold, somber atmosphere pervades the opening scene of the film.
Francis and an older man are sitting on a bench by a high forbidding wall which curves away into shadow.
Francis, apparently not very interested, responds by staring blankly skyward.
Caligari, the screenplay, 1919
If Charlie Chaplin had lived in this sunless world, he might have killed himself, for surely the Tramp had a disposition toward sorrow or gloom.
But the light on Chaplin`s street is the California light that inspires American cinema.
If his pictures end on an iris into the Tramp and his girl walking into the future, then they are headed toward the sunlight, too, and it warms them and promises to take care of them.
Is that the abiding commercial cheerfulness in American film, the urge to spend money on a ticket and be with strangers in a shared mood, or is there some glow in the American screen, the sheen of burned emulsion, the wash of natural light, the promise of summer, the unforced imprint of a modest but habitual optimism?
But now that that despondency has set in, who can forget the influence of Germany on the light show?
The German army was the most efficient force fighting in the First World War, so the collapse of the country at the end of that war struck at the nation`s confidence.
There was the dismay of an army that believed it had never been defeated.
There was the political chaos of 1919 and 1920, with attempts at Communist insurrection, rightist retaliation, the uncertain role of the mob, and the execution of figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
There was hyperinflation whereby in four years in the early 1920s the value of a gold mark went from one paper mark to a trillion.
Instead of wallets, you needed sacks.
Plus the sense of violence coming.
The arts flourished, even if much of what was done frightened middlebrow tastes.
That`s one of the reasons, after Europe turned so cold, that creative refugees and Berliners such as Christopher Isherwood went to California.
This is the period and the mood associated with Isherwood`s observations of Berlin made more famous in the musical Cabaret, which in turn is based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera, by John Van Druten.
At the start of his 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood promises, I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. That the sentence was so taken up suggests it met many needs.
It is the detachment and the helplessness of the camera as a neutral machine that seem alluring and persuasive.
Is that like a camera photographing the business of the concentration camps?
Isherwood would have never wanted that.
Or were they helpless adjuncts of the camera?
Not to burden this point with the concentration camps.
There are subtler issues.
Last night my son and I watched one of the Jackass movies.
These are crudely made anthologies in which a gang of guys does absurd and reckless things to be amusing.
What will these idiots do next?
Will you watch this?
My son and I didn`t feel like a camera, exactly, but I think we felt overpowered by the screen and Jackass being there.
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