The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Production

Production

Pommer put Caligari in the hands of designer Hermann Warm and painters Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, whom he had met as a soldier while painting sets for a German military theater. When Pommer began to have second thoughts about how the film should be designed, they had to convince him that it made sense to paint lights and shadows directly on set walls, floors, background canvases and to place flat sets behind the actors.

Pommer first approached Fritz Lang to direct this film, but Lang was committed to work on Die Spinnen (The Spiders), so Pommer gave directorial duties to Robert Wiene. Wiene filmed a test scene to prove Warm, Reimann, and Röhrig's theories, and it was so impressive that Pommer gave his artists free rein. Janowitz, Mayer, and Wiene would later use the same artistic methods on another production, Genuine, which was less successful commercially and critically.

The producers, who wanted a less macabre ending, imposed upon the director the idea that everything turns out to be Francis's delusion. In so doing, they produced the first cinematographic representation of altered mental states.

The original story made it clear that Caligari and Cesare were real and were responsible for a number of deaths.

Filming took place during December 1919 and January 1920. The film premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920.