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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FILM
The function of editing is infinitely more important as the intrinsic essence of filmic creation.
Thus, in the middle of the striving for photographic realism, came the first real advance in the cinema. One year after the war, the first genuinely imaginative film made its appearance amongst the hundreds of formulated movies. This break in the monotony, this gleaming ray of light, deserves our closest attention.
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Like a drop of wine in an ocean of salt water, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari appeared in the profusion of films during the year 1920. Almost immediately, it created a sensation by nature of its complete dissimilarity to any other film yet made. It was, once and for all, the first attempt at the expression of a creative mind in the new medium of cinematography. Griffith may have his place as the first employer of the close up, the dissolve, and the fade, but Griffith's contribution to the advance of the film is negligible when compared with the possibilities laid bare by The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Griffith and his super-spectacles will disappear under the dust of time, if they have not already done so, but Wiene's picture will be revived again and again, until the existing copy wears out. In ten years this film has risen to the greatest heights, as fresh now as when first produced, a masterpiece of dramatic form and content. It is destined to go down to posterity as one of the two most momentous advances achieved by any one film in the history of the development of the cinema. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Battleship 'Potemkirt are pre-eminent.
Made for the Decla producing firm by Dr. Robert Wiene, of the Sturm group in the Berlin theatre, during 191 9 (a period, it will be remembered, when expressionism and cubism were the doctrines of the advanced schools of the drama, the novel, painting, and sculpture in Germany, France, and Russia) The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari was released in March of the following year. It was handled in this country at a later date by the Philips Film Company, now extinct. Wiene, himself an enthusiast for expressionistic theories, was almost an amateur in film production. The architects or designers, Walther Rohrig, Herman Warm, and Walther Reimann, were three artists absorbed with ideas of cubist and abstract art. It is only natural to assume that their intelligence saw in the making of a film an adventure in a new medium, a form of expression which they must have realised
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