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HISTORY AND FANTASY 85
Rather, as a "leap into the world of art" this unique film is a retrogression, for all the fascination its recourse to expressionist painting may exert. The controversy it has aroused conceivably revolves around its radical negation of camera-realism. In the early 'twenties, Rene Clair praised Caligari and Destiny precisely for driving home the share of subjectivity that should go into film making; the very artificiality of their settings, lighting, and acting seemed to him a triumph of the intellect over the given raw material. But it appears that Clair was then so disturbed by a contemporary trend in favor of too mechanical a conception of the "realistic dogma" that he overstated his case; he failed to envisage the possibility of films which, like his later Paris comedies, would give subjectivity, including the intellect, its due and yet acknowledge the supremacy of physical reality.12
The crude tenor of Eisenstein's verdict on Caligari— he called it a "barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy human infancy of our art"13— may be traced to the fact that he passed judgment on it toward the end of the war against Nazi Germany. Other relevant comments on Caligarism fall into line with the proposition of this book. The German expressionist films, says Cavalcanti, "went out of fashion because the directors were attempting to use the camera in a way which is not proper to it. At this time the pictures got farther and farther away from reality."14 Neergaard confronts Carl Dreyer's handling of fantasy in Vampyr with the procedures applied in Caligari and arrives at the conclusion that the latter is nothing but "photographed theater."15 Probably influenced by French avant-garde moods, even Jean Cocteau condemned Caligari, in 1923 or 1924, for deriving its macabre effects from eccentric settings rather than the activities of the camera16— Cocteau, who later was to make films extremely vulnerable to similar objections.
Since sustained stagy fantasy is a special case of staginess in general, its uncinematic character naturally admits of the same alleviations as the latter's.* In addition, if fantasy of the type under consideration appears within otherwise realistic-minded feature films, in the form of a dream or the like, it is surrounded by real-life events which inevitably claim predominance, thereby subduing the insert's uncinematic quality. However, this does not always work with dreams built from conspicuously theatrical material; for instance, the theatricality of the dream sequences in Lady in the Dark is too penetrating to be toned down by the realistic character of the rest of the film.
* See pp. 60-62. For instance, even though the Jack-the-Ripper episode of the old German film Waxworks is a fantasy laid in expressionist settings, it nevertheless has a semblance of cinematic life because of the admirable skill with which it is implemented technically. The "montage" of this fantasy makes you forget its remoteness from camera-reality. (Cf. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 86-7.)