SOURCE: "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari: Production, Reception, History," in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, edited by Peter Lehman, The Florida State University Press, 1990, pp. 333-52.

Budd is an American film scholar and educator who has written extensively on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In the following excerpt, which summarizes much of his previous scholarship on the film, he places The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in its historical and artistic contexts.

Films, like other cultural products, are made and received within particular historical situations. Thus close analyses of film texts will be most revealing when they demonstrate how textual operations and processes are implicated in larger historical processes. Rather than reified objects dissected by the critic, films are dynamic processes in which we as viewers make meaning and pleasure and knowledge—help make our own lives—but not under conditions of our own choosing. These...