As it was, the alleged insane man was more sensible than most motion picture directors, for his scenery acted with him, and not according to accident or silly formula.  I make these points as an antidote to the general description of this production by those who praise it.

They speak of the scenery as grotesque, strained, and experimental, and the plot as sinister.  But this does not get to the root of the matter.  There is rather the implication in most of the criticisms and praises that the scenery is abstract.  Quite the contrary is the case.  Indoors looks like indoors.  Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs.  The actors do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to believe.  The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for the most part expressed in the acting and plot.  The fair looks like a fair and the library looks like a library.  There is nothing experimental about any of the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or over-considered.  It seems experimental because it is thrown into contrast with extreme commercial formulas in the regular line of the “movie trade.”  But compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or Du Lac or Duerer, or Rembrandt’s etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more realistic.  And Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter.  Hundreds of indoor stories will be along such lines, once the merely commercial motive is eliminated, and the artist is set free.  This film is an extraordinary variation of the intimate, as expounded in chapter three.  It is drawing-in-motion, instead of painting-in-motion.  Because it was drawing instead of painting, literary-minded people stepped to the hasty conclusion it was experimental.  Half-tone effects are, for the most part, eliminated.  Line is dominant everywhere.  It is the opposite of vast conceptions like Theodora—­which are architecture-in-motion.  All the architecture of the Caligari film seems pasteboard.  The whole thing happens in a cabinet.

It is the most overwhelming contrast to Griffith’s Intolerance that could be in any way imagined.  It contains, one may say, all the effects left out of Intolerance.  The word cabinet is a quadruple pun.  Not only does it mean a mystery box and a box holding a somnambulist, but a kind of treasury of tiny twisted thoughts.  There is not one line or conception in it on the grand scale, or even the grandiose.  It is a devil’s toy-house.  One feels like a mouse in a mouse-trap so small one cannot turn around.  In Intolerance, Griffith hurls nation at nation, race at race, century against century, and his camera is not only a telescope across the plains of Babylon, but across the ages.  Griffith is, in Intolerance, the ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron, and since he is the first of his kind I, for one, am willing to name him with Marlowe.