Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet

As a Deaf person,  I feel rather awkward on commenting on a musical score composed specifically for Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet which was aired Sunday night on October 16, 2016 at the Conexus Arts Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan.  It doesn’t seem to matter that I can’t hear much with a profound hearing loss,  I know when things sound bad and insulting to my ears.  That much I know to be true.  But I know that my vision is enhanced by music and Jason Cullimore absolutely transposed every shadow,  every contrast between light and darkness and the craziness in the mind, the paranormal and the fear in every frame of the movie,  Dr. Calgari’s Cabinet which is a silent film produced during between the two world wars.  It’s a sort of synthaesia, and we experience it all the time when senses are blended together to produce a sort of feverish pitch.  It was a great moment for a Deaf movie buff,  but moreover, it was egalitarian in that English subtitles occasionally flashed on the screen when a character spoke (in German) to another character in the movie.  This is how it used to be.  Deaf and hearing alike were avid fans of silent movies and both groups attended the silents in groves.  Until audiocentricism trumped the day.  Then the Deaf community disappeared from sight.

But that is not what this movie review is really about.  It is about the Caligari Project and what the Cabinet Collective is really doing here.  During the doctoral studies I’ve engaged in the past two years,  I encounter the maxim that everything is socially constructed.  We don’t subscribe to grand narratives or eternal truths but are governed by discourses.  Yeah talk.  What we talk about determines what we know and how we come to know something.  Well,  the Caligari Cabinet has news for you.  It’s pointing its large finger at the psychoanalytic tradition,  the spooky stuff of our dreams.  In this day of Trump and before, in Hitler’s time,  how can any other explanation account for the irrational sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, that dominates our political scene?  Surely not just discourses.  We are driven by our nightmares, our dreams, our ghouls that control us until we waken.

As the main character learns,  he will die before dawn.  Of course,  we rather die before we awaken to what our nightmares are telling us, about our prejudices, our need to dominate, to subjugate people,  and to reduce madness or insanity to a group of chemicals running amok.  We are more than that, the Caligari Cabinet seems to insist and show us with their art, their exhibits and their presentations.  German expressionism comes from the Germans who take themselves oh so seriously and for good reason.  The rise and fall of Nazi Germany is a loud clarion call for those of us who would casually toss away our democracy for what?  The insatiable greed of our dark urges.  

Visit the somnambulist,  the showcase of new films made in the German expressionism which, by the way,  features a Deaf actor (Sable),  a young woman and high school student. Watch Sable die or dare to die (to self, to preconceived ideas, to your craziness, to the darkness of our times) before dawn.  See you at the MacKenzie Art Gallery on Oct 20th at 7:00 pm.

Dare to die before dawn.