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 Dürer, 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