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Wiene, Robert

German film director and screenwriter, of Jewish family, born in Wroclaw in 1873 and died in Paris on July 16, 1938. His name remains tied to Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920; Dr. Calligari, also known as Doctor's Cabinet Caligari), a classic of Expressionism , which made him famous but at the same time obscured the rest of his work.

Son of the actor Carl, he studied law at the University of Berlin, then philosophy in Vienna, where in 1908 he began to devote himself to theater. From 1912 he was active in Germany and Austria as a screenwriter and film director; from 1914 he collaborated with Messter-Film and other production companies, writing and directing comedies and melodramas. His career took a turn in 1919, when he directed Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari; produced by Decla-Film, on the subject of Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, the film was a great success, nationally and internationally, to which the scenographers Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig contributed; in the history of the mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) responsible for the crimes committed by a sort of zombie (Conradt Veidt), the scenography anticipates the role played later by the machine movements: in front of the still motionless camera, the broken and twisted lines suggest at the same time the instability of the external world and the disorder of the internal one. The term 'cabinet', which also alludes to the eighteenth-century 'cabinets of curiosities', thus takes on its clinical meaning: Caligari invades the interiority of the minds by directing a hospice for the alienated, structured in turn as an imaginary scene. Interiority and exteriority become inextricably linked and reversible; the soul is a theater and man is a puppet. In the critical literature on the film, the interpretation of S. Kracauer remains famous, according to which the film contains a double allegory, which makes visible the power of the cinema itself and prefigures the terrifying force of A. Hitler, hypnotist of the masses.

W. maintained a style close to Expressionism, marked by the taste for the 'dark forces', in the immediately following productions, Genuine (1920), Raskolnikow (1923; Crime and punishment), from the novel by FM Dostoevskij, INRI (1923), shot with huge means and the use of great stars, and Der Puppenmacher von Kiang-Ning (1923). Returning to Vienna, from 1924 he assumed the artistic direction of Pan-Film and regained criticism with Orlacs Hände (1924), a psychological thriller (based on M. Renard's novel Les mains d'Orlac) in which a pianist is dominated by will of the hands that have been transplanted (in 1935 Karl Freund would have made a remake in the United States, entitled Mad love). Also in Vienna he shot Der Rosenkavalier (1926), an adaptation of the work of R.

Back in Berlin since 1926, W. continued in this more commercial direction, even if he did not completely abandon themes and motifs proper to Expressionism, as his first sound film, Der Andere (1930), remake of the homonymous, shows in particular Max Mack's 1913 film disturbing story based on the 'double' motif. In 1934, when the Nazis had already gained power, W., of Jewish origins, had to leave Germany; after staying in Budapest and London, he settled in Paris, where he struggled to find work and was unable to complete his last direction, Ultimatum (1938), which was then entrusted to Robert Siodmak.BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: a psychological history of the German film , Princeton (NJ) 1947 (trad. It. From Caligari to Hitler , new ed. Edited by L. Quaresima, Turin 2001, pp- 109-25 .

KP Hess, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari , Stuttgart 1985.

The cabinet of Dr. Caligari: texts, contexts, histories , ed. M. Budd, New Brunswick (NJ) 1990.

U. Jung, W. Schatzberg, Robert Wiene: der Caligari Regisseur , Berlin 1995.

D. Robinson, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari , London 1997.

P. Bertetto, C. Monti, Doctor Caligari's cabinet , Turin 1999.

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