Saturday, January 2, 2010

Caligari's Camouflage

From Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), p. 94—

For most people the Cubist camouflage [of WWI] was a demonstration of visual effects they had never seen before. But by the time the war was over everybody was familiar with them and new experiments with Cubist forms were made in architecture as well as other arts. One of these was the German film Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, made in 1919, in which the action takes place inside the brain of a lunatic where all forms are disintegrated into crooked triangles and other weird shapes. Buildings too were constructed with bizarre lines and shapes.