Screening + Live Score: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

National Sawdust invites you to a special Halloween film screening + live score of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1920 silent horror film that jolted the post postwar masses and catapulted the movement known as German Expressionism into film history. Director Robert Wiene and a visionary team of designers crafted a nightmare realm in which light, shadow and substance are abstracted, a world in which a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community. The film features a dark and striking visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles.

This film screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 4K restoration scanned from the (mostly) preserved camera negative at the German Federal Film Archive. Live rescored and performed by composer & electronic artist Ricardo Romaneiro featuring Vasko Dukovski (clarinet), Manami Mizumoto (violin), Hannah Sumner (singer), Justin Abrams (cello) & David Zisa (modular synth).