Rare vintage gelatin silver print, double weight, matte finish, margins
10 x 13 inches (25.4 x 33 cm)
Verso: Various stamps - Carlos Clarens Collection and Phototeque

Provenance: Carlos Clarens was born in Havana, Cuba. He received his education at Havana University, at Columbia and at the Sorbonne. Clarens started out writing film criticism for a variety of prominent periodicals including Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinema, and The Village Voice. He later began assisting such directors as Agnes Varda and Robert Bresson and then worked as a casting agent for Francis Ford Coppola. He has also written English subtitles for foreign films such as Zeffirelli's La Traviata. As an actor, Clarens has appeared in Lion's Love and Flacons D'Or. He has written a definitive film study, Crime Movies (1980), An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967) and a study of George Cukor. Clarens also taught courses on crime films in New York and was co-owner of Phototeque.

Literature: Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Classic Film Scripts, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972. See page 61 for the identical image. And illlustrated on the cover of Siegbert Solomon Prawer, Caligari's Children: The Film As Tale of Terror, Da Capo Press, 1989

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, about which more has been written probably than any other film, blends fantasy, romanticism, medieval stories and philosophic fable into a story of mind-control, murder, and insanity. The painted backgrounds, sets and costumes were in the style of the Der Sturm expressionist group, which included the painters Rohrig and Reimann and the designer Hermann Warm, all three of whom contributed to the art direction of the film. It is in many respects - filmed theater, a series of tableaux or “lived drawings” (Der Sturm). In the ongoing controversy over definitions of German Expressionist Cinema, CALIGARI has long been the key work by which other films have been measured. –-- Pacific Film Archive