Karl Bartos - The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

Musician and writer Karl Bartos has long been admirer of Weimar-era culture. During his time in Kraftwerk, he helped

create the stunning track 'Metropolis', directly inspired by a band viewing of the classic 1927 Fritz Lang film of the

same name. The original orchestral music composed for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Giuseppe Becce had long been

lost and in 2005, after watching the film, Bartos imagined what it would be like to create an entirely new one in the

21st Century in his home studios in Hamburg. Now with crystal clear images, digitally restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm

-Murnau-Foundation, the film is visually the best quality it has ever been, and now, with Bartos' soundtrack, there is

impressive sound to go with the haunting vision. Narrative film music and sound design for Robert Wiene's classic 1920

psychological thriller.



For the task, Bartos ransacked his own library of musical compositions, recreating pieces he had written as a young

classical musician in his pre-Kraftwerk days whilst creating new sounds, melodies and textures. The intention was not

simply to write a film score per se. This was to be an immersive listening experience with special sound effects to

match the action as we enter the film as both spectator and participant. A creaking door, footsteps on gravel, the

turning of pages in a ledger, a half-heard fragment of dialogue are seamlessly synchronised to the action on screen.

By taking the characteristics of Expressionism in the arts, and transferring them into film making, a disturbing,

distorted depiction of reality enwrapped and entrapped the viewer. The subjective replaces the objective. We are

sucked into a parallel world lit in menacing chiaroscuro, where dimension, proportion and perspective are all off

skew. From the convex polygon-shaped windows of precipitously sharp-inclined buildings to the surreally odd tables

and chairs with long spindly legs to be found in preposterously small and oddly shaped rooms, alienating camera angles

and impossible vanishing points, the town of Holstenwall in which much of the action takes place, is the world of the

imagination, not the empirical world of our own eyes and ears. 'The cinema image must become an engraving,' the film's

set designer Hermann Warm said. We can hear melodies that lie within the tradition of the Baroque Age of Bach, the

early Romanticism of Mozart, the dissonance of Schoenberg, the unsettling metric play of Stravinsky and the harshly

dramatic repetitions of Philip Glass. From outside of the classical tradition there is the folklorist bricolage of the fair-

ground barrel organ tempered playfully by some psychedelic backwards musique concrete along with some melodies

which would not have been out of place on a Kraftwerk album from the classic era.



All the time the listener is on a journey, sounds move in and out, music weaves and entwines, the soundscape is

immersive and intoxicatingly rich. It is music which is, by turns, beautiful, amusing, playful and profoundly dis-

quieting and it is perfect fit for the aesthetic of era-jumping in the actual film. Dr. Caligari's action switches from

the then present day to the past century and even further back before rebooting back to the imagined present.



'There's something about this film. No matter how often you watch it, it keeps its secrets. Who is mad and who is not

always remains a question of interpretation,' says Bartos. The film remains an enigma, but now one with the

soundtrack and soundscape it deserves.



Tracklisting:

1. Prologue

2. Scary Memories

3. Atonal Floating

4. Full Of Life

5. In The Town Hall

6. At The Funfair

7. A Mysterious Crime

8. At The Funfair 2

9. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

10. Jane's Theme

11. March Grotesque 2

12. Jane’s Theme 2

13. Shadows

14. Tragic Message

15. Suspicion

16. Tragic Message 2

17. The Plan

18. A Dark Figure

19. Caligari's Theme

20. Arrest Of The Suspect

21. Caligari's Theme 2

22. Worried Jane

23. Interrogation

24. Jane's Fear

25. Francis's Observation

26. Cesare's Attack And Escape

27. Safe And Sound

28. Francis At A Loss

29. Caligari's Deception

30. Lunatic Asylum

31. In Search Of The Truth

32. Out In The Field

33. The Director Rants And Rages

34. Scary Memories 2

35. Who’s Mad Here?

36. Francis Rants And Rages

37. Epilogue

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