The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a German silent horror film, first released on 26 February 1920. It was directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style. The sets have sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, and structures that lean and twist in unusual angles. The film's design team, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, recommended a fantastic, graphic style over a naturalistic one. With a violent and insane authority figure as its antagonist, the film expresses the theme of brutal and irrational authority. Considered a classic, it helped draw worldwide attention to the artistic merit of German cinema and had a major influence on American films, particularly in the genres of horror and film noir.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabinet_of_Dr._Caligari
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1606:
Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon made the first recorded European landing in Australia, although he believed that he was on New Guinea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janszoon_voyage_of_1605%E2%80%9306
1936:
Imperial Japanese Army troops attempted a coup d'etat, occupying parts of Tokyo, and killing several politicians, including Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo (pictured). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_26_Incident
1995:
Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in London, collapsed after its head derivatives trader in Singapore, Nick Leeson, lost £827 million while making unauthorized trades on futures contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
haul: 1. (transitive) To transport by drawing or pulling, as with horses or oxen, or a motor vehicle. 2. (transitive) To draw or pull something heavy. 3. (transitive) To carry or transport something, with a connotation that the item is heavy or otherwise difficult to move. 4. (transitive, figuratively) To drag, to pull, to tug. 5. (transitive, figuratively) Followed by up: to summon to be disciplined or held answerable for something. 6. (intransitive) To pull apart, as oxen sometimes do when yoked. 7. (transitive, intransitive, nautical) To steer (a vessel) closer to the wind. 8. (intransitive, nautical) Of the wind: to shift fore (more towards the bow). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/haul
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul. To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. --Les Misérables https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables