...I think most people would be inclined to walk out. I might myself in a different mood.
If the somnambulist from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" made a movie, it would be something like this: sloooooooow, droooooooowsy, like roaming a rainy city by night, stopping for a while in an empty, smoky bar, though it doesn't matter whether you're inside or out, sitting or walking, asleep or awake, it's all the same. If you've ever been in that state and would care to see it reproduced in a film, this is that film, but I doubt whether it means much more.
It certainly doesn't describe damnation. Sleepwalking in a mental and moral stupor makes a good metaphor for life, but surely it applies to the saved as well as the damned? This film is always stepping in and out of self-parody: we get the point of every shot and every speech in about one-sixth the time allowed; we can predict whenever a dog--the same dog?--is about to skulk into frame to cross the dreary street or the dreary waste; and the first of the lyric interludes that punctuate the story is a one-note, narcoleptic, androgynous chanson that sounds like Dietrich on Valium.
The same director's "Satantango" opens with a ten-minute shot of cows coming out of a barn in the morning and dispersing through the barnyard. The film is seven hours long. I'm not pure enough in spirit for that, but this one I can about manage.
If the somnambulist from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" made a movie, it would be something like this: sloooooooow, droooooooowsy, like roaming a rainy city by night, stopping for a while in an empty, smoky bar, though it doesn't matter whether you're inside or out, sitting or walking, asleep or awake, it's all the same. If you've ever been in that state and would care to see it reproduced in a film, this is that film, but I doubt whether it means much more.
It certainly doesn't describe damnation. Sleepwalking in a mental and moral stupor makes a good metaphor for life, but surely it applies to the saved as well as the damned? This film is always stepping in and out of self-parody: we get the point of every shot and every speech in about one-sixth the time allowed; we can predict whenever a dog--the same dog?--is about to skulk into frame to cross the dreary street or the dreary waste; and the first of the lyric interludes that punctuate the story is a one-note, narcoleptic, androgynous chanson that sounds like Dietrich on Valium.
The same director's "Satantango" opens with a ten-minute shot of cows coming out of a barn in the morning and dispersing through the barnyard. The film is seven hours long. I'm not pure enough in spirit for that, but this one I can about manage.