Beyond its cultic importance, with modern instrumental techniques we intend to reveal new dimensions of a film, nearly one hundred years old, whether it’s vibrations of the individual human soul, or aspects, happenings of a community, still bearing actual relevancy, a century later. With the help from film professionals, we manipulate and alter the film’s visual world to point at the impact of this outstanding work of art on film industry, and feedback of film art to the classic original.
The film music consits of pre-composed etudes, partly leaving room for improvisation. Beside traditional sense intruments (guitars, drums) and human voice we use self-built instruments, and samples, recorded throughout the preparation process.
TOM JANTOL / co-creator
Croatian filmmaker Tom Jantol, Academy degree Film and television director has worked as film critic, director of many music videos and commercials, for more then quarter of a century. For the last decade he has worked almost exclusively as author of short animated movies.
He believes that animation is the last spell. The source of his creative inspiration, his driving force is to express this spell, his unbridled creativity with the help of technique, instead of using hocus-pocus.
He is the author of the term “Anymation”, an expression that is being used more and more. Tom tries to promote “Anymation” as a new paradigm for animation, some kind of hybrid approach of movie making, where it doesn’t matter if the final product is animated or live made – where any tool, any person, with any technique can be used to get to the final product. Everything is allowed – steeling, combining, what really matters is nothing but the final outcome .
In his view, anyone can create a hybrid animated movie, any animation with the right software. Quality boundaries fade between works created by big studios and works created on a home computer. The essence is story-centricity, the technical background is secondary.
the original movie
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film, 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, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.
The script was inspired by various experiences from the lives of Janowitz and Mayer, both pacifists who were left distrustful of authority after their experiences with the military during World War I.
The film presents themes on brutal and irrational authority; Dr. Caligari represents the German war government, and Cesare is symbolic of the common man conditioned, like soldiers, to kill. In his influential book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer says the film reflects a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant, and it is an example of Germany’s obedience to authority and unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority. He says the film is a premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and says the addition of the frame story turns an otherwise “revolutionary” film into a “conformist” one. Other themes of the film include the destabilized contrast between insanity and sanity, the subjective perception of reality, and the duality of human nature.
Critic Roger Ebert called it arguably “the first true horror film”, and film reviewer Danny Peary called it cinema’s first cult film and a precursor to arthouse films.
source: wikipedia