Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (4K Restored) [Blu-ray] On Sale

Title : Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (4K Restored) [Blu-ray]
ASIN : B00N5ND6PU
Description : In 1920, one brilliant movie jolted the postwar masses and catapulted the movement known as German Expressionism into film history. That movie was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a plunge into the mind of insanity that severs all ties with the rational world. Director Robert Wiene and a visionary team of designers crafted a nightmare realm in which light, shadow and substance are abstracted, a world in which a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community. This authoritative edition of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 4K restoration scanned from the (mostly) preserved camera negative at the German Federal Film Archive.

German intertitles with optional English Subtitles

Score performed by the Studio For Film Music at the University of Music, Freiburg


Special Features: Booklet Essay by Kristin Thompson, Caligari: How Horror Came to the Cinema (Documentary, 52 minutes), Additional Music Score by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Image Gallery, Restoration Demonstration


List Price : $29.95
Price : $18.49
Saved Price : $11.46

category: Movies
brand: Kino Classics
Item Page Detail URL : link
Rating : 4.3
Review : Edition selection tips
I'm not going to spend time raving about the movie, because I'm going to assume that if you've got this far you already know how wonderful it is. What I think could be far more useful (as this is an area where I have been burned) is some comparison between the two DVD editions I know of.

I have copies of both the Kino Video edition and the Image Entertainment edition. My preference is for Image Entertainment for the following reasons:

(1) The print seems slightly cleaner (and most helpfully, the DVD packaging warns you about the horizontal line across the top of some scenes which is a defect on the original film)

(2) The intertitles on Image use the correct expressionistic style as per the 1920 release. from what I recall, Kino's are the 'normalised' printed intertitles from 1923.

(3) The Kino version has possibly the most insensitive layer transition location I have ever come across. For reasons of their own Kino put an intertitle...