YOU MUST BECOME CALIGARI: IRIS BARRY'S SHAPING OF EARLY WEIMAR CINEMA

ABSTRACT While much scholarship today looks to expand the narrow canon of early Weimar cinema beyond the Expressionist classics, this article examines how this inherited canon of German silent cinema's golden age came to dominance, focusing on the critical role played by Iris Barry, the groundbreaking British film critic and founding curator of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library in New York. Central to the story that she propagates is Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), a film about which Barry was highly ambivalent. This article argues that Caligari features prominently in Barry's educational work for the MoMA because it aligns particularly well with her understanding of the relationship between cinema and national cultures, serving as a metonym for an understanding of German culture rooted in longstanding cultural prejudices. German films that do not likewise reflect this ‘national character’ are elided from Barry's programming, resulting in a rather narrow conception of German cinema that in turn reinforces these cultural prejudices. Barry's account lays the groundwork for the reception of Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler , and helps shape the narrative of German silent cinema for decades to come.