Tag Archives: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

E. R. Torre Art

Sketchin’ 60 and 61

I love darkness and heavy shadows in film and perhaps the best -and earliest- examples of this sort of expressionism was found in the early German cinema of the 1920’s and into the 30’s.  Here then is Conrad Veidt as the killer somnambulist in the classic film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari…

The German cinema heavily influenced another cinematic movement which came a few years later: Film noir.  Boasting similar visuals (at least when it came to heavy shadows) and stories often involving crime and desperation usually centered around a “big city”, there are quite literally hundreds of great films noir movies out there worth checking out.

Here then is my interpretation of a still from one of the more memorable ones, Laura (1944).  Featuring Gene Tierney as the mysterious “victim” of murder -or was she?- and Dana Andrews as the cop investigating this strange case, Laura also featured a young Vincent Price and was directed by Otto Preminger.  The plot of the movie was essentially lifted by author William Diehl for his novel, then subsequent movie, Sharky’s Machine (1981).

Here though is the original, with too-cool Gene Tierney’s Laura being interrogated by Dana Andrew’s cop.

Books/Literature, E. R. Torre Art

Sketchin’ 27… and a Corrosive Knights update 9/22/2017

Life for me is slowly but surely going back to “normal” after Irma.

The electricity returned a while back and we’ve picked up all the fallen branches and some has been picked up by the (very) busy garbage people and I think I’ve managed to regain all the lost sleep and shake off the muscle aches from all the stuff I’ve been doing to get the house back to what it was.

I’ve also managed to get back to both my writing and artwork.

First, regarding the writing, in the past few days I’ve been on a tear with the latest Corrosive Knights novel, getting the bits I needed written out and working them to something satisfactory.  Incredibly, because of Irma I hadn’t written a single thing for this novel in nearly two weeks.

Ugh.

But its flowing well.  Last time around when I talked about this book, I mentioned that it might be split into two books.  This will be the concluding chapter of the Corrosive Knights series and, as such, I was intent on making it as spectacular as I could… but I worried there might be a little too much diverse material for “just” one book.

Well, based on the writings I’ve done in the past few days, I’m thinking that might not be necessary after all and I may well be able to make this concluding chapter “fit” well within this novel after all, even if this concluding chapter will be extra sized.

This thrills me!

Anyway, I’ll offer more information as it comes…

Meanwhile, my latest sketch.  This piece, taken from perhaps one of the most famous frames from the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, shows Dr. Caligari, his sleepwalking/zombie subject Cesare, and Jane Olsen, the intrepid lady in peril.

If you haven’t seen the film, give it a whirl.  For something now nearly 100 years old, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an incredible work well worth checking out.