German Expressionism was an avant-garde movement that was more than just a style of artistic or filmmaking, but rather a sociocultural state of mind of people. Expressionism can be seen as a way of approaching or dealing with changes in life. In this essay on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), I will explore the nature of the film's narrative structure; I will look at how the conflicts between setting and narrative contradict each other. I will also discuss the representation of madness and illusion in the film by looking at the production. I will watch some scenes from the film to illustrate and reveal the meaning and contradictory nature of the film.Narrative StructureThe film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent film directed by Robert Wiene. The film tells the story of Francis who tells his story to an elderly companion after seeing an absent-minded young woman, Jane (whom he calls his fiancée), pass by. Francis' story is about a psychotic killer, Dr. Caligari, who hypnotizes a sleepwalker (a person who is perpetually asleep but can be awakened briefly) to commit grisly murders of his choosing. Two friends, Alan and Francis, see Caligari at a village fair exhibiting his sleepwalking patient. After Alan is murdered (by the sleepwalker), Francis suspects that the real culprit is Caligari, and he sets out to denounce Caligari as the mastermind of evil (Film Sufi, 2008). The film uses a framing technique so that the main action of this film is a story told within a story, in which an introductory narrative is introduced (to set the scene or to lead into the other story) and a second story follows. The film does not seem... middle of paper... to transform completely into interior elements and the psychic events are externalized” (Eisner, 1973: 15). This can be seen in the film where the setting is a self-contained construction of a character's subjective perception that challenges our normal perception of reality. The whole thing is an alteration of reality and it is imbued with life and expresses the madness, disorientation and illusions of a world detached from everyday life. In conclusion, the integration of all the elements of setting work together to create an overall composition of a paradoxical story that has a contradictory narrative structure. The visual style of the film shows that not only are the characters dislocated, but the world itself is out of place; the world is an illusion and this prevents you from distinguishing truth from illusion and madness and this gives an uncertain ending to the film.