The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Revisited - Concert / Film screening Contemporary Music Days

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The streets in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari lean the wrong way, the windows sit at impossible angles, and the shadows are painted straight onto the flats — Robert Wiene's 1920 film built German Expressionism one crooked set at a time. On 5 November the Celluloid Ensemble plays a live score beneath it at the GNO Alternative Stage inside the SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ).

The music is by Nikos Karagiannis, who leads the ensemble from the first violin. The Celluloid Ensemble is a string quartet — Karagiannis and Marianthi Karagianni on violins, Stelios Papanastasis on viola, Nikolas Prevezianos on cello — and it plays to the picture in real time, tracking each cut and gesture rather than running a fixed recording.

The night draws two crowds the Alternative Stage rarely seats together: silent-cinema followers who know every intertitle of Caligari, and new-music listeners who came for the string writing. The black box goes cinema-dark for the screening, the quartet lit at the edge of the frame, and the room holds the particular hush of an audience watching and listening at once.

Caligari itself is the source of the modern twist ending. A fairground hypnotist exhibits Cesare, a somnambulist who sleeps in a coffin-like box and, on command, walks out at night to kill; the town's murders and a final reversal turn the whole account inside out. The film runs about seventy-five minutes, and Karagiannis's score has to carry every lurch of Cesare's walk and every painted shadow without a spoken word to lean on.

If you want the film in its original silence, or a lush orchestral romance laid over it, this is neither. But if you want four string players shadowing an Expressionist nightmare in real time, that is the evening the Celluloid Ensemble has built.

The SNFCC is on the Kallithea coast, reached by tram, bus, or the free shuttle from central Athens rather than by metro; the Alternative Stage rebuilds its telescopic seating for each production, so no seat is the habitual good one. Tickets are 12 or 15 EUR, 10 EUR concession, for a 20:30 start. The screening sits inside the Contemporary Music Days cycle and the Alternative Stage's tenth-anniversary season.

This is a score made to measure for a single screening; leave the room and Caligari goes back to silence.