Lil Dagover was a German actress whose film career spanned between 1913 and 1979. She was one of the most popular and recognized film actresses in the Weimar Republic.
Dagover in 1919, photo by Alexander Binder
Lil Dagover c. 1912−13
Lil Dagover as the character Jane Olsen in the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Lil Dagover photographed by Elmer Fryer, May 1932
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist who uses a brainwashed somnambulist to commit murders. The film features a dark, twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique, curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.
Theatrical release poster
Werner Krauss as Caligari, 1920
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used stylised intertitles.
The visual style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari included deliberately distorted forms, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.