Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Caligari's painted walls lean and curve to show a distorted mind. The figure is taken from Museum of Modern Art, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

German expressionist films bent their sets out of shape

Caligari's painted walls lean and curve to show a distorted mind The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was designed with painted sets of leaning walls, sharp shadows and tilted floors, so the world looks as unstable as the story. The style, called expressionism, influenced horror and noir. Its designers treated the set as part of the psychology rather than a copy of reality. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Museum of Modern Art

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Intolerance built a Babylon set hundreds of feet wideThe 1916 set had huge decorated walls and a working crane for the camera Matte paintings extended sets without building themArtists painted scenery on glass and masked the live action around it Film noir lighting came from German emigresShadowy low-key photography drew directly on expressionist cinema Italian neorealism left the studio behindFilms were shot in real streets with non-professional actors The French New Wave ran on light camerasPortable 16mm and 35mm rigs let small crews shoot on real streets Dogme 95 banned artificial lighting and effectsA group of Danish directors wrote ten rules for making films plainly

Tags: expressionism, 1920, production-design

German expressionist films bent their sets out of shape: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Caligari's painted walls lean and curve to show a distorted mind. The figure is taken from Museum of Modern Art, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a movies & tv fact?: Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.