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This edition's video transfer utilized a 35mm print struck in Russia, probably from an early generation nitrate duplicate negative. However, in the silent era and from country to country, there was no worldwide standard for the position of the image's frame in relation to the film's perforated sprocket holes. The standard later established and still in effect today has the image area lined on both sides by eight sprocket holes (four on each side of the image) and puts the horizontal frame line in between two perforations. Caligari was shot with a camera that placed the horizontal frame line centered with two of the perforations. When the Russian print was struck, some anonymous Russian film lab technician failed to adjust the film printer to allow for the difference in frame lines. The result was a print with a visible frame line running through the image; most of the bottom part of the picture was at the top and a sliver of the top of the picture was at the bottom. Preservation prints taken from this Russian print have adjusted for the originalframe line of the German camera, but now a visible frame line appears at the top of the picture. A sliver of image at the top and the bulk of the image at the bottom now overlap slightly within the visible dark horizontal frame line.
Previous video transfers of this source material (we wonder, are there any?) would have dodged the problem by cropping the picture area tight enough to avoid the frame line, but the surrounding image area would disappear on all sides of the new framing and heads would be cut off. Shepard decided to approach the video transfer of the print on a shot-by-shot basis. Where it was deemed necessary to see all of the original image, the frame line was allowed to be seen in the transfer. Where it was felt that a shot could be shown without losing any essential action or important background visual information, the image was cropped tight enough to remove the frame line. The result is a largely more-open framing of the film. In shots of the busy Holstenwall fair, a merry-go-round is now seen at the left of the picture that was nonexistent in other editions of the film. More so than before, we can see the top of heads.
We suggest for consideration that a film preservation team could take a high-definition transfer of the original Russian print and digitally repair the frame line discrepancy for good. The repaired film could then be imaged to a preservation 35mm safety film negative. The digital work would be expensive, but wouldn't it be worth the money to restore a film that is certainly one of the ten greatest films of the silent era?