Nosferatu (1922)
“Nosferatu” (1922)
Very likely, this is the Greatest Vampire Movie Ever Made.
It was the first of many score of adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” (1897)
and until the somewhat obscure BBC version starring Louis Jordan (1977 and quite
excellent) it is the one which displayed greatest fidelity to the original text.
This is ironic because … well … that’s a long story.
It was the first, and unfortunately
the last, project by the Prana Film studio. Though made on what was, even in
its day, a tight budget, the studio managed to assemble a “Dream Team” in their
Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer, and Production Designer.
Even before being given this project, Director
F.W. Murnau had proved his hand with the Fantastic with films like “Der
Januskopf,” (1920, it is a lost film) loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s
novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886). A pioneer in German Expressionism,
Murnau composed dramatic chiaroscuros and distorted angles created by lighting,
set design, camera position, or some combination of the three. One critic
credited him with being the first to understand the idea of "negative
space," i.e., the space beyond the film frame, moving actors and objects
in and out of the view, reminding us that we can only see part of this
particular slice of this particular world. He demonstrated command over every
facet of his film-making in a way that would be later be associated with Auteur
Theory and Mentored Alfred Hitchcock. He extensively story-boarded each shot,
and paced the action conscious of the intended musical score (the film is
subtitled “A Symphony of Terror”) having the Actors adapt their actions to the
rhythm of an on-stage metronome. Even so, until the last twelve pages or so, he
mostly followed the script. I’ve read he had to Write those pages himself only
because the original pages were missing.
The Scriptwriter was another veteran
of the then embryotic Fantastic cinema, Henrik Galeen, who’d Written and co-Directed
“Der Golem” (1915), “Der Student von Prague” and a second version “Der Golem” (both
1920). Galeen chose to maintain the multiple Character perspectives that Stoker
employed in his Epistolary novel, inserting “texts” like letters, newspaper
clippings, diary, and log book entries in addition to more conventional
intertitles.
According to film Historians, the
English language version of the intertitles alters several plot details and
loses the stylistic elements Galeen’s originals. Lotte H. Eisner wrote the
original employed “oddly-broken lines. prolific use of exclamation marks, words
in capitals, and letter-spaced lower-case matter… [a] staccato rhythm with its
incomplete sentences, clauses, phrases and idiosyncratic punctuation.”
Even so, beautiful phrases remain,
like an excerpt from the “Book of Vampires” which Character Thomas Hutter (the equivalent
of the novel’s Jonathan Harker, played by Gustav von Wangenheim) finds in his
room at a country inn, “That name rings like the cry of a bird of prey. Never
speak it aloud.” This book would prove all-important to the plot.
And intertitle that appears when Thomas
is forced to trudge through the wilderness alone, “And when he had crossed the
bridge, the shadows came to meet him."
And later Count Orlok (the equivalent
of Dracula, played by Max Schreck), looking at
a miniature of Thomas’ wife Ellen (the equivalent of Mina, played by Greta Schröder) that Thomas
carries with him, “She has a lovely neck.”
As for the stage directions he
provides, Galeen wrote in a direct, terse style that had been compared to
“blank verse”:
"Ellen at the window. She wants
to call for help. She staggers forward. She stops in front of Hutter. One last
moment of indecision..."
The gifted Cinematographer, Fritz Arno
Wagner, had been Galeen’s collaborator on the 1920 “Der Golem.” Because of
budget restrictions, he used only one camera, meaning there was only one
negative. After the film’s release, this would almost prove tragic.
The most memorable aspect of the film
was the performance by, and makeup applied to, the lead Actor Shreck.
Production Designer Albin Grau is largely responsible for the look, making
Shrek’s angular features exaggerated and rat-like, he was made bald with
protruding ears, exaggerated eyebrows, two fangs centered at the position of
his central incisors as opposed to the now traditional fangs replacing cuspids.
Tall and emaciated looking in his long, black, mandarin coat, Shrek moved with
a spider-like gait, never relaxing his arms while they hung at his sides, but
always had them somewhat twisted, to better display his unnaturally long finger
nails.
Grau was an avid Occultist and
believer in the reality of Vampires. He ignored the handsome, seductive Count
of the Stoker novel, and gave us a creature more similar in appearance to the
root folklore. He also incorporated Enochian, Hermetic, and Alchemical symbols
into the set and prop design.
Despite its tight budget, the films
abounds with technical innovations and bold production choices. Murnau came up
with an idea of the coach driven by Character Orlok coach traveling through a
"white forest" accomplished simply by using a negative print, but
even in the white-for-black reversal, Orlok still appears black as if a
demonstration of his powers over nature. In this and a few other scenes, the
other-naturalness of Orlok’s motions were achieved by a laborious application
of stop-motion animation to full-sized carriages, props, and the live Actor
himself.
There is also the beautiful location
footage for scenes of the Transylvanian countryside (in reality, Germany’s Tara
mountains) and Orlok’s castle (in reality, Oravasky Podzámok castle). Location
footage was a rarity in German cinema of that era, and served a goal reflected
in much of Murnau’s work, a fluid mixture of Expressionism and Realism.
The exposition of shadows is justly
famous. There are moving shadows seeming cast by no one that open doors. Orlock’s
distorted shadow rising the stairs, claw-like hand extended before him, may be
the single most emblematic image in the whole of Silent Cinema.
The sequence on the doomed ship
carrying Orlok’s coffins (a sequence in the novel that most film versions omit)
is especially strong. Like the image of the back-lit death-ship at full sail.
Or the frightful bit as a crew member who suspects the truth going down below
to inspect the cargo: He opens a coffin and finds it full of rats, then Orlok
rises from another coffin unnaturally stiff as he swings up from prone to
attention (this simple effect has been imitated hundreds, if not thousands, of
times).
As Thomas and Orlok both race to the
city where Ellen waits, she scans the horizon on a beach littered with black
crosses. On the intertitles Ellen states, “He’s coming. I must go out to meet
him.” Who ‘he’ is remains ambiguous.
While Stoker’s novel titillated, it
was also puritanically hostile to a woman’s sexuality being unleashed. This
film eschewed sexual issues for most of its length (Orlok’s/Dracula’s wanton
brides do not appear to seduce Thomas/Johnathan) but when it does, the ideas
are nowhere near as puritanical as Stoker’s. These appear towards the end of
the film, so the sections Director Murnau ended up writing, and I can’t help
but suspect the plot changes were influenced by the fact that Murnau was a
homosexual, subject to extortion and/or imprisonment under German law. (Murnau
fled to the United States a decade before most of the other famous German film makers,
largely because he faced official persecution long before men like Fritz Lang
did.)
In “The Book of the Vampires” Ellen
finds a passage describing the only way to defeat the evil is that untainted
woman offers herself to the Vampire, distracting him from the threat of the
rising sun. This climatic scene where Ellen sacrifices herself is beautifully
staged, featuring the memorable image of her heart (and breast) as the Vampire's
shadow falls across it. Sex equals death again, but not as punitively as in the
book, as sexual surrender is also equated with virtue and redemption.
The change of era, location, and
character names between novel and film was a futile attempt to escape charges
of Copyright Infringement, because the Prana Film never bothered obtaining the
rights to the book. This was common enough in its day (the Lipow Co. was guilty
of the same with “Der Januskopf”) but usually, the producers got away with it.
In this case, the film got international distribution and was warmly received
by painters and experimental poets (more conventional critics had mixed
responses) and its growing notoriety made it impossible to hide. Author Stoker’s
widow sued, and not surprisingly won. Prana went bankrupt, and the negative and
all existing prints of “Nosferatu” were ordered destroyed.
The international distribution which
doomed the film also saved it, allowing for second generation copies to survive,
forgotten in archives. The search for more complete prints of the film became
an obsession among Film Historians, and the are no less than six in current
distribution, varying in length from 65 to 92 minutes long.
Its influence is tremendous, and it is
endlessly referenced by other film makers, especial the image of Orlok’s shadow
climbing the stair. In the TV mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel
“Salem’s Lot” (book 1975, TV 1979) the producer chose to have the Vampire’s
appearance reflect that of Orlok, as opposed to the suaver Dracula-type in the
novel.
Director Werner Herzog made a wholly
bizarre remake “Nosferatu” (also 1979, with Klaus Kinski in the title role). It
is far more a deeply admiring spoof than conventional remake, and well worth
watching.
Much legend surrounded the film. The
last name of the Actor playing the Vampire, Shrek, means “fright.” This seems
to have inspired the fiction that Max Shrek was a mysterious figure of which
nothing is known and he never appeared in another film and perhaps wasn’t,
well, Human. (Actually, he was reasonably famous in his day, you can read his
biography online, and he starred in at least 40 other films, some of which you
can watch free online). Inspired by the myth, screenwriter Steven Katz and
director Elias Merhige gave us “Shadow of the Vampire” (2000) a Fantasy about
the making of “Nosferatu” in which a Megalomaniacal Director (a fictional fusion
of Murnau and Grau, played by John Malkovich) employs a real Vampire (William
Defoe) to give the film greater realism. Defoe was nominated for an Oscar, and
this admiring spoof of the movie that plagiarized “Dracula” won a Bram Stoker Award.
Finally, there was another remake, “Nosferatu”
(2022), a much straighter Horror film than the Herzog version. It is much
admired, but I haven’t seen it.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxlJxDr26mM
Comments
Post a Comment