Nosferatu (1922): Eine Symphonie des Grauens 9781844576500, 9781838713546, 9781844577026

Citation preview

BFI FILM CLASSICS

BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film.

For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.bloomsbury.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens Kevin Jackson

To Sir Christopher Frayling ‘The van Helsing de nos jours …’

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2013 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Kevin Jackson, 2013 Kevin Jackson has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. 6-7 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Julia Soboleva Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens, Prana Film; Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000), © Shadow of the Vampire Ltd; The Fast Show (1994–2001), BBC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN:

PB: ePDF:

978-1-8445-7811-5 978-1-8445-7702-6

Series: BFI Film Classics

Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

6

Introduction

8

1 Contexts

14

2 Production

27

3 Nosferatu: Acts I and II

41

4 Nosferatu: Acts III–V

69

5 Release, Reactions, Reputation

94

6 Afterlives

106

Notes

120

Credits

123

Select Bibliography

125

6

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments This small book owes much to other, usually longer books. The biographical sketch of the director in Chapter 1 is based on Lotte Eisner’s Murnau. Chapter 2 is indebted to the documentary Language of Shadows, written and directed by Luciano Berriatúa, and included in the Eureka! Masters of Cinema DVD edition of Nosferatu. Chapters 3 and 4 draw on Murnau’s annotated copy of Galeen’s screenplay, translated into English by Gertud Mander and published as an appendix to Eisner’s Murnau. Chapter 5’s account of the Florence Stoker law suit draws on David J. Skal’s witty and scholarly explorations in Hollywood Gothic. (See Select Bibliography.) Other published sources are recorded in the endnotes. Anne Billson, who has probably forgotten more about vampire cinema than I will ever know, was kind enough to read the manuscript and make valuable comments. Maryam Imani unearthed a fascinating trove of Max Shreck images. Michael Brooke, an expert in Czech surrealism, put me onto the remarkable essay about Murnau by the author of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Gary Lachman, the musician and occult scholar, helped provide the links between Albin Grau and Aleister Crowley. David Thompson, as so often, generously gave me rare DVDs, including a long-forgotten BBC documentary on Dracula presented by Daniel Farson – a descendant of Bram Stoker. John Archer showed me his 1982 Writers and Places documentary about Gabriel García Márquez, who became a lifelong fan of Nosferatu after seeing it several times at an open-air cinema in his home town, the place immortalised in One Hundred Years of Solitude. My thanks to Sophia Contento at BFI Publishing for her tolerance of my cyber-incompetence and to Julia Soboleva for her brilliant if alarming art work.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Finally: this book is a happy by-product of almost thirty years of delightful conversations about cinema, vampires, the occult and all manner of other recondite matters with my dear friend Sir Christopher Frayling, to whom it is dedicated with admiration, affection and gratitude. KJ June 2013

7

8

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Introduction Nosferatu is a magnet for superlatives. Pauline Kael, who summed up its prevailing mood as ‘superbly loathsome’, declared that ‘this first important film of the vampire genre has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors’.1 A. O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times, spoke for countless others when he called it ‘the first great vampire film’. In 2001, Roger Ebert (who died as this small book was being written: RIP) said that ‘The best of all vampire movies is Nosferatu … Its eerie power only increases with age. Watching it, we don’t think about screenplays or special effects. We think: this movie believes in vampires.’ A German critic, Andreas Kilb, wrote that ‘No later horror film has ever out-done the horror’ of its image of the death ship gliding into Bremen.2 The film historian Angela Dalle Vacche noted, correctly, that ‘No other film about vampires … has received such weighty critical attention.’3 And the superlatives continue to pile up even when the film is not being considered primarily as a horror movie. Robert Desnos, the Surrealist poet, once called it ‘the most beautiful film ever made’.4 Perez suggested that it is ‘perhaps the greatest of Weimar films’ which ‘endures as one of the most resonant and unsettling responses that has been made in art to the death that inescapably awaits us’.5 Magazine Litteraire once called it ‘le premiere film culte de l’histoire’ – the first-ever cult movie. As with the film, so with its director, F. W. Murnau. For Lotte Eisner, Murnau was ‘the greatest film director the Germans have ever known … He created the most overwhelming and poignant images in the whole German Cinema.’6 Werner Herzog, who revered Eisner, agreed with her view. Nosferatu, he believes, is ‘the greatest of all

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Albin Grau’s poster for the 1922 release of Nosferatu

German films’,7 a ‘masterpiece’ by a director who is the equal of Griffith, Pudovkin, Buñuel and Kurosawa. Stan Brakhage, not entirely sympathetic to Murnau, none the less calls him ‘perhaps the greatest story-teller Cinema has yet fostered’.8 Frank Hansen, who worked with Murnau, recalled that: He knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted perfection and each finished film was the result of meticulous care. He brought to the cinema a culture, a knowledge of production, a sense of artistic beauty and of lighting which until today have known no equal.9

And Thomas Elsaesser notes that Murnau is generally agreed to be ‘German cinema’s most exquisite Romantic poet’.10

9

10

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Such examples could probably be multiplied into a whole book, but the upshot is plain: Nosferatu now enjoys an all but unassailable status as a classic. This is a little surprising, not simply because horror films are sometimes treated with snobbish disdain, but for a number of less obvious reasons. Apart from provoking a wildly enthusiastic response from the Surrealists in Paris, who immediately adopted Murnau’s vampire as one of their own, most of the early reviews outside Germany were lukewarm to poor: in New York, audiences were reputed to have been snoring their way through the projection. When it was shown in London by the Film Society, the programme note sniffed that it combined ‘the ridiculous and the horrid’.11 Even in Germany, where most of the reviews were excellent, it found only a small audience, lost money and drove its production company into bankruptcy within a matter of weeks. Then Florence Stoker, the widow of the man who wrote its unacknowledged source novel Dracula, won her law suit against the producers and had, so it seemed at the time, all prints and negatives destroyed. Of course, like a vampire, Nosferatu rose again12 – though not, at first, very high. Its reputation more or less dissolved until the end of the 1940s, when Siegfried Kracauer’s much-discussed ‘psychological history’ of pre-war German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, recovered the film from neglect and attested to its prophetic quality as a carrier for German national nightmares. Count Orlok, he suggested, was one of the tyrant figures, like Lang’s Dr Mabuse, who prefigured Hitler. ‘The German soul, haunted by the alternate images of tyrannic rule and instinct-covered chaos, tossed about in gloomy space like the phantom ship in NOSFERATU.’13 But the real turning points in Nosferatu’s critical reputation came with Lotte Eisner’s fine study of Weimar cinema, L’Écran Démoniaque (1952, revised 1965; translated into English as The Haunted Screen in 1969) and then her monograph Murnau (1964, translated 1973). Eisner, who disagreed with many of Kracauer’s contentions, made a brilliant case for the artistic excellence of several

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

films by Murnau: she said of Nosferatu – an argument that seemed perversely ingenious in its day, but is now a commonplace – that this film of hideous sights is also rapturously beautiful: He films the fragile form of a white cloud scudding over the dunes, while the wind from the Baltic plays among the scarce blades of grass. His camera lingers over a filigree of branches standing out against a spring sky at twilight. He makes us feel the freshness of a meadow in which horses gallop around with a marvellous lightness … In a film by Murnau every shot has its precise function and is entirely conceived with an eye to its participation in the action. The momentary close-up of a detail of billowing sails is as necessary to the action as the image preceding it – the high-angle shot of the current sweeping away the raft and its sinister cargo.14

She credits Murnau, that is, not with a conventional (and facile) eye for the picturesque, but with an almost mystical vision of landscape, seascapes, architecture and animals as the essential components of his work of supernatural art. (Both Kracauer and Eisner cite a potent phrase from the German-Hungarian Béla Balázs, who wrote in an early account that the film is swept by ‘glacial draughts of air from the beyond’.15) In the wake of The Haunted Screen, commentary on the film began to proliferate. By and large, it was only specialist writers like Eisner, with privileged access to film archives (in her case, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, where Henri Langlois kept a print of the 1926 French version of Nosferatu among his treasures), who had a chance to make up their minds. In the USA, most viewers knew it only from chopped-down versions shown late at night on television, or from stills published in Famous Monsters of Filmland and other magazines aimed at baby-boomers with ghoulish tastes. So it is only in the last couple of decades that, thanks to the labours of archivists and film restorers in different countries,16 we

11

12

BFI FILM CLASSICS

have been able to see adequate, let alone more or less complete (and correctly tinted)17 versions of the film. Though the likes of André Breton and Robert Desnos caught on while Murnau was still alive, most of the people who love the film first encountered it in quite recent years. At this point, it would usually be the custom to state that the power of the film has remained undiminished. This would not be entirely honest; and even those who consider the film a masterpiece would usually concede that it is not a flawless masterpiece. Much of the acting (especially that of Granach as Knock) is embarrassingly overstated or simply unconvincing. Some of the special effects – especially the accelerated motion of Nosferatu’s coach – now seem more comical than frightening, especially to younger viewers, or at least those younger viewers who are innocent of most silent films. Much the same can be said of the vampire’s make-up. Words such as ‘silly’, ‘corny’ or ‘dated’ are sometimes just. But not always. Given a degree of suspended disbelief, the vampire and his actions continue to be chilling; as has often been said, Orlok seems far more convincing as a horrific corpse than any other member of the undead in cinema history. His first approach to Hutter at night-time in the castle can still frighten and disturb; as can his appearance – brilliantly staged – on board ship, or the dreadful sight of his face staring with blank malice and hunger from his window in the ruined house in Bremen. And Eisner’s ardent evocation of the film’s intense beauty at certain points grows more convincing with the years. Some of the visions of land and sea threaten to up-stage the horrors; others, like the shots of horses being stalked at night, or the lowering skies, or – above all – the Empusa entering dock, combine beauty and terror to a degree that has seldom been rivalled. Beauty and terror are at the heart of what makes Nosferatu a classic film, if by ‘classic’ we mean something that is not safely dead and tucked away in the dictionaries of cinema, but still has potency and life – here, the unsettling life-in-death that has been termed ‘the

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

uncanny’.18 Nosferatu can still enthral a sympathetic audience when screened, and continue to haunt long after the final frame. It is large; it contains multitudes: the ‘convulsive beauty’ adumbrated by the Surrealists, Balázs’s ‘glacial terror’, Kracauer’s social and political dimensions, Eisner’s highly cultivated artistry ... and much else. The film has also been read as a coded commentary on Murnau’s status as an outsider – he was gay at a time when the sexual laws of his country were Draconian – and, fancifully, as a pure exercise in camp, whose central character is not ‘Max Shreck’, but another Max: Murnau’s theatrical mentor Max Reinhardt.19 In one version of this fantasia, it is Murnau who plays Nosferatu; in another, Nosferatu himself.20 Nosferatu has been seen as a self-reflexive film, one that plays with metaphoric links between cinema and vampirism. (All its actors are now dead; but they come back to life when the film is projected or played.) Small wonder, as the novelist Anne Billson said,21 that Murnau’s film invented the convention that vampires vanish in the daylight: so do films, which can only thrive in the dark. In the following chapters, I will elaborate on these topics and possibilities, and hope to add at least one other, seldom discussed ingredient to an already heady mix: the film’s origins in German and international occult societies, and, above all, the important part played in its development by the shadowy figure of Albin Grau, who smuggled in references to occult masters from Athanasius Kircher to Paracelsus, like Orlok smuggling his earth-laden, rat-infested coffins into Bremen. Let us begin with the most dreadful of the events that quickened Nosferatu into being: World War I.

13

14

BFI FILM CLASSICS

1 Contexts Weimar Culture Years passed. One no longer reads the terror of war in the eyes of men; but something of it has remained. Suffering and grief have weakened the heart of man and have bit by bit stirred up the desire to understand what is behind this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men. Albin Grau, Vampires (1921)

Wittingly or not, all films express something of the age in which they are made, but – at least since the publication in 1947 of Siegfried Kracauer’s sociological study From Caligari to Hitler (see Introduction) – it has widely been accepted that the films made during the short-lived democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic are exceptionally fertile in their allegorical and not-so-allegorical treatment of popular desires, anxieties, hallucinations and dreads. Nosferatu has often been seen, in the distinguished company of Fritz Lang’s brace of early films about the master criminal Dr Mabuse, as one of the outstanding documents of Weimar culture’s dark side. Albin Grau, a lifelong occultist, was the producer of Nosferatu as well as its designer, and his comparison of the recently fought war to a cosmic ‘vampire’ suggests that at least some of the dramatised anxieties that make the film so enduringly potent were well understood by its makers. Its prevailing themes include human destructiveness, moral and physical pollution, individual and collective insanity, the instinctive horror of corpses and the eternally fated struggle of life against death. These are, to be sure, ancient subjects of tragic art, but as Grau’s essay underlines, they also had a stinging topicality in 1921.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

The state of Germany during the decade or so after the Armistice of 1918 – signed just three years before shooting began on Nosferatu – was finely evoked by Lotte Eisner at the opening of her passionate account of Weimar cinema, The Haunted Screen (L’Écran Démoniaque, 1952; translated 1969). Thousands of young German men had died and their families went into mourning, just as the bereaved families of France and Britain were mourning, but without the cold solace of a clear victory. Maimed and disfigured war veterans begged in the city streets of Munich and Berlin, a hideous daily reminder of the late massacres. German national self-confidence had been shattered by a crushing military defeat; what was left of the economy was in ruins. The punitive, not to say humiliating terms of the war reparations laid down by the Treaty of Versailles exacerbated the condition. The notorious inflation, and then terrifying hyper-inflation of the mark during the Weimar period had become conspicuous as early as 1922, the year of Nosferatu’s release. But there was an even greater nightmare in the popular imagination. Germany had been one of the nations afflicted by the appalling Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which killed more people world-wide than all the guns and bombs of the previous four years. Contemporary audiences for Nosferatu, with its unsettling scenes of plague rats and mass burials, knew the terrors of contagion intimately. The Social Democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic were hard-pressed to maintain a balance between the violent forces set loose by the defeat. Rumours ran wild: the country had been sold out, whispered or shouted adherents of the Kaiser, by a conspiracy of Jews and socialists. Agitators on the left proclaimed that the moderate government had sold out the workers, and thwarted them of the chance of a revolution along Russian lines. The so-called Spartacist movement attempted Soviet-style revolutions in 1919; the following year, on 13 March 1920, came the Kapp Putch, in which 5,000 soldiers of the Freicorps occupied Berlin and installed the right-wing journalist Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor. This

15

16

BFI FILM CLASSICS

attempted coup d’état lasted just four days. Further upheavals lay ahead. Finally, the collapse of the German economy was accompanied by a collapse in traditional values; some contemporary observers described the Berlin of 1922 as a new Sodom, where every known vice could be indulged, especially by those with dollars or other hard currencies. On the positive side, the sense that everything was teetering on the edge of a precipice could be exhilarating for those, especially the young, who wanted to see Germany made entirely anew, and the avant-garde arts that had begun to flourish in the prewar period, including Expressionist painting, made a dramatic comeback. Weimar culture was unusually rich, and Weimar cinema is sometimes said to be the high-water mark of German film-making. All this is reasonably common knowledge. Less well remembered is the major occult revival which took place in Germany at this time – a revival in which Grau played a leading part. In the words of Eisner: Mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves, had flourished in the face of death on the battlefields. … And the ghosts which had haunted the German Romantics revived, like the shades of Hades after draughts of blood. A new stimulus was thus given to the eternal attraction towards all that was obscure and undetermined, towards the kind of brooding speculative reflection called Grübelei.22

Which is to say that the supernatural, macabre nature of Nosferatu was very much à la mode in 1922; and the producers could reasonably expect it to attract a substantial audience. Consider how many of the classics of Weimar cinema have macabre or supernatural elements: Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1919, directed by Robert Weine); Der Golem (1920, directed by Paul Wegener); Der Müde Tod (1921, directed by Fritz Lang); as well as Der Knabe in Blau (1919), Satanas (1919), Der Januskopf (1920, a version of Stevenson’s Dr

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and Faust (1926) … all of them directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Murnau In an age when many if not most film directors around the world were innocent of higher education, and often of humble origin, Murnau was not merely a young gentleman from a comfortably off (at one time, rich) background, but also an aesthete, an intellectual and a scholar of literature and art, who abandoned his original academic career for the stage and the screen. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma (August 1961), Edgar G. Ulmer, who had worked as Murnau’s assistant before becoming a director in his own right, maintained that there had never been such a cultivated director. He was born in Bielefeld, in the province of Westphalia, on 28 December 1888, the second of three sons of his father’s second marriage; there were two step-sisters from his father’s first marriage, Ida and Anna. His father, Heinrich Plumpe, was a wealthy textile manufacturer; his mother Otilie, née Volbracht, sometimes worked as a teacher. The infant was christened Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe: ‘Murnau’ was a stage name. According to his older brother, Robert Plumpe, their forebears had suffered from chronic restlessness across the centuries, and seldom settled in one place for more than a few years. Towards the end of his life, Murnau wrote to his mother from Tahiti: ‘I am at home in no house and in no country.’ In the Christmas holidays of 1920, about eighteen months before he began to shoot Nosferatu, Wilhelm – as his family called him – stayed with Robert and his wife in their new home. Until the war, Friedrich had shown little interest in his ancestors, but the experience of combat somehow seemed to have woken a sense of family feeling in him. Robert, who had investigated their ancestry, gave Wilhelm a long talk about their ancient roots. Their forefathers had been Swedish, but had moved to Pomerania in about 1,000 AD. Around 1350, they had been awarded a coat of arms – Robert had recently

17

18

BFI FILM CLASSICS

rediscovered it – and settled on a large estate at Varzmin. But this was an area torn by conflict, and towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Peter von Plumpe sold the estate and moved to Westphalia. Friedrich was fascinated by one strange detail in this account: When I told Wilhelm that two women of our family had been burned as witches at Recklinghausen, he looked at me doubtfully, but eager to be convinced. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It’s true. It happened in 1650. I still have to do some more research to find out whether one of their daughters, Trine Plumpe, was burnt too. At any rate, her mother and grandmother were, and she herself was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in the Tower at Horneburg.’ Wilhelm seemed very struck by this, and remained deep in thought.23

The supernatural was, it seems, in Murnau’s blood. In the 1880s, the Plumpe family were living in a house on the Bahnhofstrasse, on a site later converted into a cinema. But when Wilhelm was still a young boy, Heinrich decided to give up industry to lead the life of a country gentleman. In 1892, as Robert recalled: He sold the business and bought a magnificent estate at Wilhelmshöhe, near Kassel, with a lot of land, hunting, a carriage and a horse. We children were delighted. There was everything we could wish for in that garden – a see-saw, a horizontal bar, a trapeze, all the things provided nowadays in playgrounds. It was a miniature paradise.24

But a short-lived paradise: Herr Plumpe made a catastrophic investment in a new industrial process, and lost his most of his fortune. They moved into a rented apartment. As might be expected from the tone of his work, Wilhelm was a delicate, imaginative boy, often lost in daydreams. He was a voracious and precocious reader, and by the age of twelve was already familiar with Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Shakespeare. His father, alarmed that this mania for books was

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

ruining his son’s health, would take him on holidays to the island of Juist, tear the book from his hands and tell him to look directly at nature. The ploy worked: Wilhelm became a keen swimmer, learned how to sail and would spend hour after hour simply gazing out to sea – much as Ellen does while waiting for Hutter’s return in Nosferatu. Eisner suggests that the country landscapes of his youth were a profound influence on his films. Throughout childhood, his chief delight was to stage plays in his puppet theatre – originally a modest toy, but soon replaced by a much larger structure built for him by his more practical brothers, and complete with lighting, a trap and flies. He roped in his siblings to play the parts he wrote for them, often basing his productions on the most recent play he had seen at the local theatre, and charged admission to fund further productions. As he grew older, Wilhelm developed into a star pupil, always at the top of his class, though his contemporaries stressed that he was never given to displays of arrogance, and he was well-liked. His father did not approve of his scholarly and artistic ways, but he yielded to the pleadings of his wife, and indulged Wilhelm even to the extent of funding lengthy trips to France, Switzerland and other countries during school vacations. It may have been that Wilhelm’s father already suspected that Wilhelm was gay. As Lotte Eisner put it, with appropriately humane indignation: ‘Murnau, born in 1888, lived under the ominous shadow which the inhuman Paragraph 175 of the pre-1918 German Penal Code, cast over him and those like him.’ Some commentators – including the film-maker Stan Brakhage – have proposed that Murnau’s homosexual identity, necessarily kept a carefully guarded secret until his trip to the South Seas, was the tacit subject of most if not all of his films. After taking his baccalauréat – he graduated cum laude in 1907 – Wilhelm went to study philology at Berlin, accompanied by his best friend Hans Ehrenbaum Degele, a fledgling poet, who was the son of a well-known opera singer, Mary Ehrenbaum Degele, and a Jewish banker.

19

20

BFI FILM CLASSICS

It is worth noting that Murnau was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women throughout his short life; if there is any truth in the contention that Count Orlok represents an anti-Semitic fantasy, that animus is highly unlikely to stem from the director’s conscious mind. One of his fellow actors in the Reinhardt troupe, Alexander Granach (who plays Knock in Nosferatu), recalled in his memoir Da geht ein Mensch (translated as There Goes an Actor), how Murnau ‘always chivalrous, defended him, a little Jew from Galicia whose German was still imperfect, from the anti-Semitic attacks of Professor Held, who was himself Jewish’.25 Wilhelm and Hans were probably lovers as well as friends – such, at any rate, is one of the assumptions made by Jim Shepard in his meticulously researched biographical novel about Murnau, Nosferatu in Love (1998). Whether or not this was the case, Hans’s parents embraced Wilhelm as another son, and his father showered both young men with generous gifts. It was at this time that Wilhelm also forged important friendships with other young artists and writers, notably Franz Marc, the Expressionist painter. Among the courses Wilhelm took in these years of higher education were: Romantic German Literature, Shakespeare and German Art History. He also studied the Niebelungenlied, an Introduction to Old English, ‘Explanation of Monuments’, ‘Basic Questions of Ethics’, ‘Readings in Carlyle’, ‘Luther’, ‘Lessing’ and ‘Public Speaking’. the artists he studied included Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grunewald and Hans Holbein. His principal art history teacher was Carl Neumann (1860–1934), a Rembrandt expert. (There is at least one direct allusion to Rembrandt in Nosferatu.) He was working towards a doctorate, and in later years was often addressed as ‘Herr Doctor’, but in fact he abandoned his studies when a more seductive career opened up to him. The celebrated director Max Reinhardt saw him acting in a Heidelberg student production, and he was so impressed that he invited the young man to join his acting school. Wilhelm abandoned his studies at the end of the summer semester, 1911. The worlds of

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

theatre and cinema were closely related, and it is striking that three of the principal creators of Nosferatu were veterans of Reinhardt’s company: Murnau; Henrik Galeen, its screenwriter; Max Shreck, its leading player (the name ‘Shreck’, which means ‘Terror’ in German, was the actor’s actual surname, though it has often been assumed that it was a rather obvious stage name). Murnau toured with the company in Budapest, Salzburg and Vienna. One of the attractions of working for Reinhardt must have been his friendly attitude to homosexuals; though a devoted heterosexual himself, Reinhardt offered a protected space where his associates could be open and relaxed about their gay identities. For his father, Murnau’s decision to abandon his studies and become an actor was the last straw. ‘No, not another penny,’ he said. ‘I paid for him to become a professor, not a starving actor.’ Unknown to him, Wilhelm’s mother asked her father to send Wilhelm regular small sums of money. It was at this time that Wilhelm adopted the ruthless policy, which he maintained until about 1920, of cutting himself off from all his family except his mother and almost all of the friends he had known in his school days. This was also the point at which he cast off his father’s name, and adopted the stage name of ‘Murnau’ – a nod to the Upper Bavarian artists’ colony, Murnau am Staffelsee, which he had visited with Hans. Murnau’s early career in the theatre was cut short by World War I. He was called up by the First Regiment of Foot Guards in October 1914, and was posted to Potsdam. After taking part in some heavy fighting, he was commissioned as an officer, and then made company commander at Riga. His friend, or lover, Hans, had volunteered in 1914 and sent Wilhelm a steady stream of letters from the front, as well as a small book of his recent poems, one of which seemed to be a premonition of his death: ‘Dig Your Grave Deeper, Soldier …’. Hans was killed in action soon afterwards, in 1915. Murnau was devastated; it may have been the greatest emotional shock of his life. But it brought him closer still to Hans’s family, and he spent his leave of 1916 at their Berlin house. Shortly

21

22

BFI FILM CLASSICS

after this stay, Hans’s father also died. Again, her bereavement only intensified Mary’s affection for Wilhelm, and when she in turn died a few years later she left the family house to the University of Berlin on the condition that the young man should be allowed to live there for as long as he wished. It seems that Murnau found life in the infantry unbearable, less because of its dangers than for its protracted periods of intense boredom. In 1917, he volunteered to be an observer for the Luftwaffe. His application was successful, and was quartered with his new comrades in an abandoned chateau near Verdun. Here he became a fighter pilot, flying several missions over France and crashing no fewer than eight times without serious injury. He later wrote about the sheer exhilaration of flight, and it has been suggested that the experience had some effect on his later camera style, particularly in Faust. One of his comrades of the time, Major Wolfgang Schramm, remembered him as a ‘curious mixture of wandering gypsy and cultivated gentleman’. Major Schramm’s memoir is uncommonly perceptive: He had the largest room in the chateau, arranged in perfect taste. Everything about it was clean and well-appointed; when you went to see him you forgot about the war, and made a polite and civilised visit. On every mission, every flight, he did all he had to do as carefully and as conscientiously as he arranged his room, and in spite of the toughness of our job, he managed to bring to everything a touch of beauty, even of tenderness. One didn’t need to be a psychologist to know that someone like that would make his mark.26

Schramm also relates a telling anecdote about Murnau as a performer of spooky entertainments. At the routine demand of his brother officers, Murnau would sit beside the fire in the mess, his long legs stretched out, his long, slim fingers beating in time with the refrain, and recite a popular poem, ‘Der Todspieler’, aka ‘The Pianist of Death’. His audience would sit enthralled night after night, then

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

loudly applaud his brilliant rendition. After a due pause, Murnau would then recite another favourite poem, ‘Three Old Troopers Sat Round the Hearth of Heaven’. Again, his comrades were enthralled. Schramm continues: Next morning, like all the rest of His Majesty’s pilots, he would go off to his work again, his lofty silhouette, dressed with studied negligence, creating around him an atmosphere that was somehow disquieting. His uniform was correct, the only eccentricity being a long stick made out of a bullet-ridden propeller, with a handle shaped like a mushroom. Soon all of us were carrying the same sort of stick. Murnau used to create our fashions and customs. He was the accepted authority in his section on all cultural activities, and accepted with a smile of pride any praise of his creative gifts.27

Murnau continued to fly missions until one day, in December 1917, his plane became lost in a fog, and he was forced to make an emergency landing in Switzerland. It is by no means clear whether this was a legitimate navigational error or a sly act of blame-free desertion. He spent the last part of the war as an internee in a POW camp at Andermatt. Conditions here seem to have been unusually agreeable, and Murnau spent much of his time acting in or staging amateur theatricals. At one point, the Swiss government launched a competition for the best production of a nationalist drama, Marignano. The inmates of the camp were eligible to compete, and Murnau’s production won first prize. On being released and demobbed in February 1919, Murnau returned to Berlin, moved into the Degele house, and set up an independent film production company with the actor Conrad Veidt: Murnau Veit Filmgesellschaft. Their first production was Der Knabe in Blau (The Boy in Blue), 1919, inspired by the Gainsborough painting. The next three years were intensely active, and by the time Albin Grau recruited him for Nosferatu in 1921, Murnau had made another eight features:

23

24

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Satanas (1920) Der Bucklige unde die Tänzerin (The Hunchback and the Dancer) (1920) Der Januskopf (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) (1920) Abend – Nacht – Morgen (Evening – Night – Morning) (1920) Sehnsucht (Desire) (1921) Der Gang in die Nacht (Journey into Night) (1921) Schloss Vogelöd: Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnesses (Haunted Castle) (1921) Marizza, genannt die Schmuggler-Madonna (1922) By his early thirties, he had managed to make himself an experienced director. Murnau is said by some to have been a cold, aloof, at times autocratic character; this is certainly how John Malkovich interprets him in Shadow of the Vampire (2000). But a memoir of working on one of Murnau’s lesser-known films by the set designer Robert Herlth gives a much happier impression: he was always good-humoured: he was never really angry when he sounded angry. Our team was extremely happy, always ready for jokes and teasing one another. It was partly the exuberance of people who know they are in the process of creating something exceptional; partly the spirit of that time, when people were always trying to spring surprises on one another.28

By the late spring of 1921, he was about to make his breakthrough film. Dracula The screenplay for Nosferatu was in large part lifted from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) – not yet, in 1921, an international best-seller, nor the household name that it is today. But it remained steadily in print after Stoker’s death in 1912 and its sales provided a modest but reliable income for his widow, Florence – an income which grew considerably when the book was adapted for the stage in

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

an authorised production. The Nosferatu team, who had almost certainly not heard of Florence, evidently believed that by changing the names and places of the narrative, and by taking it back in time to some past era – notionally 1838, the year of an actual outbreak of plague in the city of Bremen – they would have covered their tracks. They were mistaken. The change of period has a number of indirect consequences. Stoker’s narrative makes much of the contrast between the timeless evil of the Count and the very modern gadgets which the forces of good enjoy, and can sometimes use as weapons: the typewriter, the telegraph, blood transfusion, sound recording onto cylinders, trains and railway timetables. Murnau establishes the ‘modern’ part of his action as very precisely in the Biedermeier epoch, so that the gap between this world and the more ‘mediaeval’ appearance of rural Transylvania is much less marked here, especially as the ‘modern’ world still seems very much in the thrall of earlier times: the local professor is distinctly, and strangely, identified as a disciple of Paracelsus. Murnau retains the triad of characters at the heart of Dracula: the young hero, Jonathan Harker, who becomes Hutter; his fiancée and wife Mina, who becomes Ellen; and Dracula himself, now Graf Orlok. In the film, Dracula/Orlok sails not to Whitby but to the Baltic port of Wismar; and the plague he brings with him is an invention for the film. Professor Abraham van Helsing, in the book a powerful and charismatic polymath who is Dracula’s most potent adversary, becomes an almost pathetically ineffectual old soul, who leaves the job of defeating Orlok to Ellen. Other characters are cut entirely (Dr Seward, Quincy) or reimagined. Arthur Holmwood becomes Hutter’s friend Harding, and Harding’s sister Anny is an all but unrecognisable Lucy Westenra – Dracula’s first major English victim, who in the novel turns into a vampire and must be staked. Renfield, the madman who eats flies, becomes transformed into the comic/sinister figure of Knock, an estate agent, and Hutter’s employer. Orlok does not enjoy the

25

26

BFI FILM CLASSICS

company of the three voluptuous brides who add erotic lustre to Castle Dracula, but endures his undeath in utter solitude; nor does he grow mysteriously younger, as Dracula does. He is also hideous. The film retains something of the novel’s exciting chase of Dracula back across continental Europe to his castle, but brings the chase forward from the climax of the narrative to its middle: Hutter and Orlok race each other to be the first to reach Wismar and Ellen, the vampire by sea, the human by land. Galeen and Murnau also play around with the rules of vampirism: most significantly, they make exposure to daylight fatal for Nosferatu; Dracula, though his stranger powers are diminished in daytime, does not fear the heat of the sun. In the decades between Nosferatu and the Twilight films, cinematic vampires have almost always had to protect themselves from natural light. And the strange detail about the vampire’s vulnerability to a ‘pure woman’, which makes Ellen’s tragic selfsacrifice both possible and inevitable, is also an addition to Stoker’s body of lore. It links the film to other romantic tales of female selfsacrifice, including Wagner’s Flying Dutchman.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

2 Production As noted above, one of the factors that set Nosferatu apart from almost every other film (and not only the films of the Weimar epoch) is that it was the product both of an industry and of a subculture: the murky world of German secret societies, fringe beliefs, alchemy, magical rites and western hermeticism. Murnau, or so at least one of his family members recalled many years later, was long fascinated by the occult, and perhaps a believer in the genuine powers of occult practitioners. Whenever challenged on the exact nature of his supernatural beliefs, however, he would just smile in a mildly sardonic way and say nothing. The extent of his personal commitment to occultism must remain a mystery, at least for the time being. Yet it is a striking fact that at least three of his main partners in the enterprise were prominent German occultists. Werner Spies, Murnau’s close friend and designated ‘artistic consultant’ on Nosferatu, had devoted himself to studying ancient Egypt – first its written language, then its religion and its (supposed) mysteries. Henrik Galeen, who wrote the screenplay, was a member of a Rosicrucian lodge. And the man who conceived Nosferatu, imagined its world, and engaged Murnau to bring its dark vision to the screen was, of course, Albin Grau. Albin Grau Born on 22 December 1884, Grau was in his late thirties at the time he met Murnau (not sixty-six, as some sources maintain). In the course of his life, Grau was an active and usually high-ranking member of two or possibly more occultist groups. By the early 1920s, Grau had become an associate of Germany’s most influential guru, Heinrich Tränker, who had cobbled together a religion of sorts from assorted traditions including Rosicrucianism, Theosophy,

27

28

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Freemasonry and the like, and called his syncretic system ‘Pansophism’. In 1921, the year of Nosferatu’s pre-production and shoot, he appointed himself ‘Grand Master’ of the Grand Pansophical Lodge of the Orient. There were about a hundred duespaying members, including Grau, who was given the unpromising title ‘Master of the Chair’ and the ceremonial name ‘Pacitius’. The members enjoyed dressing up in long robes, decorated with arcane symbols. In May 1921, Tränker was approached by the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the largest and most internationally inclined occultist body in the world. He accepted the invitation to join forces, and was appointed as the Grand Master of OTO for Germany. (Neither Grau nor any of the other Pansophists followed his lead.) Inevitably, this led Tränker to enter into a correspondence with the Grand Master of the USA and UK: Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and, according to Britain’s yellow press, the ‘wickedest man in the world’. In November 1921 – about the same time that Nosferatu was being edited – Crowley seized control of the OTO and made it into a vehicle for his own self-concocted religious faith, Thelema. The wrangles and shouting matches that this move provoked were the background of Grau’s life for the next three years or so. Briefly: Crowley and Tränker began a correspondence – an awkward one, as neither spoke the other’s language – and, eventually, Tränker invited Crowley to stay in Germany for several weeks. He also seems to have asked Grau to shoot a documentary about Crowley’s trip: E. Elias Merhige, in his commentary to Shadow of the Vampire, makes a reference to this filming, but any footage Grau might have shot has not, so far, been discovered. Crowley, acting in familiar fashion, tried to wrest control of the German OTO from Tränker. The German magus was so angered by this that he not only resisted but tried to persuade the authorities to have Crowley deported. Though he, too, was distressed by Crowley’s attempted coup, Grau felt that Tränker had been guilty of a serious

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

breach of occult hospitality, and demanded that Tränker resign. Tränker refused, and so the Grand Philosophical Lodge was dissolved. About two-thirds of its members banded together again to form the Fraternitas Saturni, or Brotherhood of Saturn. Grau was offered the post of Master, but declined. Many people fell under Crowley’s sway in the 1920s, but Grau was not among them. In his biography of Crowley, The Great Beast, John Symonds (who clearly had no idea of Grau’s activities outside the world of secret societies) states that ‘a certain Albin Grau’, who was a member of the OTO, was appalled by the anti-Christian sentiments of Crowley’s Book of the Law – the so-called ‘Bible of Crowleyanity’. Grau wrote: I thus to my horror got a real glimpse of the future reconstruction, as planned by the AA, of a primitive world order which suggests the blackest days of Atlantis. If these ideas had been clearly in my knowledge at the time, Sir Crowley [sic: though it is true that Crowley enjoyed posing as a Knight of the Realm] may rest assured that I would not have put myself so certainly before the chariot of the AA.29

None of this detail should be taken to imply that Nosferatu is a coded work of occult belief – in the nature, say, of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising – rather than a straightforward supernatural yarn. But Grau’s passionate involvement with occultist power-politics and comparably ardent hunger for mystical revelations told deeply on the whole production, and at many levels. It is perceptible even in the name Grau chose for his production company: Prana-Film. Grau would have known the word ‘Prana’ from yoga practitioners, or from the pre-war German theosophical magazine Prana. The Sanskrit word has been variously translated as ‘breath’, ‘breath of life’ or, more loosely, ‘life force’. The logo for Prana-Film took the form of the classical circle of yin and yang. Prana-Film was founded in January 1921, by Grau and a businessman, Enrico Dieckmann, with an initial capital investment of

29

30

BFI FILM CLASSICS

20,000 marks. The company announced an ambitious slate of productions, almost all of them with a supernatural or macabre element, including Höllenträume (Dreams of Hell) and Der Sumpfteufel (The Swamp Devil) … and Nosferatu. In the event Nosferatu was to be the first, last and only production of Prana-Film. Grau produced a series of detailed sketches and paintings for the film, many of which – including the scenes in which Hutter and Ellen, in bed, are menaced by the Nosferatu – found their way almost unchanged into the completed film. In some of them, the vampire creature appears not in humanoid form but as a kind of cross between a winged ant-eater – with a long proboscis – and an armadillo. (A curious anticipation of the geography-defying armadillos which root around Dracula’s Transylvanian castle in Tod Browning’s Dracula.) This odd little creature, more cute than frightening, even appeared in some posters for the film. In other images, the vampire is a large, powerful being with the macho build of a comic-book superhero. In one of Grau’s images, the Nosferatu appears to be shooting beams of light from its eyes. E. Elias Merhige had this illustration in mind for the scene in Shadow of the Vampire in which Orlok/Shreck discovers the wonders of the movie projector. Grau’s visual style here was deeply influenced, he said, by the work of the artist Hugo Steiner-Prag, who had provided the illustrations for an edition of Gustav Meyrink’s novel Golem. (The source for Paul Wegener’s Der Golem; Henrik Galeen was the cowriter of this film.) As his ideas developed, Grau eventually came up with a version of the Nosferatu face that is almost exactly the one we now know; this too came from a monster drawn by Steiner-Prag, though Christopher Frayling has argued, persuasively, that both Steiner-Prag and Grau must also have been thinking of the menacing incubus figure in Henry Fuseli’s famous supernatural painting ‘The Nightmare’ (1781). Grau hired Galeen to write the screenplay. Fortunately, Murnau’s own copy of the script has been preserved, and it shows

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

both Galeen’s original ideas and – in a series of fascinating marginalia and sketches – Murnau’s changes and additions to the text. (In the following chapters, Murnau’s marginalia appear in bold, following the example of the appendix to Eisner’s Murnau.) At times, Murnau’s comments are so detailed as to give the impression that we can see his mind working, turning over possibilities, introducing nuances, making the film more his own. He drew sketches of the sets and of the camera set-ups; he repeatedly drew diagrams, rather like a noughts-and-crosses grid, which he used for listing the characters, their clothes and the time of day. Galeen’s script reads very differently from screenplays as we know them today. It reads exactly like a German Expressionist poem of its day, with broken lines, a staccato rhythm, incomplete sentences, emphatic use of capitals, plenty of triple dots and a liberal peppering of exclamation marks. A sample, from scene 74:30 Yet in the sand … something moves violently … something is alive … jumps out … horrible animals … rats!! One of the dock workers, who bends over to scoop the scattered sand back, hits out violently. Did not one of the animals … reeling from the blow … bite his foot?

Albin Grau’s conception of the vampire; Henry Fuseli, ‘The Nightmare’ (1781)

31

32

BFI FILM CLASSICS

From scene 99: The captain is guarding the helm. Then, from the hatch, the mate emerges … his hair has turned grey … his face looks crazed … he is foaming at the mouth … Trying to escape … turns deliriously in a circle … loses his sense of direction … does not see the railing … and overshoots it, falling head first. The captain watches in horror. Now he is left all alone. But his face remains determined. He picks up a rope and ties himself to the helm, not to be tempted to leave it. Thus he awaits the horror.

It is a compelling read. Now all Grau needed was a director. He turned to Murnau, whom he had met during the production of Journey Into Night in 1920. Location work The crew went on a location shoot in the summer of 1921, with Fritz Arno Wagner as cameraman; Wagner had the reputation of being one of the best cameramen at Ufa. (The other great German cinematographers of this period were Karl Freund, Eugen Schüfftan – these two being the most enduringly famous – Guido Seeber, Carl Hoffmann, Curt Courant, Gunther Rittau, Reimar Kuntze and Franz Planer.) Principal cast: Max Shreck Gustav von Wangenheim Greta Schröder G. H. Schnell Ruth Landshoff Gustav Botz Alexander Granach John Gottowt Max Nemetz Wolfgang Heinz Albert Venohr

Count Orlok Hutter Ellen, Hutter’s wife Harding, a shipbuilder Ruth, Harding’s sister Professor Sievers, the town doctor Knock, a property agent Professor Bulwer, a Paracelsian A ship’s captain First sailor Second sailor

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

The location shoot began in early July 1921. After leaving Berlin, the first call was Lübeck, which provided several important exterior shots, incuding Hutter’s house and the sinister, broken-down building across the way from Hutter’s house – in reality, a set of former salt warehouses – in which Orlok lodges. By mid-July they had travelled about 60 kilometres to Wismar. The very first shot of the film was made here, from a platform inside the tower of St Mary’s church, using Murnau’s favourite tool, a telescopic lens. Edgar G. Ulmer, later to become a notable director in his own right, was an assistant set designer on several of Murnau’s films. Years later, he recalled that Murnau always used a telescopic lens for scenes which could have been filmed with other lenses … Where other directors film with a 32 or 24 focal length, Murnau films those shots with a focal length of 75 – he knew how to use those lenses because he knew their secrets.31 Wismar, St Mary’s church – the film’s establishing shot

33

34

BFI FILM CLASSICS

There are usually three reasons why directors use such long-distance lenses in place of more conventional ones: (a) to shoot at some distance from the actors, so that they are less conscious of the proximity of the camera and will perform more freely and spontaneously; (b) to create a shallow depth of field around the actors or other subjects; (c) to create an effect of ‘flatness’ in the image.32 Given the florid acting style throughout much of the film, we can safely assume that Murnau’s intentions here were primarily to do with the composition of the film. On 31 July, Prana-Film took out an advertisement in the local press, asking for ‘thirty to fifty’ live rats, though only a dozen or so are visible in the film. (It may have been a mild publicity joke: the next day, an advertisement in the same paper offered the services of a rat-catcher.) The activities of cast and crew stirred up a good deal of local interest, and the Wismar newspaper ran articles about the production on 2 and 3 August. Wismar is a port, and it was here, on a jetty, that the team shot the thrilling image of the death ship’s silent glide into the town, bringing death and undeath. Most of the other locations were within a few hundred yards of each other: the large archway through which Orlok passes, carrying his coffin; the scene of Hutter mounting his horse at the start of his journey (Max Shreck was being made up at the same time). For the sea sequences, the team hired a sailing boat, the Jürgen, and towed it from Wismar to the island of Poel. (The beach scenes, in which Ellen gazes wistfully out to sea, were shot at List, on the nearby island of Sylt.) On 7 August, Walter Spies wrote to his mother, telling her that Murnau was so excited by his experiences filming on board a sailing ship that he now wanted to hire a much larger ship and sail to ‘Java or Honolulu’. (Here is the basis of his adventures making his last film, Tabu [1931].) Spies liked the idea himself, and mused about the possibility of sailing with the crew to Constantinople. The production moved on to Prague, where they took a brief holiday. On 17 August, Spies sent his mother a postcard explaining

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

that their next move would be to the ‘High Tatras’. It was during their stop in Prague, so Grau told it in an article published shortly afterwards in Buhne und Film, that he ran into one of his army friends – a friend who had been with him in Serbia during the winter of 1916. ‘He quickly took me by the arms: “Come, I know a very old inn on the corner, where the great alchemist Rudoph II once caroused, along with his astrologer Tycho Brahe.”’33 The bond of former comradeship was strengthened by the fact that both men had been witnesses, one snowy night, to the telling of a strange tale. Huddled together around a fire in a small thatched cottage, the German soldiers – a delousing detail of five, charged with trying to contain an outbreak of exanthematic typhus – listened to an old peasant man whispering a tale of supernatural evil. ‘Before this wretched war, I was over in Romania. You can laugh about this superstition, but I swear on the mother of God, that I myself knew that horrible thing of seeing an undead.’ – ‘An undead?’ one of us asked. – ‘Yes, an undead or a Nosferatu, as vampires are known over there. Only in books have you heard those strange and disturbing creatures spoken about, and you smile at these old wives’ tales; but it’s here, where we’re at in the Balkans, that one finds the cradle of those vampires. We’ve been pursued and tormented by those monsters forever.’34

After having some difficulty with the customs officers, who confiscated their camera – Grau had to hand over 5,000 krone in socalled ‘duties’ and more in personal bribes – the team travelled by stagecoach to Poprad, where they had their first sight of ‘the gigantic Tatra’. An arduous ascent of 1,700 metres brought them to the Silesian houses. Their drivers were not the most cooperative of souls, and would insist on stopping every half an hour for a hefty draught of schnapps. But they were happy enough to act as extras, and can be seen in the sequence during which Hutter is taken as far as the pass. From Poprad, they travelled on, through Kral’ovany, and on 25 August reached Dolný Kubín. The next set of the scenes to be filmed

35

36

BFI FILM CLASSICS

were those of the ‘magical’ carriage scene – using accelerated motion – and the ‘white wood’ scene, shot in negative; the carriage was draped with white cloth so that it would show up as black on the projected image. Both of these were shot in Vrátna, which is about 20 kilometres from Dolný Kubín. Finally, they came to their most atmospheric location: the semiruined castle of Oravsky Podzamok – in the film, Orlok’s lair. Murnau was overwhelmed by the sight: ‘Incredible!’ he said. Here they shot some of the film’s most memorable scenes, above all the first encounter between Hutter and the vampire. People from the nearby village would cluster around the shoot, hoping to pick up the odd coin by helping with menial chores, but none of them would go near Shreck, so terrifying was his appearance even in broad daylight – and almost all of the shooting was done in full daylight; the effect of night-time would be achieved after the edit, by tinting all the nocturnal scenes blue. Until about a decade ago, most of the prints in circulation had no tinting, which made Nosferatu’s fatal exposure to

The ruined castle of Trencˇiansky hrad, the last shot of the film

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

daylight at the end of the film something of a puzzle to those who were not in the know. With most of the exteriors now safely in the can, they set off on the return journey to Berlin, stopping only twice on the way. The first stop was at Rutga, on the river Waag, which was the location for the scene in which Orlok takes his caskets down the river on a raft. (Until quite recently, most local merchants had used rafts to transport their wares.) Finally, they paused at the ruins of Trencˇiansky hrad, to shoot an impromptu vista – the one which was used as the film’s final shot. This had not been in the screenplay. Interiors Murnau filmed his interiors at the Jofa studio in the Johannisthal district. Grau used the sights they had encountered throughout the shoot when he came to design the sets; for example, the arched doorway through which Orlock stumbles was modelled on a real-life original in Dolný Kubín; it became a recurrent form in the interior shots, often serving as a frame to the bolt-upright figure of Orlok. The large interior in which the elders gather to discuss the plague was inspired by a painting Grau had spotted in Lübeck. But some of his inspirations were much more private, and came directly from his occult studies. If you look closely at the wall behind the Professor as he gives his ‘Paracelsian’ lecture on predation in plants and micro-organisms, you will notice an arcane image. This was taken by Grau from the Arithmetica, an obscure treatise on mathematics by Athanasius Kircher, the polymathic Jesuit. (And not, as the English subtitles of a documentary on Murnau have it, ‘the mathematics of the Athanasian Creed’!) One of Grau’s most mysterious contributions to the shoot was his preparation of the legal deed that Count Orlok reads with fascinated attention. As a close frame analysis has revealed, the document is covered with authentic symbols and emblems from the western hermetic tradition, and has been said to include samples of ‘Enochian’ – the angel language dictated to Dr John Dee

37

38

BFI FILM CLASSICS

and his associate Edward Kelly.35 Other occultists have doubted this, and have identified the symbols in a number of different ways. Some of them seem to have come from the OTO; some from Tränker’s publications on magic; some from Rosicrucianism (specifically: from the eighth level of the ten in the Rosicrucian lodge system); and some from the encryption methods of Slovakian feudal lords. In less mystical mode, Grau and Murnau turned to German art history. Nosferatu is set in what is known as the Biedermeier period, and they went to some specific images. The scene in which Ellen is seated in an armchair, sewing a motto onto a cushion, is inspired by ‘The Elegant Reader’, by Georg Friedrich Kersting. Murnau cast the actress Ruth Landshoff because she reminded him strongly of a portrait by Wilhelm von Kaulbach. They also looked at paintings by Moritz von Schwind and, again, the work of Hugo Steiner-Prag, the illustrator of Der Golem. Grau’s portrait of Paracelsus

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

There are few records of what happened during these weeks in the Jufa studio, but Robert Herlth’s article (an interview with Lotte Eisner) recalls Murnau’s working method on a film he shot just two years later, Der Finanzen des Grossherzogs (1923). When I entered the studio, I was very much surprised at how quiet it was. For in the days of silent films it was the custom to build sets while the shooting was actually going on, while there was usually a crowd of people talking at the tops of their voices, people who were there simply out of curiosity and had nothing to do with the actual shooting. But here there was no one to be seen but the cameraman and one of the actors, Alfred Abel, and also, standing in the dark out of the way, a tall slim gentleman in his white workcoat, issuing directions in a very low voice. This was Murnau.36

Herlth’s account repeatedly stresses three aspects of Murnau’s demeanour – his concentration, his calm, his courtesy – and the high morale that this attitude created: The atmosphere, in fact, was always cheerful and gay, as if he and his colleagues were children larking about together … Though he was not a technician himself, Murnau, a ‘Raphael without hands’, knew that it [a particular special effect] was possible to achieve. And all that was done was done simply because he insisted on it, and because he stimulated us into being capable of it. I think that his imperturbable calm in the studio was due not only to a sense of discipline, but also because he possessed that passion for ‘play’ itself which is essential and necessary to any kind of artistic activity.37

He summed Murnau up in these words: I have never known anyone else who enjoyed the strange business of filmmaking so much as Murnau, although he took his work intensely seriously. … For him, work itself was a kind of intoxication: he was fascinated and gripped by the actual processes, carried away in spite of himself, like a

39

40

BFI FILM CLASSICS

scientist performing an experiment in a laboratory, or a surgeon during a complicated operation.38

The final element in the production was to create a musical score for this ‘Symphony of Horrors’. It was Spies who introduced Murnau to the composer Hans Erdmann. (One of his family members said that, in his youth, Murnau ‘had studied music and would have liked to have been Mahler’.) Erdmann was duly commissioned as the film’s composer, and Nosferatu was one of the earliest silent films to have a specially commissioned orchestral score.39 Meanwhile, Grau did some orchestration of his own, presiding over a vigorous press campaign, writing articles, sending his production drawings and designing posters. One of them, a fine example of the ‘teaser’, simply had the word NOSFERATU, flanked with two large question marks – the dot of each question mark being the yin-yang logo for Prana-Film. His repeated boast was that he had made ‘the first authentic occult film’. He probably had.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

3 Nosferatu: Acts I and II

Les films de Murnau, c’est toujours le passage de la ville à la campagne, du jour à la nuit. [Murnau’s films are always about the pasage from the city to the country, from day to night.] Alexandre (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud), La Maman et la Putain, Jean Eustache, 1973

Lotte Eisner was the earliest critic to observe that Murnau’s films tend to have the same kind of visual felicities, no matter the cameraman with whom he was working.40 For example, Charles Rosher, the cameraman for Sunrise (1924), noted that Murnau was always keenly alive to the kind of images that he and his team might come across by happy chance – the glittering of sun on water, for example. ‘He had an eye for all light and movement.’41 Murnau left few written observations on his aesthetic practice, but one of them is worth noting: he warned would-be directors against the temptations of the ‘interesting camera angle’: when you see the film as a whole, with all these so-called interesting cameraangles, you realize they damage the action: they only lower, instead of intensifying, the dramatic interest of the story, because they are merely ‘interesting’ without having any dramatic value.42

Individual shots must serve the drama as a whole, not call attention to themselves. This policy is key for appreciating Murnau’s approach to Nosferatu; it is also something of a rebuke to those reference books which routinely class the film as ‘Expressionist’ – an ‘Expressionist’ style being, here, one which leans heavily on just such ‘interesting’ angles. There are some obviously Expressionist sequences in the film, notably those including Knock, and some

41

42

BFI FILM CLASSICS

(including scenes on the death ship) which deploy arresting angles. But most of these creepy images are achieved by the use of existing locations, not created on set. As Eisner put it: ‘Never again was so perfect an Expressionism to be attained, and its stylization was achieved without the aid of the least artifice.’43 Most of the film, though, is shot in a much more classical style and, as noted above, the prevailing visual influences are not from Expressionist films but Romantic paintings. What Eisner and her followers have most admired in Murnau is his capacity to portray the natural world, as Caspar David Friedrich did, as expressive of psychic states. Nosferatu’s potency has, to be sure, many sources: the dark mystery of the vampire myth in general and Bram Stoker’s imagination of it in particular; Galeen’s efficient and suggestive script; Grau’s pictorial imagination and his lifelong commitment to the occult (Nosferatu, as Ebert said, is a film which believes vampires exist); the explosion of talent in the early Weimar cinema; and so on. But the next two chapters will be mainly concerned with noting how Murnau shaped the materials he was handed by Galeen and Grau, and brought them to the screen – and with the familiar paradox that this film of horror and death is also enduringly beautiful. In other words, they will partly be about what Nezval called the ‘poetry’ of Nosferatu.44 Act I One of the most striking features of Stoker’s novel is that it is composed entirely of a series of documents – journal entries, letters, newspaper articles, transcriptions of sound recordings and so on. Murnau’s approach is less thorough – the days of supposedly ‘found footage’ movies, such as The Blair Witch Project, were decades in the future – but he does incorporate a great deal of written matter into his drama. Nosferatu declares itself with a page of antiquated German script (the handiwork of Grau), which speaks of a plague which

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

afflicted Bremen in 1838. Grau made about eighty titles for the film, some just conventional slices of dialogue and exposition, but many of them elaborate, atmospheric images in their own right. Since Murnau had the ambition of making films that pursued their narratives with as few titles as possible – The Last Laugh (1924) was his masterpiece in this regard – we can guess that Grau’s sensibility was prevailing here. The texture of Nosferatu is, at times, densely textual. The main text purports to be first-person reportage; it uses the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ fairly often. Who is the ‘I’, the film’s unseen narrator? It depends on the print you see. In Murnau’s orginal, the un-named narrator ‘signs’ himself with the ominous figure of three crosses. In the French prints, a title tells us that we are reading extracts ‘From the diary of Johann Cavallius [in some versions: “Carvallius”], Able Historian of his Native City of Bremen’. This is pure invention. Documents, both handwritten and printed, also play their part in the action as emotionally charged props: the occult letter and deeds sent from Knock to Orlok; the ancient book on vampire lore; Hutter’s letter home to Ellen; the customs documents examined on the quayside; the doomed captain’s log; the news-sheet announcing plague that Knock steals from his captor’s pocket; the proclamation read out by the drummer … The first filmic image proper is the establishing shot filmed from St Mary’s church tower in Wismar: it serves both the practical purpose of showing where the story will unfold, and as a suggestion of an ordered way of life that will soon be in peril. There are relatively few high shots in the film (exceptions: the vertiginous spectacle of the sheer drop from Orlok’s castle; some glimpses from an upper storey of the street leading to Hutter’s house …). This is also the first of Murnau’s several art-historical references. As Angela Dalle Vacche has established, the shot was based on a recent painting by Ludwig Kirchner: ‘The Red Tower in Halle’ (1915).45 Among other pictorial sources and influences, of which the most pervasive both in general mood and specific allusions is

43

44

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Caspar David Friedrich, are paintings by Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), Alfred Kubin (possibly), Moritz von Schwind, George Friedrich Kersting, Wilhelm von Kaulbach and Arnold Böcklin – ‘The Isle of the Dead’. Dalle Vacche also proposes Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson’ as a source for the scene in which doctors examine the dead sea captain – in this, she is almost certainly correct – De Chirico for some of the townscapes (Murnau may have learned about De Chirico from his painter friend Franz Marc) and Emile Nolde for other scenes. An iris in and out then introduces us to a brief sequence of idyllic young-married life. Frau Ellen, the hero’s pretty, ringletsporting wife, is at an open window, basking in sunshine and playing with her cat. (The first of the fifteen or so animal species which will appear in the film; see below.) Next we see Hutter, grooming himself in a mirror. Murnau was precise as to his costume – Hutter – white jabot – blue waist-coat. Murnau was keenly aware of how colours

Frau Ellen with the film’s first predator

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

translated into the greys of the projected image. (In his spoof film Dance of the Vampires [1967], Roman Polanski plays a bumbling young man whose clothes and appearance are closely based on Hutter as he appears here.) Almost at once comes the first intimation of mortality. Hutter goes into their garden to gather flowers. He comes back into the house hiding a posy behind his back, takes Ellen in his arms, kisses her and then produces the bouquet. This sequence was much longer in Galeen’s script, and included a long, semi-comic piece of business about Ellen’s shame at being a poor housewife, and Hutter silently reproaching her for not having made his breakfast. The lost scene also indicates, by way of Hutter showing his empty purse, their both sighing deeply and Ellen resorting to peeling some potatoes – ‘the last resort of the poor housewife’, that they are in serious need of money. This scene would have clarified the reasons for Hutter being so keen to undertake his mission to Transylvania. Ellen and Hutter – the innocent couple

45

46

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Instead of finding the gesture romantic, Ellen is dismayed: ‘Why have you killed them – the beautiful flowers.’ Her sorrow sounds a melancholy note, and anticipates the deeper miseries she will feel when humans, not flowers, are being slaughtered. But she forgives him, and they embrace. Many viewers feel that, despite the conventional gestures of affection between the young couple, there is a distinctly sexless air to these embraces; and the ambiguous hint, later in the film, that Ellen is still a virgin reinforces the sense that erotic intimacy plays no part in their marriage. It is tempting to suggest that Count Orlok may be read as an embodiment of Hutter’s buried sexuality (that the two characters are intended to be recognised, if only in a subliminal way, as Doppelgangers is all but indisputable46). Few critics have resisted the temptation. Hutter sets off for work, and bumps into a friend – Professor Bulwer, a ‘Paracelsian’ intellectual who is the counterpart of Professor van Helsing in Dracula. Unlike van Helsing, who is Count ‘Why have you killed them – the beautiful flowers’

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Dracula’s most powerful opponent, Bulwer is rather a passive character, memorable only for the lecture about universal predation he gives later. Bulwer greets the bustling young man with a cheery bit of wisdom that is also a mildly clumsy portent: ‘Not so fast my young friend! No one out-runs his destiny!’ As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out,47 this remark makes Nosferatu kin not only of its source novel, Dracula, but also of the folk tale, best known from the short story ‘Appointment in Samarra’ by W. Somerset Maugham, about the Baghdad merchant who, at noon, is told that he is about to meet Death. He flees to Samarra to avoid his fate, only to discover that Death had been waiting there for an evening appointment with him. Transylvania will be Hutter’s Samarra. There now follows one of the few scenes in the film which fully merits the term ‘Expressionist’. Hutter is an ill-paid underling for Knock, an estate agent. Knock (played by Alexander Granach), a grotesque old man with bald pate, mediaeval teeth, ludicrously heavy

The film’s first Expressionist interior

47

48

BFI FILM CLASSICS

eyebrows and a permanent cackle, is seen perching on a chair that is much too high for comfort. (The script states that ‘Around his mouth throbs the ugly tic of the epileptic. In his eyes burns a sombre fire.’) Later in the film, Knock – inspired by the character of Renfield in Dracula – will be locked up in the local asylum as a dangerous maniac. Modern viewers tend to wonder why he has not already been committed, since Granach’s performance, probably the broadest and coarsest in a film not lacking in actorly overstatement, establishes him not so much as someone who might be sufficiently unstable to come under Orlok’s mental sway, but as a man who has long since been driven entirely mad. Knock is examining a document, which we can plainly see is covered with arcane symbols – the occult letters and sigils over which Grau took so much care. Keen-eyed viewers will understand at once what later becomes inescapable – that Knock is Orlok’s creature, and knows full well the scope of the evil that he is helping to unleash.

The occult document

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

In the novel, Harker’s employers are wholly innocent of anything more sinister than the desire for a decent fee. Orlok outlines the task he proposes for Hutter, telling the impoverished clerk that he will make a nice bit of money, at the cost of ‘a few drops of sweat’ and – Murnau’s own addition to the script – ‘just a little blood’. The grotesque old man then takes Hutter to the office window and shows him a set of houses immediately opposite the home he shares with Ellen – it is the shot of the disused salt warehouses, which Wagner filmed through a grid in front of the camera lens, suggesting window-panes – and proposes that Hutter should entice Orlok into buying this property. At a level which is never made fully explicit by the narrative, but which is all but impossible for the viewer to miss, we intuit that Orlok has, by some supernatural means, learned about Hutter and Ellen and has dark designs on them. (This theme, again, is a major departure from Stoker.) Soon, the drama will make it clear not only that Orlok can in some way The Faustian pact

49

50

BFI FILM CLASSICS

observe Ellen’s actions, but also that she has some kind of deepening psychic link to the vampire. Some critics48 have noted that several of Murnau’s later films return to a fairly simple story-line which first appears here: that of an innocent young heterosexual couple in some way threatened by a sinister third party, male, female, living or undead. This set-up occurs in Tartuffe, in Faust, in Sunrise and above all in Murnau’s last film, Tabu. Hutter leaves the front of his house with Ellen pleading that he change his mind. But Hutter is characteristically blithe, and laughs off her foreboding. He climbs onto his horse (presumably to make his way to a staging post, as the rest of his journey will be by horsedrawn carriage) and sets off to meet his destiny. The subsequent shot is one of the most magnificent in the film – a slow pan from right to left over a mountainous landscape. It is from here on that Murnau’s deep affinities for the German Romantic landscape tradition in general, and for the paintings of Friedrich in particular, become manifest.

Murnau as landscape artist

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Murnau’s next sequence is hard for modern viewers to watch without a smile, since it established the conventional episode in which terrified peasants and pious old folk warn the foolish outsider not to venture any further towards the Lair of the Beast. Hutter, having summoned dinner at an inn, is in high spirits, until he mentions that he is on his way to see Orlok; at which point the inn falls silent, women cross themselves and a sturdy, moustachioed gentleman in traditional costume warns him to go no further. There is talk of a ‘werewolf’. Murnau punctuates Hutter’s evening at the inn with some extraordinary – and strikingly elegant – exterior shots of the night world of animals. He shows us running horses, and the unexpected sight of a hyena (is it a shape-shifting Orlok?), which appears to stalk them. Murnau went to pains to film the hyena, which he tracked down in a zoo;49 we can safely conclude that the shot meant a great deal to him. At a simple level, these shots are part of the theme of predation that runs through the whole film. Recall that Grau said his The superstitious locals

51

52

BFI FILM CLASSICS

first inspiration to make Nosferatu came when he saw a spider eating its prey. Less evidently, these shots – like those of the tiny ‘polyp’ and its prey, bought in from a scientific documentary – point to one of the extra-narrative properties which gives the film its richness. Nosferatu is, among other things, a cinematic bestiary. Nosferatu as Bestiary Nosferatu, c’est le rhythme animal changé en rhythme démoniaque. [Nosferatu is animal rhythm turned into demonic rhythm.] Roger Blin50

Murnau has often been praised, and rightly, as an artist of landscape. Repeated viewings of Nosferatu make it abundantly clear that his visual imagination was also fired by the beauty, mystery and menace of animals. Hyena or vampire?

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

• Ellen’s cat • Horses • [In the script: Chickens and other birds. Script: ‘The old servant, mother to all animals, throws corn to her chickens. There are sparrows, too.’ Murnau omitted this scene from Nosferatu, but remade it for Sunrise] • [In the script: A man-sized raven; see below] • The ‘werewolf’ referred to by the innkeeper – in fact, a hyena • Mosquitoes • Scene 50: A pack of wolves, howling • Flies, greedily consumed by Knock • The microscopic predator – the script calls it a ‘polyp’ – of Professor Bulwer’s Paracelsian lecture • The small predated fish in the same scene • A spider, feeding on an insect trapped in its web • Plague rats • Scene 89: Wild dogs in Constantinople • Scene 136: A giant bat; omitted • A crowing cock • The fish and other animals – ‘all kinds of animals’ – in Bulwer’s laboratory-cum-living-room. There are also two beings which occupy an odd space between plant and animal: the Venus fly trap and – another deleted scene – the fairy-tale animate tree, which gazes on the speeding stagecoach (see below). Most of these animals are sinister; Orlok, though he is a supernatural, or perhaps anti-natural figure, is simultaneously a wild animal – a participant in a universal nightmare of hunters and prey. *

*

*

Hutter in his bedroom looks out through his open window at these night scenes. From now on, many of the film’s most dramatic scenes, including its finale, take place in bedrooms. He seems to feel

53

54

BFI FILM CLASSICS

a chill – more than the cool night air? – and backs away. His attention is drawn by the small book pressed on him by the landlady, and we see the old-fashioned German-Gothic font, Fraktur, telling the legend of the vampire. But Hutter is too tired to pay much attention; he yawns, kicks off his boots and climbs into bed. Those who have seen the film more than once will notice a telling architectural detail: behind his bed is the shape of a high arch, modelled on the design Grau had discovered on location, and incorporated into his sets. As Hutter drifts off to sleep, Murnau luxuriates in a stately leftto-right pan across the nocturnal landscape: another homage to Caspar David Friedrich. Comes the dawn. Hutter wakes, gets out of bed and opens the shutter. Wholesome light pours in, and he gazes with pleasure at the land outside, now cheerful and teeming with life. He stretches, grins and picks up the vampire book again. Its contents strike him as ridiculous, and he bursts out laughing and throws the Hutter and the vampire book

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

book to the ground. Then he rolls down his shirt and has a bracing wash. We are now approaching the arena of the undead. Outside the inn, a stagecoach is being prepared. Hutter boards, and they set off through mountain roads, at one point crossing a bridge which shudders as the coach passes over it. Finally – another scene which would in later decades become a cliché – the coachmen refuse to travel any further. Hutter laughs at their superstition, shoulders his bag and sets off on foot. Soon, he crosses a bridge; and it is here, as the title informs us, that he meets phantasms. In its loose French translation, this was the title that so affected André Breton when he first saw the film. (See Chapter 5.) A brief shot of the castle, on top of a high mountain, overlooking a vertiginous drop. The supernatural enters with a technical flourish: from the distance, a second stagecoach, its horses hooded, approaches at an impossibly fast rate – an effect simply achieved by under-cranking. Christopher Frayling has pointed out51 that Murnau’s aesthetic here is exactly the opposite of the cinema of the last few decades, which (broadly speaking) uses fast motion for comic effect and slow motion to intensify dramatic impact. For Murnau, on the contrary, fast motion was alarming, and he uses the effect several more times in the film. The driver of the coach, an odd-looking fellow wearing a hat with a giant feather and a cloak that masks much of his face, bids Hutter to climb on board. Hutter does not know it, and neither do viewers who have not been alerted, but the coachman is Graf Orlok himself. Hutter gets in, and the coach sets off again at a similarly impossible speed. Close-ups of Hutter leaning out of the window show his alarm. In the boldest special effect of the film, the film becomes a negative. (Murnau was inspired here by the director Mauritz Stiller.) As Murnau’s annotation reads: ‘Coach drives at high speed through a white forest!’ It seems likely that Cocteau had Murnau’s film in mind when he used negatives for the motor-car trip to Hell early in the action of Orphée (1950);

55

56

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Orlok as coachman; ‘Coach drives at high speed through a white forest!’

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Jean-Luc Godard certainly did when he introduced the same effect in Alphaville (1965). At this point, Murnau cut two quaintly eerie details from Galeen’s script. The first was the appearance of a giant raven. 5 metres. At the Vratna Pass, behind Tyer Hora Empty. By the roadside a wise, man-sized raven. Its shoulders hunched up. It turns its head, listening. Then takes two hops forward and looks down the road. Who’s coming? The familiar vehicle sweeps up and past. A young man, holding on desperately, sits inside, looking terrified. [It] The raven follows him with mocking eyes behind glasses.

This is a fairy-tale detail, and the next shots were even more steeped in folkloric mystery: 5 metres [Valley.] Deserted lane. Only a lonely twisted willow-tree with a scraggly top can be seen. Again, the carriage races past. Like an ancient man who has been disturbed in his rest the tree looks after the vehicle with blank eyes. Isn’t there a grin on its mouth.

There is no indication in Murnau’s notes as to why he cut these magical images. Perhaps they were too hard to achieve in a way that made them seem frightening instead of silly; or perhaps he simply felt that the ride was better filmed entirely at top speed, with no cutaways to other action or inaction. Hutter climbs out of the carriage; the coachman points him towards the castle with his whip hand, then sets off back down the road at magical speed. Hutter approaches the castle, with its arch-shaped doorway; his figure is dwarfed by the architecture. The door swings open, moved by unseen forces, and he enters. A reverse shot shows us an interior archway, from which the figure of Nosferatu emerges, walking stiffly. There is dark sorcery at work; it is impossible for the creature to have found its way inside the castle in just a few seconds.

57

58

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Hutter approaches the castle; first encounter

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Another reverse shot: Nosferatu is closest to the camera, and Hutter looks tiny as he approaches. They meet; a medium shot displays Orlok’s face clearly for the first time, and emphasises his ludicrously over-developed nose. He is wearing a hat: the shock of his bare pate will come later. Together, vampire on left of screen, human on right, they walk into the castle’s dark interior. Act II The action has skipped by what must be about an hour or so: Hutter and Orlok are at a table, Hutter eating, Orlok looking at the documents we have earlier seen in the hands of Knock. Galeen’s script reads: The back page of the letter shows a confusion of numbers, legible and illegible letters. The holy number seven is repeated several times. In between, cabbalistic signs. The spindly fingers holding the letter cover up the rest like claws.

Orlok and the occult document

59

60

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Still staring ahead of him, Orlok slowly lowers the letter allowing us our first clear view of his horrific features from a close range. The thickness of his jagged eyebrows echoes those of Knock the estate agent. Cut to an antique clock, striking the hour of midnight; in the original script it is a plain pendulum clock, but here it is a memento mori, adorned with a skeleton. On paper, the idea might sound a shade too obvious, but in the film it is a very fine touch, at once playing a part in the rhythms of editing, helping to build dramatic tension and reaffirming the macabre dimension of this encounter. Now, a moment that will be repeated in many a vampire movie: attempting to cut a slice of bread by drawing a knife towards himself, Hutter accidently makes a small cut in his thumb. The sight excites Orlok, and he starts to advance on his understandably alarmed guest. Hutter backs away in terror, until he reaches a chair into which he falls. Some viewers read this as a moment of homophobic panic, and they may well be right: from Lotte Eisner onwards, many Memento mori

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Hutter draws blood

Orlok is tempted

Hutter as prey

61

62

BFI FILM CLASSICS

commentators have sought for hints, implications and coded statements of Murnau’s gay sensibility in this film. Some are excessively ingenious, but the notion that Murnau might have sympathised with Orlok as the ultimate outsider seems more than plausible. Nosferatu comes closer and closer, proposing to Hutter that they should sit up together for a while. Murnau shifts away from the action and returns to it the next morning, showing Hutter slumped in the same chair. He shrugs himself awake and stretches. Cut to a hallway, presumably adjacent, with light streaming in through the windows. Jack Kerouac wrote of this scene: The castle has tile floors: Somehow there’s more evil in those tile floors than in the dripping dust of Bela Lugosi [sic] castle where women with spiders on their shoulders dragged dead muslin gowns across the stone. They are the tile floors of a Byzantine Alexandrian Transylvanian throat ogre.52

Cut back to Hutter who investigates his throat, using a small hand mirror. He spots two very small bites – almost imperceptible. If this discovery threatens him, he soon shrugs off his anxiety, helped by the sight of a table loaded with breakfast foods. Next, some castle exteriors. Seemingly restored to high spirits despite the nocturnal scares, Hutter investigates the castle to the limits of its grounds – an ornate stone balcony looking out at a forested landscape. Hutter takes out a piece of paper and starts to write a reassuring letter to Ellen, pausing only to use the paper to swat at the mosquitoes which begin to plague him. (He seems to believe that it was a mosquito which bit him in the night; a reasonable, if incorrect assumption.) A rider passes by, and Hutter gives him the letter. Sunset – another Friedrich moment – and then a return to the dining room, where Orlok is preparing to sign his documents with a quill pen. Hutter accidentally drops his locket, which contains a

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

portrait of Ellen (it appears to be a photograph rather than a drawing, which would make Hutter very up-to-the-minute, as the earliest known photographic technologies were barely more than a few years old). Orlok stares at it with mad eyes, and murmurs that Hutter’s wife has a beautiful throat. Back in his bedroom, Hutter grows increasingly nervous. He looks at the vampire book again – more Fraktur on screen. Another cut to the skeleton clock striking midnight. Hutter grapples with the door of his bedroom and pulls it open, only to see the terrifying vision of Orlok, bolt upright, head bare, with blazing eyes wide open, having cast off all pretence of being anything other than a vampire. Hutter runs back to the window in search of a potential escape route, but we see that the fall from his room is vertiginously high. The bedroom door swings open and, haltingly, Orlok approaches until his body is closely framed by the arched outline of the doorway. There is something obscene about Orlok; he truly looks, as so few cinematic vampires have, like an old corpse escaped from its wormy bed. Infantilised by his fear, Hutter climbs into bed and – a clever psychological touch – pulls the sheets over his head. From this point on, the scene becomes a brilliant display of cross-cutting between Hutter’s bedroom and, hundreds of miles away, Ellen’s bedroom. Ellen wakes in horror; she is aware, by psychic means, that her man is in deadly peril. (Secondary cuts show other scenes in her household.) She rises from her bed and sleepwalks along a stone balcony – faintly reminiscent of Orlok’s grander balcony – until she faints, and is caught in the nick of time. Somnambulism was, as audiences of the time would be aware, the subject of the earliest famous film of the Weimar period, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Back to Hutter, and a masterful effect – one which retains its power to alarm: the shadow of Orlok’s Satanic head, arms and predatory claws inexorably advancing up Hutter’s quivering form. Back to Ellen; back again to the shadow shot. But then Nosferatu stops: Murnau films him in profile, as he slowly turns his head from

63

64

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Orlok approaches; Ellen senses danger

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Orlok attacks; Orlok senses Ellen

65

66

BFI FILM CLASSICS

screen left to right. The effect is chilling – it is as if he has suddenly become aware that Ellen is ‘watching’ him. Cut back to Ellen, almost as if she is now in the same cinematic space. Back to Orlok, and back again to Ellen, in bed, surrounded by family and a doctor. She faints back on her pillow. The doctor complacently decrees that her condition is ‘harmless’. Back to the text of the vampire book; and to the night sky. Iris out to Hutter the next morning. His throat has suffered a more serious attack, and he clutches at it in pain. He rushes out of his room and through the deserted castle until he reaches its cellar, to find an ancient sarcophagus with a battered wooded lid. Through the holes in the wood, he can see the partly obscured features of Orlok, sleeping his vampire sleep of daylight hours. In a rash moment, he tears off the lid to reveal the whole figure of Orlok. It frightens him so much that he almost loses the use of his legs and has to bump his way up the steps on his buttocks.

Orlok in his crypt

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Loading the coffins; coffins on the raft

67

68

BFI FILM CLASSICS

A landscape shot again; the sun is setting. From his window he sees Orlok loading several coffins onto the back of a horse-pulled vehicle; once again Murnau uses accelerated motion. ‘Ellen! Ellen!’ Hutter screams, realising what Orlok intends. He tears up his bed linen, ties the scraps into a makeshift rope and lowers himself out over the castle’s wall. The rope is not long enough so he has to drop the last part and lands so hard that he passes out, revives for a moment, then falls into a deep coma. The act ends with some sublime shots of boatmen steering a coffin-laden raft down a fast-flowing river. The contagion is about to spread.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

4 Nosferatu: Acts III–V Act III This act moves swiftly, and is a triumph of fluent, dramatic crosscutting, worthy of, if not superior to, D. W. Griffith. Murnau is routinely and rightly praised for quality of the images he achieved with his various cameramen, but he deserves equal recognition for his mastery of narrative rhythms.53 In one period of his youth, he had expressed the ambition to be a composer, in the vein of Mahler; he never achieved this goal directly, but if it is fair to think of the flow of images in film as analogous to the flow of notes and phrases and melodies in music, Murnau was a skilled composer in celluloid. Hence, no doubt, the subtitle: ‘A Symphony in Terror’. His annotations on the shooting script indicate that he generally knew in advance precisely how many metres of film would be required for a given scene. To this extent, Nosferatu was being mentally ‘edited’ by Murnau long before its footage went to the cutting room. Act III jumps between five main sets of action: Hutter’s recovery from his fall and his arduous journey home by land; the progress from dock to dock of the ship carrying Orlok and his coffins (hence, it is a race to the same destination by land and sea – an idea taken from the final chapters of Dracula, but brought well forward to the middle of the narrative); Professor Bulwer’s lecture on primitive modes of predation; Knock in the lunatic asylum, doing some primitive predation of his own; and Ellen waiting anxiously on the beach for word of her husband. Iris out to show Hutter in a hospital bed (we are meant to be in Budapest; the script called for ‘A long line of white beds’, which doubtless proved too expensive an indulgence), attended by a nun and a doctor. After a few moments, Hutter wakes up suddenly and clasps the nun in terror. Iris out to a quayside – the port of Varna.

69

70

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Dockers are loading Nosferatu’s coffins onto a ship. The foreman reads the customs document and is suspicious at the claim that these wooden boxes contain nothing but earth: ‘Garden soil for experimental purposes’. He has one of his men break off one of the lids: sure enough, inside there is nothing but earth … and some rats. (Script: ‘Yet in the sand [Murnau corrects to earth] … something moves violently … something is alive … jumps out … horrible animals … rats!’) The foremen tells his men to go ahead with the loading; as they do so, one of them is bitten on the foot. In the script, the ship is called the Demeter, which is the name of the ship that brings Dracula to England in Stoker’s book.54 In fact, the script draws particular attention to this name. ‘Long shot. The big hand pulley [steam crane] hauls up one of the boxes and drops it into the belly of the sailing-boat that is anchored at the quay. At the ship’s stern one can discern a name, underneath the baroque figurehead: DEMETER.’ Plague rats

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

In the film, the Demeter, Stoker’s name for the doomed ship, has become the Empusa – the Greek word for a kind of she-vampire, a goddess who feasts on blood. This is a highly recondite allusion; one suspects the hand of Grau. There is also a more overt literary allusion here: as S. S. Prawer has pointed out,55 educated Germans of the period would at once have associated these sea-faring rats with a scene in Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephisto is known as ‘Herr der Ratten’: Master of the Rats. Iris out to Professor Bulwer – the script is precise in labelling him ‘a Paracelsian’56 – giving a lecture to a group of students. He wears an ornate dressing gown, a toque and heavy spectacles. His first exhibit is a Venus fly trap plant: a close-up shows its ‘jaws’ closing on a fly. (Script: ‘With irresistible force the flower has drawn it into the recesses of the calyx.’) ‘Isn’t it like a vampire?’ he asks with a grin. To the local asylum, where an attendant comes to report strange behaviour in one of the inmates: Knock. The chief psychiatrist, Professor Sievers (the film’s counterpart to Dr Seward in Dracula) leaves his desk and accompanies the man to Knock’s cell. Here, like the plant in Bulwer’s lecture, Knock is also feeding on flies, which he snatches gleefully from the air and gobbles hungrily. ‘Blood is life!’ he shouts … and then attacks the doctor, seizing him by the throat. Back to the lecture: Bulwer is showing his students an even more elementary species of predator: a ‘polyp’. Seen through a microscope, the polyp seizes and absorbs its prey: ‘And this one … a polyp with tentacles … transparent … almost incorporeal … almost a phantom.’ Knock’s cell: he has spotted a spider and bubbles with delight: ‘Spiders! Spiders!’ In its intricate web, the spider wraps up its victim with freshly spun threads. For those in the know, the scene recapitulates the moment when Grau, or so he claimed, first conceived the idea for Nosferatu. Next: a relatively peaceful, if melancholy, interlude. Ellen sits on a beach, staring out to sea.57 (The script, slipping back into Stoker’s

71

72

BFI FILM CLASSICS

world, refers to it as the ‘graveyard at Whitby’!) She is wearing a heavy black dress, like widow’s weeds, and for some reason the sand dunes around her are filled with crucifixes – marking graves of the townsfolk, or commemorating those lost at sea? None of the crosses stands upright: they appear to have been bent over by the wind. Cut to a light-hearted scene of Ellen’s friends – Harding and Anny – happily playing croquet. (This footage was lost for the better part of seven decades, until Kevin Brownlow’s restoration. Galeen suggested that they should be playing badminton; Croquet? was Murnau’s idea.) Cut back to images of waves, and the sky over the sea, and Ellen again, brooding. (Murnau’s annotation to the script here changes ‘Whitby’ to Heligoland.) A letter arrives – the one Hutter wrote to Ellen from Orlok’s castle. (We see his handwriting.) Ellen’s friends are overjoyed, and head to the beach to hand the letter over. Ellen reads the letter, but looks more alarmed than reassured. (An omitted scene here, no. 87, Ellen gazes out to sea

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

showed ‘The port of Galaz at night. The “Demeter” is anchored off the jetty. Nobody is about on the quay. Suddenly – a gentle movement from the ship down the gangway to the shore … rats … . The coffins are reloaded.’) Iris out on Hutter, fully dressed in his greatcoat and riding boots, obviously about to leave the Budapest hospital, though it is clear that he is still weak. He shakes the nun’s hand in gratitude. (Several scenes are omitted here.) No. 89. ‘Constantinople. Night. Wild dogs are barking from the debris in the street up to the distant firmament, writhing in the mud like snakes. Focus on quay: The “Demeter” at anchor. What’s scuttling over there? … A shadow from the ship to the land … rats … one … four … ten … an endless stream. … They carry terror with them.’

No. 90. ‘8 metres. Polnischer Kamm. Non-stop rain. Entry to the Vratna Gorge.’ This was a scene in which we see Hutter on board a

The Empusa in full sail

73

74

BFI FILM CLASSICS

mail coach as it arrives at a coach station ‘in the Pussta’. The horses have been driven hard and are exhausted; Hutter is anxious to keep up speed, yells at the men to bring out fresh horses and lends a hand strapping them into their harness. The coach takes off at top speed, sparks flying from the horses’ hooves. No. 91. ‘The port of Constantinople. In a fresh breeze, the “Demeter” emerges from the confusion of mast-heads and gains the open sea.’ The ship in full sail. It grows larger and larger as it glides smoothly from screen right to left; no sailors are visible. To Hutter, riding his horse through some heavy undergrowth in a forest. The slow and awkward ride is in striking contrast to the smoothness of the ship’s passage. Back to the ship. Back to Knock, who, despite being chained up, manages to steal a sheet of printed paper from his warden’s back pocket. More Fraktur: a report of the plague that has broken out at several ports.

Knock in the asylum

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

In Transylvania and in the Black Sea ports of Varna and Galaz a plague epidemic has started. Young women in particular fall prey to it in large numbers. All the victims show the same peculiar wound marks on the neck whose origin is still an enigma to the doctors. The Dardanelles have been closed to all ships suspected of carrying the epidemic.

Knock cackles with pleasure, knowing full well what is behind these outbreaks. The ship: its fine sails. Hutter rides his horse slowly over the jagged rocks of a shallow river crossing. One of the film’s rare dissolves: to a crewmen on board the ship – in fact, the mate. He goes below deck to tell the Captain that one of the other crew members is seriously ill. The Captain, smoke rising

Hutter’s frantic ride home

75

76

BFI FILM CLASSICS

abundantly from his pipe, joins the sailor and they visit the shipmate in his hammock, near the coffins in the hold. A change in tinting signals the passage of hours and nightfall. The sick man raises his head and sees an appalling sight: hovering above the coffins, the transparent image of Nosferatu. Hutter, on foot, leads his horse through dense forest. Daytime, on the ship’s deck. The Captain, with only his last surviving crew member, the mate, by way of a congregation, improvises a simple funeral for the dead sailor, whose remains are wrapped up in a sack. He crosses himself, and the two of them throw the sack overboard. The last surviving crewman gathers up his courage, and seizes a small axe. ‘I’m going down!!! If I haven’t come back in ten minutes …’ He heads down to the hold. Hutter rides his horse swiftly over a plain. This scene, No. 96, is shorter than in the script. ‘10 metres Hornunger Moor. Lüneberger Orlok haunts the Empusa

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Heide.’ Then: ‘Hutter, standing near his horse and examining its injured hoof. With a desperate gesture, he lets go of it. Yet he has made his decision. He must go on. He takes the horse by the reins and walks on, dragging the limping animal after him.’ Although the experience of seeing this accident after the scene of Hutter leading his horse does not jar on the viewer,58 it would make more sense if the two scenes changed places. Below deck, the sailor smashes open one of the coffins with his axe. Rats swarm. Then – one of the most celebrated images in the film – Nosferatu, his body rigid as if with rigor mortis, swings upward in a manner that contradicts physics, until he is fully upright. (‘Quick as lightning NOSFERATU rears up from the box.’) Some commentators have assumed that this is a reverse-motion shot, but it is far more likely that the effect was achieved by strapping Shreck to a plank and swinging it upwards on a pivot, as in Merhige’s film Shadow of the Vampire. The mate flees in terror. The captain lashes himself to the wheel, while Nosferatu slowly emerges from the darkness of the hold. He walks slowly and stiffly across the deck, his form framed by the sharp diagonals of the rigging and the mast. The captain at the wheel. Fade to black. Now, one of Murnau’s most haunting visions: a grimly beautiful shot of the ship, strongly back-lit so that both its body and its sails appear to be black. Murnau’s term for back lighting throughout the script is taken from his studies in art history: contre jour, literally: ‘against the day’. The term recurs several times in Murnau’s annotations; the technique is obviously adaptable to different ends, but in Nosferatu it is usually deployed to create images of the kind that Burke would have termed ‘Sublime’ – roughly, the mode of beauty associated with awe, fear and even pain rather than health, pleasure and calm. A new captain has taken charge. The Empusa has become a death ship.

77

78

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Orlok rising

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Act IV A stirring sight: the prow of the ship, as seen from deck. The heavy seas as the ship crashes through them on way to harbour. Cut to Ellen, in her white night attire. The storm is raging on land as well. She raises her arms out before her horizontally in the traditional ‘sleepwalker’ posture. Script: ‘Ellen, her clothes fluttering in the wind, her hair like a flag, is sleepwalking in the storm. She stretches out her arms defensively. A white figure against the black night sky. Contre jour! Clouds!’ The prow of the ship. Heavy waves. Ellen’s house. The wind blows white curtains back into Anny’s bedroom, waking her. She rushes to Ellen. Ellen’s eyes are glassy. ‘I must go to him – he’s coming.’ But which ‘he’: her husband or the undead Graf? Most commentators agree that the ambiguity here is entirely deliberate, and accentuates The death ship

79

80

BFI FILM CLASSICS

the occult bond between Ellen and the vampire established in Act II. Some are convinced that, despite the hideous appearance of Orlok, the bond is overtly erotic: Ellen desires the vile creature as much as she fears it. The ambiguity is almost certainly intentional, though the next cut – to Hutter, climbing out of a carriage – provides the narrative’s ‘official’ answer, so to say: it is her husband for whom she yearns. Again: the prow of the ship. Heavy waves. Knock, in his cell, grows more agitated than ever. Then, probably the single most haunting image in Nosferatu: the ship, no living soul on board, sails along the canal from screen right to left; there is not a sign of anyone ashore, either. As it crosses the screen, the ship blocks out the Cathedral: supernatural evil has triumphed over supernatural good. Spelled out, the symbolism seems a little heavy-handed, but on screen the effect is more subtle and insidious. Christopher Frayling has said59 that

The death ship sails in

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

this image is probably his favourite, not just in Nosferatu, but in any horror film; a preference that deserves noting, since he has seen many. Reviewing a Murnau retrospective held in February 2003, the journalist Andres Kilb described this scene as Murnau’s ‘answer’ to the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en Gare de la Ciotat (1895). In a fanciful but potent vein, he continues: ‘The death-ship glides along like a black cloud. For the first time in silent cinema one hears silence, the dying away of every sound. No later horror film has ever outdone the horror of this first image.’60 Knock in his cell is in ecstasies. ‘The master is here! The master is here!’ And he jumps up onto his bed as an ape might. A wide shot of the ship, now quite still. Then a special-effect sequence – in a series of small jump-cuts, a tarpaulin magically peels itself away from the entrance to the hold. The door swings back. Darkness below. Then the ghastly head of Nosferatu slowly emerges, peering round with blazing eyes. (This is one of the handful of shots that can chill all but the most blasé of twenty-firstcentury audiences.) Orlok, now on shore, walks through a high archway, his coffin under his arm. The archway frames our view of the ship. The doorway to the hold. Rats start to swarm out. Long shot of a street: houses with steeply raked, tiled roofs. (This is one of the moments that Eisner praised as Expressionism without artifice.) Hutter hurries along it, from left to right. Nosferatu, walking in the opposite direction, passes by the wall of a church. Interior of Ellen and Hutter’s house. Ellen swoons into his arms. Iris out: Nosferatu, still walking through the streets with his coffin. Ellen: ‘Thank God you’re well!’ The wall of the salt warehouses. Standing in a small boat on the canal in front of the building, propelled by some occult force, Orlok glides into frame with his back towards us. (This image was directly inspired by Böcklin’s ‘Isle of the

81

82

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Orlok and his coffin; Orlok reaches his base

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Dead’.) On shore, his coffin still under his arm, he approaches the shut door – and dissolves through it. Daylight. The authorities are investigating the ghost ship. They find the dead skipper and untie him from the wheel. ‘Not a living soul on board.’ One of the men investigates the hold; meanwhile, the captain’s body is carried down the gangway. The man who has found the log starts to read the Captain’s recent entries – which appear on screen as a handwritten text. He leaves, and heads down the gangway himself. The Town Hall. The doctor and others examine the captain’s body. (This is the scene inspired by Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson’.) Then he reads the Captain’s log: Second Day. July 13. A sailor has fallen ill with a fever … Third Day. July 14. Mate is talking strangely. He says there is an unknown passenger below deck.

They reach the obvious, terrifying and not wholly incorrect conclusion: ‘Plague!’ The local worthies all rush home leaving the room empty. (Murnau’s notes show that he considered ending the Act here.) Iris out onto a long shot of a nearby street. A lone figure – a drummer – walks down the middle, alerting the people. Closer shot of the drummer, who ceases his drumming and reads out a proclamation. Individual shots of the locals opening their windows and looking out to see what is happening. (The script was more macabre than the filmed version: ‘A closed window. The hatch opens and a woman’s head appears: totally emaciated, long dishevelled hair. On her neck the ominous little marks.’)The drummer rolls up his proclamation, and begins to drum again. Long shot of the street, with the drummer continuing on his way.

83

84

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Act V Iris out to the front door of one of the town’s houses. A man – obviously a local official – slowly leaves the house and chalks a white cross on the door, indicating that it has been afflicted. In a long shot, he walks down the street, chalking more crosses on each door. A group of pall-bearers leave another house further down the street, carrying a coffin on their shoulders. Iris in and out. A close-up of Ellen, agitated, reading the vampire book. We see its Gothic script. She grows more and more fearful. Hutter rushes into the room and takes her into his arms. But she breaks away from him, and points with a dramatic gesture at the window. We see what she has been seeing: the sinister prospect of the empty houses opposite, and Nosferatu – barely visible in long shot – staring across. This, she shouts at Hutter, is what she has to witness every evening! The final version of this scene differs somewhat from both the script and Murnau’s notes – which are more than usually detailed The drummer announces a state of plague

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

here, and show how closely he pondered details of light, shade and contrast. Scene 132 Ellen’s bedroom

15 metres 2x shaded candle on table near armchair Book cover. Inscription. (Vampire). See Chapter I of book.

Dissolve to:

Ellen by the window, the book on her knees, continues reading overcoming her aversion. Chapter II appears.

Medium close-up: Ellen is pondering on what she has read. Hutter comes into the picture, with agitation, almost hostility he grabs the book. Ellen, standing now, looks straight into his eyes, turns and points over to the deserted house. compare the following black dress and shawl Hutter, black waist-coat and jacket

Hutter crosses to the window, but at first is too intimidated to look, and stands with his back to it. Slowly he turns, is obviously horrified by what he sees, and backs away slowly, his arms hanging stiffly from his shoulders … and then he collapses onto the bed. A dark street, lit only by a lamp off in the distance, screen right. Then, in the foreground, another lamp springs into life, clearly illuminating the figure of the town lamp-lighter who proceeds to pull the cord that raises it to its proper level. (This brief sequence, though its service to the plot is slight, adds memorably to the sense of encroaching doom.) A title tells us that the town is in a state of fear. Iris in and out to Anny, in distress; Harding leaning over her, tries to calm her down, and then runs off to find Dr Sievers. In the script, this scene with Anny was much more blatantly supernatural:

85

86

BFI FILM CLASSICS

A procession of coffins; Ellen despairs

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Script:

‘The window, covered by the curtain. Behind it, the shadow of a giant bat. It grows and grows. Soon it isn’t a bat any longer. A vampire? NOSFERATU?! Anny’s body hits the wall … .’

Back to Ellen, who looks out of her other window. From her point of view, we see along the narrow street, now filled with townspeople bearing coffins. Ellen collapses into a chair, and once again picks up the vampire book. We see its Gothic script, which explains how the vampire can be defeated by a pure woman. As the script says: ONLY IF A CHASTE WOMAN CAN FEARLESSLY MAKE HIM MISS THE FIRST CROWING OF THE COCK WILL HE DISINTEGRATE IN THE LIGHT OF DAWN.

The expression on her face changes by degrees. She is steeling herself for a desperate stratagem. In the streets, young and old alike are talking about the crisis. In a long high shot, we see a form scuttling down the street – shortly afterwards, pursued by an ever-increasing mob. It is Knock, who has escaped from the asylum. He climbs onto the roof, cackling and gurning. Townsmen pelt him with stones. He throws his leg over the peak of the roof and then lowers himself down into a rear courtyard before running off again. Back to Ellen, who is embroidering Ich Liebe Dich onto a cushion. (Who is Dich? Hutter? Orlok?) The original scene had more detail:

87

88

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Scene [149] 147 Ellen’s bedroom.

8 metres

Ellen in an old armchair, busy embroidering a cushion in the cross-stitch manner of the 1840s. An inscription reading: I LOVE YOU

Close-up:

Tired, she falls to day-dreaming. Then she lights a lamp.

Medium close-up: Ellen takes up her work again, determined to finish it.

Back to Knock running. He reaches open country, outside the town, still being pursued. Shot of a tree stump; Knock unexpectedly rises up from behind it, leering – a witty touch. The mob. A long shot of a cornfield, occupied almost entirely by the sky and strongly back-lit – Murnau’s ‘contre jour’, again – shows a small figure in silhouette. Knock? A single townsman attacks this figure, which is now seen to be a scarecrow. Murnau holds the long shot as the rest of the mob catches up and rushes across the screen, a horde of tiny black silhouettes. The effect is that of a ‘dance of death’. Sunset. In medium close-up, Nosferatu’s terrible fanged face, staring out from behind the window of his house. The sight is more than adequately frightening for all but the most hardened audiences, though Murnau does not quite achieve the degree of supernatural grotesquerie demanded by the script: 133. A window, divided into four rectangular panes. Light from behind. Stuck to the window, almost completely covering it, something looking like a black four-legged spider. [A visual echo, then, of the spiders in Knock’s cell.] It takes a moment before one can make out Nosferatu’s fingers which are clawing the window frame. In the centre of the body, grinning lasciviously, the waxen face with the ratlike teeth.

Ellen, in her night-dress and in bed, jolts awake bolt upright in dread. Nosferatu’s face again. Ellen clutches at her chest as if her heart were failing. She is being psychically summoned to the closed window.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

The ‘dance of death’; Orlok’s gaze

89

90

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Nosferatu’s face. Ellen reaches up towards the window latches, but falls back in pain. A cutaway shows Hutter on the other side of the room, fast asleep in his armchair. Nosferatu’s face, a final time. Ellen finally gives in and opens the window. This in some unexplained way gives Orlok the power he needs to invade her house. One tradition of vampire lore, mentioned by van Helsing in Dracula, is that a vampire can only enter a new house if he or she has been invited. Hence the title of the outstanding Swedish production Let The Right One In (2008). Still, the business with the window can be a little puzzling, even to those who are familiar with this tradition. The script clarifies this puzzle: originally, Nosferatu was meant to jump in through the window: Scene 164 In front of Hutter’s house

6 metres Nobody is about. Nosferatu is approaching. He comes to a halt. (He is preparing to jump, looks up.) He enters the house.

Scene 165

6 metres

Ellen’s room

Ellen turns round suddenly. She is shaking with fear, anticipating the horror about to happen. And it is coming – Slowly, tensed like a predatory animal. She recoils, moves backwards step by step, and step by step it follows her. !Heart — Hand!

(The last detail being, presumably, the origin of the scene where the shadow of Orlok’s hand covers Ellen’s heart.) Orlok raises his arms high up to one side in the pose of a praying mantis, and begins to edge away to screen left. Ellen collapses, then wakes her husband. As he wakes, she faints.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Hutter settles her on the bed. She awakes, just long enough to beg him to summon Bulwer. We realise, as Hutter does not, that this is her selfless ploy for moving him safely out of the way before Orlok comes. He leaves by the front door, in search of Bulwer. Ellen sits up in bed. The staircase. The large, elongated shadow of Orlock as he climbs the stairs – an image that has passed into history as the most sinister use of the shade in all Weimar cinema, a field crowded with strong competitors. At the top of the stairs: Orlok’s shadow, his claw reaching out towards her door. Neither Galeen’s script nor Murnau’s annotations make any reference to these now-famous shadow effects, nor to the shadows cast over Ellen’s body in the following scene. It seems safe to assume that they were an inspiration of the interiors shoot in Berlin, and that Grau built the sets to accommodate them. Ellen in bed, frightened but resolved. A slightly different angle. Slowly, Nosferatu’s shadow begins to inch up her body. When it reaches her heart, she convulses in pain. Across town, Hutter wakes Bulwer, who has been dozing in his armchair – dressed in his gown and toque – much as Hutter himself has just been sleeping. Hutter urges him to hurry, and he takes off his dressing gown. A classic shot: at the lower left-hand side of the image, Nosferatu’s head as he crouches at Ellen’s neck. She is supine and motionless. We cannot make out any action, but it is evident that he is drinking blood from her jugular. Knock is captured. Reprise of the ‘feeding’ image. A cock crows – dawn. Nosferatu’s face rises, slowly. A horrible suspicion dawns. He turns his head towards the window … The cock crows again. Knock is back in his cell. He senses that Orlok is in peril. ‘The Master …’

91

92

BFI FILM CLASSICS

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Hutter and Bulwer walk down the dawn-lit street. In his cell, Knock clambers desperately up towards the high window, but cannot reach it. Attendants grab him. Ellen’s room. Orlok rises, stiffly. He staggers towards the window. Sunlight strikes him. He leans far backward in agony, then turns around into a mirror image the same almost impossible posture. More light. He begins to dissolve as we have seen him dissolve before … but this time it ends in a puff of smoke. Knock, now trussed up in ropes, senses the absence. ‘… is dead!’ Ellen manages a wan smile – she knows she has won, but also knows the price of her victory – and rises a little. Hutter rushes in and seizes her with a frantic passion. Ellen (we assume) dies in his arms. Her sacrifice, like that of Senta in Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, has saved her love. The tragedy is done. Murnau films this last shot of the drama from outside the bedroom door: to the left, a wall; in the middle, on a deeper plane, Hutter face down on the bed, hugging his dead wife; to the right, the useless and almost motionless form of the Professor, apparently burdened by a shameful sense of his ineffectuality. Slowly, he walks a pace or two to screen left.61 Text. The death bird has been destroyed. The final shot of the film shows a ruined castle – as if Orlok’s lair has come tumbling down now that its denizen has finally been laid to rest. Ende.

93

94

BFI FILM CLASSICS

5 Release, Reactions, Reputation Berlin The official preview of Nosferatu was held on 4 March in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Society. Guests were asked to wear Biedermeier costume for the occasion. (The public premiere was held eleven days later, on 15 March at the PrimusPalast, Berlin.) The advance publicity – almost certainly the work of Grau – was calculated to titillate, to provoke and even to dare: Nosferatu – who cannot die! A million fancies strike you when you hear the name: Nosferatu! NOSFE RATU Does not die! What do you expect of the first showing of this great work? Aren’t you afraid? Men must die. But legend has it that a vampire, Nosferatu, ‘the undead’, lives on men’s blood! You want to see a symphony of horror? You may expect more. Be careful. Nosferatu is not just fun, not something to be taken lightly. Once more: beware.

It was soon revealed that Prana-Film had spent more on the publicity than on the production itself. The film was not commercially successful, but most of the reviews were good, and some ecstatic. On 11 March, Lichtbuld-Buhne called it a ‘masterpiece’ and Der Film used the term ‘masterstroke’. On 18 March, Das Tagebuch judged it ‘exceptional’ and praised it for its ‘poetry’. The all but unanimous praise was contradicted only by a single bad review in the left-wing Leipziger Volkszeitung, which derided its occult themes as capitalist mystification.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Rave reviews were no help in fending off debts. By June 1922, Prana-Film was taken into receivership by Deutsch-Amerikansch Film Union (DAFU). Then Florence Stoker’s legal representatives entered the story. She was represented by the Society of Authors, who – on the evidence of surviving correspondence – seem to have found the widow fairly exasperating and the case an irritation. None the less, they persisted in putting pressure on the German company. The case dragged on for a year. By June 1923, the committee of the Society of Authors was thoroughly sick and tired of the whole time-consuming mess. But Mrs Stoker would not let it lie. In July 1924 the German courts proposed that DAFU should pay Mrs Stoker the equivalent of $5,000, but the company appealed. In February 1925, the appellate court ruled again in her favour; once again the receivers appealed. After it became clear that she would be winning little if any money, she changed her tactics and demanded that all copies of the film be destroyed. On 10 July 1925, the receivers finally agreed to comply and junked every print in their possession. But by this time, prints and negatives were circulating overseas, far beyond the control of DAFU. London Mrs Stoker now discovered that she had an enemy closer to home. A high-toned cultural body, the Film Society (prominent members included H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley) were staging a season of some of the most important films of recent years, to be shown at private screenings. One of the main attractions announced was ‘Dracula by F. W. Murnau’. Florence was outraged, and she contacted the Film Society’s organiser, a young intellectual named Ivor Montagu – a socialist with Marxist leanings, from a wealthy family, who would later work with both Eisenstein and Hitchcock. Florence called in the help of an agent, one C. A. Bang, who handled her dramatic interests in Dracula. She may have expected

95

96

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Montagu to cave in at once, but he stood his ground with a ferocity that prompted the young Marxist, shortly afterwards, to write a letter to Bang apologising for his initial rudeness. One of the things he revealed was that Nosferatu had already been turned down by all the major British distributors as ‘too horrible’; in effect, this meant that the film had no monetary value in Britain, which is why the Film Society had been offered the print by the importer for the peppercorn sum of £40. Bang and his associates set out to track down the identity of this importer, and eventually discovered it to be Sargent’s Trust Ltd of Chancery Lane. But no film canisters could be found. The combat between Mrs Stoker and the Film Society grew more bitter as it was reported that Florence had recently sold the film rights of Dracula to Universal. (See below.) Everything came to a head on 7 February 1929, when both sides met, heavily flanked with teams of lawyers. It was an angry encounter; both sides were intransigent. Eventually, Mrs Stoker prevailed. By late March, the Film Society handed over its print; and it seems likely that it was burned some time around April Fool’s Day. Paris Nosferatu was first screened in Paris as early as November 1922. There were several more releases throughout the 1920s, including a version of the film cut specifically for the French market in 1926. Henri Langlois preserved a copy of the ‘French’ Nosferatu (or possibly a slightly later version, from 1927) at the Cinématheque Française. One of the famous people who saw it on its 1928 re-release was the novelist André Gide. His journal entry for 27 February of that year62 expresses his disdain, and his belief that he could have handled the film more artfully than Murnau: Yesterday: Nosferatu the Vampire. German film, fairly mediocre, but with a mediocrity that makes you think, and invites you to imagine something better.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

After complaining that the film evoked neither pity nor terror (the Aristotelian virtues of tragedy), and that the hero’s acting was over the top, he then declares that the film was misguided in making it clear from the outset that Orlok is a vampire. ‘If he flashes his fangs right away, it’s nothing more than a childish nightmare.’ And the semi-scientific matter of Professor Bulwer’s lecture is ‘presented with a truly German heavy-handedness: absurd’. Gide goes on to outline how he would have tackled the story: by making the vampire, though still hideous to others, highly attractive to Ellen; and then having the vampire himself fall in love with Ellen, and becoming less and less horrible-looking until, finally, he looks altogether exquisite. Thus, he concludes, when we see Nosferatu destroyed, we are filled with pity and regret. (At least the first half of what Gide proposes – the mutual attraction of Orlok and Ellen – corresponds with the standard critical readings of the film over the past few decades. Gide, in other words, imagined making the erotic sub-text into a main text.) He concludes: ‘In short, a completely botched film.’63 The Riddle of the Prints, and The Twelfth Hour Film scholars who began to study Nosferatu after World War II were puzzled by the fact that the film seemed to exist in at least two distinct versions, one of them about a thousand metres longer than the other. It was Lotte Eisner who solved the riddle. She discovered that, in 1930, a fly-by-night company named Deutsche-Film Produktion had taken much of the footage from Nosferatu – they seem to have laid their hands on a very good print, as the quality of the 1921 footage is excellent – then shot some new scenes and added a soundtrack, credited to a method they called ‘Organon GmbH im Polyphon Grammophon Konzern’. The resulting film, whose ‘artistic adaptation’ – Kunstlerische Bearbeitung – was credited to one Dr Waldemar Roger, was granted its censor’s certificate on 14 November and then released as Die Zwoelfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens [The Twelfth Hour – A

97

98

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Night of Horror]. The censors had demanded that one of the main additions to the original film should be cut on religious grounds. Dr Roger had introduced an entirely new character to the narrative – a handsome young priest, played by Hans Behal. The censors insisted that the priest must go, as must a church choir at the end of the film. (Dr Roger had ditched the original score by Hans Erdmann and commissioned a new one from Georg Fliebinger, a composer otherwise unknown to musical historians.) Dr Roger made a handful of substantial additions, which were glaringly obvious to Murnau scholars when the film was discovered after World War II. During Hutter’s journey to Orlok’s castle, the film cuts away to lengthy footage of peasants dancing and joking and enjoying a feast at a long table. (This was probably stock footage; F. A. Wagner, when told about the sequences, denied ever having shot anything of the kind.) Young peasant girls roar with laughter at a conjurer whose magic hen lays egg after egg. During the plague sequences, the handsome priest conducts a tension-sapping, protracted Mass for the Dead. And the names of the characters were changed: Orlock became ‘Furst Wollkoff’, Knock became ‘Karsten’, Hutter became ‘Kundberg’ and Ellen became ‘Margitta’. Most striking of all, the film has a happy ending! This was achieved by taking the idyllic shots of Hutter and Ellen from the start of the film and placing them after Nosferatu has perished. Instead, the revised film opens with the shots of predatory creatures from the Paracelsian lecture. Lotte Eisner published the results of her assiduous research in an article published in Cahiers du cinéma.64 She established beyond reasonable doubt that the French version was Murnau’s film, and the German was Dr Roger’s. Nosferatu and the Surrealists Nosferatu was one of the films which was most adored by the Surrealists; indeed, it became one of their artistic touch-stones. They were struck by its erotic dimension as well as its dream- or nightmare-like aspects. The leader of the movement, André Breton,

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

was particularly enchanted by the title which read, in its French version, ‘Et quand il fut de l’autre côte du pont, les fantômes vinrent à sa rencontre’ [‘And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him’]. (This was a free rendering of the German original, which read ‘Kaum hatte Hutter die Bruke uberschritten, da ergriffen ihn die unheimlichen Gesichte’ [‘No sooner had Hutter stepped across the bridge than the uncanny visions seized hold of him’].) Breton had wandered into a screening late, on a whim, and what he regarded as the intense poetic aptness of the line delighted him. He recalled walking straight out of the cinema in a mood of near-ecstasy, as if he were floating six feet above the ground. Breton wrote about the film several times, first in an article on the paintings of De Chirico in La Revolution Surrealiste.65 (The text was later incorporated into Le Surrealisme et la peinture in 1928.) He returned to Nosferatu at greatest length in Les Vases communicantes (1932; the English translation is Communicating Vessels). One ‘And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him’

99

100

BFI FILM CLASSICS

section of this book is an extended analysis, in the manner of Freud, of a dream from which Breton woke suddenly at 3 a.m. on 26 August 1931. In one part of the remembered dream, a middle-aged salesman, talks to me about a tie called ‘Nosferatu’, of which he used to sell a lot two years ago, but he is afraid that he has none left. I am the one to discover this tie immediately among the others. It is garnet red, and on its points there stands out in white and, at least on the visible point – once it has been knotted – twice, the face of Nosferatu, which is at the same time the map of France, empty, with scarcely any marks at all, on which the eastern border is very sketchily traced in green and blue, so that I think it looks like rivers, outlining in a suprising way the makeup of the vampire.66

Breton’s analysis of this dream (which contains much more than the Nosferatu tie event; one of the characters is the Surrealist and film critic Georges Sadoul) runs to some thirty-five pages, and is complex and ingenious. Among the associations he makes: A bat flying about every evening under the arcades of the hotel [Hotel Reines des Alpes, where Breton had stayed] could scarcely fail to complete the personage of the vampire. His entrance on the scene is justified by the aspect of certain views of Basse-Alpes at nightfall, rather similar to those in which the film unfolds and which some days earlier had caused me to evoke in a conversation the sentence that I have never been able to see without a mixture of joy and terror: ‘When he was on the other side of the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.’ Here the bridge appears, as a sexual symbol of the very clearest kind, for the second time.67

Breton also, among other keen perceptions, links the vendor’s fear that no ties are left to the anxious rumours that the negative of Nosferatu has been lost and that the existing print will not stand many further projections. But Breton was not the first of his group to celebrate the film. Nosferatu had already been ‘discovered’ by another pioneering

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Surrealist, the poet Robert Desnos, who wrote about it in three articles, notably an essay for the Belgian journal Le Soir in 1927. There was a further Parisian re-release in 1929. Georges Sadoul, who had the cameo role in Breton’s dream, recalled that the Surrealists would attend screening after screening together, as if taking part in some arcane ritual. (Their fanaticism for Nosferatu had been preceded by a similar craze for Les Vampires, a serial made in 1914 by Louis Feuillade, and staring ‘Musidora’, née Jeanne Roques, though Les Vampires are not undead.) It was this behaviour that prompted a writer for the Magazine Litteraire to describe Nosferatu as the first-ever cult movie, an early precursor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Sadoul also remembered that: ‘For several weeks, we [the Surrealists] repeated to ourselves, as a pure expression of convulsive beauty, this French subtitle: ‘‘Passe le pont, les fantômes vinrent à sa rencontre”.’68 Other Surrealists took up the refrain long after the 1920s: Gerard Legrand, 1951: Do we arrive at the paradox of a poetic cinema in which the ‘surreal’ would count for little? There is only one Nosferatu, and one alone. The horror film is no longer feasible in the same shape as in the silent film days.69

Ado Kyrou, 1953: Everything fantastic is not marvelous. The fantastic without the marvelous (in which case the fantastic becomes the enemy of the marvelous) does not belong here: I gladly leave it to the priests, Cocteau [the Surrealists made it a principle to despise, insult and attack Cocteau whenever possible] and the spectacular revues. I don’t confuse monstrances with lanterns and I don’t get ecstatic about every vampire or every apparition; there are phantoms that belong to the lowest strata of commerce, phantoms which have their place in the bedrock of respectability. Fear, the unknown, mysterious forces, predestined places, the magic of love find themselves on the other side. ‘As soon as Hutter crossed the bridge, the

101

102

BFI FILM CLASSICS

phantoms came to meet him.’ The crossing cannot be made in carpet slippers and many are the renunciations, falls or searches for other, safer bridges which lead to the fantastic without the marvelous …70

In 1951, the French Surrealists drew up a double list of directors – in the spirit of Wyndham Lewis’s lists of things to ‘blast’ or ‘bless’ – under the headings of ‘See’ and ‘Don’t See’. Murnau is safely in the ‘See’ list, in the company of Chaplin, Eisenstein, Renoir, Vigo, Cavalcanti, Bunuel, Sternberg and Lang.71 Nosferatu was also prized by Surrealists in other countries: in Czechoslovakia, for example, where the novelist Víteˇslav Nezval, who saw it on its belated 1933 release, was so impressed by the film that he wrote an essay, ‘The Vampire Nosferatu’, to account for its potency. As the critic Michael Brooke paraphrases the text: Nezval ‘paid particular attention to the film’s use of objects, saying that Murnau seemed completely attuned to the fact that certain objects seemed to have an aura about them that increased with age, because they become repositories for our memories’.72 Nosferatu was a major influence on Nezval’s bestknown novel, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (finally published in 1945, though written a decade earlier). In the 1970 film of Valerie, directed by Jaromil Jireš, the vampire character is made up to look like Orlok. New York In June 1929, Nosferatu – now called Nosferatu the Vampire, and openly boasting of being ‘Inspired by Dracula’ – opened at the Film Guild Cinema, in Greenwich Village, at Eighth Street. This cinema was a compact but sumptuous creation of the architect Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) and had a fantastical auditorium dominated by a proscenium in the shape of an iris. Its proprietor was the idealistic Symon Gould – who in later years would try to run against John Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the US presidency, as candidate for the American Vegetarian Party.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Most of the reviews were damning: ‘like cardboard puppets doing all they can to be horrible on papier-maché settings’; and: ‘more of a soporific than a thriller’, according to the New York Times, which claimed that the noise of snoring filled the auditorium. But the down-market New York Post was more keen: Not since Caligari has this reviewer been so taken with a foreign horror film as with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu the Vampire. … Taken from Dracula, recently seen on the stage … and infinitely more subtly horrible than the stage edition. Mr Murnau’s is no momentary horror, bringing shrieks from suburban ladies in the balcony, but a pestilential horror coming from a fear of things only rarely seen.73

It caught the attention of several interested parties. One of them was the publisher and theatrical entrepreneur Horace Liveright. Liveright had seen Hamilton Deane’s critically derided but commercially triumphant stage adaptation of Dracula (into a drawing-room melodrama) on a visit to London in 1927, and was sufficiently impressed by its crowd-pleasing power that he offered to produce it in America, provided both Mrs Stoker and Hamilton Deane would agree to substantial rewrites by the playwright John L. Balderston. After various complex and ill-natured negotiations, the heavily rewritten play opened on Broadway on 5 October 1927. An obscure Hungarian actor with the stage name Bela Lugosi74 was cast as the lead. It was an immediate hit; and when the show went on tour, it created a national Dracula craze. By May 1929, Liveright’s earnings from the play were well over $1 million. Naturally, Hollywood looked at this product with mounting interest. It was rumoured – incorrectly – that Mrs Stoker had sold the film rights to Universal. When she heard this, Florence was once again outraged. Here, the story grows yet more intricate. By surfacing in this unexpected manner on Eighth Street, the supposedly destroyed Nosferatu alarmed everyone from Liveright to Universal. Would the existence of this film be damaging for other versions of Dracula?

103

104

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Would Universal be more interested in destroying this competitor with their planned film, or would they want to study it closely to see how vampire films are made? Liveright sent one of his employees to see Nosferatu at the Film Guild Cinema; his man reported back that, though Nosferatu had obviously been based on Dracula, it was so boring as to pose no threat. Another man who noticed the Film Guild screenings with concern was the literary agent Harold Freedman, of the Brandt and Brandt Dramatic Department in New York, who represented John Balderston. After a welter of offers and counter-offers, threats and counter-threats, the skirmishes finally fizzled out in ill-tempered compromises. Liveright eventually accepted $4,500 to waive all future rights to Dracula. And on 13 August 1930, Universal forwarded a cheque for $400 to Brandt and Brandt – a payment for Symon Gould’s print of Murnau’s film. On 15 August, Universal duly received Gould’s print. The covering letter by Harold Freedman read, in part: Nosferatu, the Vampire has been adjudged by the courts to be a violation of Mrs Stoker’s rights, and the courts have ordered the prints destroyed. I am turning it over to you [Universal] for the purposes of destruction and in view of our contract with you for delivering over the rights to Dracula for motion picture purposes.75

Universal could now go ahead with their plans for a Dracula film. After a period of dithering, they decided to cast Bela Lugosi in the lead role. Filming began in September and finished in November. The Universal Dracula was released in February 1931. Murnau died on 11 March 1931. *

*

*

The New York Museum of Modern Art received a copy of the French cut of Nosferatu in 1947. As was the policy at that time, the titles were translated into English. More unusually, the character’s names

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

were also changed – changed back to their originals in Dracula, so that Orlok became Count Dracula, Hutter became Jonathan Harker, Knock became Renfield and Bulwer became van Helsing. This anglicised version was the one which was sent to London and the National Film Archive; and thence to Germany, where the distribution company translated the titles back into German but retained the character names from Dracula. In the next part of the story, Nosferatu comes out of the shadows of critical neglect and crosses the bridge into popular culture.

105

106

BFI FILM CLASSICS

6 Afterlives

The Company F. W. Murnau Though Nosferatu was not a commercial success, critical enthusiasm for the film immediately put Murnau into the first rank of German directors. Over the next four years, he made seven more films: Der brennende Acker (The Burning Earth, 1922), Phantom (1922), Die Austreibung (The Expulsion, 1923), Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (The Finances of the Grand Duke, 1924), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Man, more commonly known as The Last Laugh), Herr Tartuff (Tartuffe, 1926) and Faust. Of this septet, the two most remarkable are Der Letzte Mann and Faust – the former for its wonderfully innovative use of a moving camera (it has often been said that Murnau was the first director to ‘set the camera free’) and the latter for its astonishing visual effects and mythic potency. The Last Laugh performed poorly at the box office in the USA – no one, it was said, wanted to see a film about a down-trodden old man – but it thrilled the movie-makers. William Fox offered him an irresistibly attractive deal, and in July 1926 Murnau travelled to Hollywood, where the entire film colony lionised him. William Fox introduced him as, simply, ‘the German genius’. Given a generous budget and – an exceptional indulgence – complete artistic control, Murnau set to work on Sunrise. Freely adapted from one of Hermann Sudermann’s Lithuanian Tales, ‘The Journey to Tilsit’, it is at heart a simple love story about a married couple whose happiness is threatened by the husband’s infatuation with a vampish girl from the Big City. Unlike Sudermann’s tale, Sunrise ends happily, with the couple reunited and the vamp sent back to the city.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

This bald outline does scant justice to the overwhelming visual brilliance of the film. Discerning viewers recognised its outstanding qualities at once. The critic Robert Sherwood, writing for Life magazine, said that, Although my admiration for Ernst Lubitsch is great – some would say ‘excessive’ – the title of World’s Greatest Director, according to my personal rating, is no longer held by him. It is applied to F. W. Murnau. Sunrise, to my mind, is the most important picture in the history of the movies.76

In recent years, many critics have come round to Sherwood’s view, and Sunrise often features in polls for the title of ‘greatest film’, though for decades its reputation was eclipsed by The Last Laugh, and it has never been as well known or widely seen as Nosferatu. But audiences stayed away, and Murnau had to abandon his lavish budgets and artistic dominance for his next American film, The Four Devils (1928). Possibly in a mood of repentance when he realised how much money Sunrise had lost, he caved in to the extent of adding an over-the-top happy ending that Fox demanded. Fox, it seemed, knew his public: the film was modestly profitable. Reading between the lines, it seems as if Murnau had chafed against Fox’s interference, and all the more so when he recognised that Fox had a sounder commercial sense. For his next production, Murnau travelled to Oregon to make a film about wheat: ‘about the sacredness of bread, about the estrangement of the modern city dwellers and their ignorance about Nature’s sources of sustenance’.77 Initially entitled Our Daily Bread, it was renamed City Girl (1930) for its release in the form approved by Fox. Once on location for the new film, Murnau became a wild spendthrift, earning himself comparisons with the likes of von Stroheim. He even bought a whole farm, so that he could achieve majestic shots of wheat by having his cameras hauled on sledges through the ripe crops. His dream was to make a film that had the clean-lined authority of a woodcut by Dürer. Fox was dismayed by

107

108

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Murnau’s first cut: the film was too long, too slow and the rural workers did not seem American. He ordered gag-men to come up with comic scenes that could be spliced into the action; and he demanded brutal cuts. Murnau broke off his five-year contract with Fox and headed off for the South Seas, and the last great venture of his life. He earned his captain’s ticket and bought a yacht of the Gloucester Fisherman class, the Pasqualito; Murnau renamed it the Bali, since he had the ambition to sail there. The Bali was 65 feet long and slim, just 16 feet at its widest. He packed a small library of books about the South Seas, including works by Conrad, Melville, Stevenson and Pierre Loti. The voyage from California took him via the coast of Mexico to the Marquesas. He visited many islands, in search of places and people who had not been contaminated by the west. (The effect of western ships, which brought tuberculosis, influenza and syphilis to people who had little or no powers of resistance to such new diseases, had been like that of the death ship pulling into Wismar.) During his time in the South Seas, Murnau joined forces with Robert Flaherty, famous as the director of Nanook of the North (1922), whose latest production, in Mexico, was falling apart. The two men signed a contract with an independent production company, Colorart, to produce a joint feature. But Colorart soon proved to be on the point of bankruptcy, so Murnau offered to finance the film himself, using what was left of his Hollywood earnings. In fact, he went on to use all of his savings in the next eighteen months of shooting their film, which was called Tabu. He was seriously in debt, and his yacht was stolen. At the eleventh hour, help came from Paramount. They had seen an early assembly of Tabu, and liked it so much that they offered Murnau a ten-year contract. He was overjoyed, and began to plot his next films, including an adaptation of Melville’s Typee. But the tale does not have a Hollywood happy ending. The New York premiere of Tabu was set for 18 March 1931. Murnau died in a car crash on 11 March.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Max Shreck Shreck (born 1879) worked with Murnau one more time, on Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs. He also appeared in a short, slapstick film scripted by Bertolt Brecht. (Brecht and Shreck had first met at the Munich Kammerspiele; Shreck had a role in Brecht’s breakthrough play Trommeln in der Nacht.) Though he played parts in several more films, from 1926 onwards he was mainly employed as a stage actor in Munich. He died of heart failure on 20 February 1936, having been taken ill when playing the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos. ‘Max Shreck’ was the name given to the character played by Christopher Walken in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992). The screenwriter Daniel Waters said that he had the German actor in mind when he invented the character, who had not previously appeared in any Batman story. Albin Grau After the collapse of Prana-Film, Grau set up another short-lived production company, Pet; the new outfit made just one film (Warning Shadows, 1923), an interesting experiment which used the shadows thrown by heavily lit actors to express the inner feelings of the characters. From 1925 onwards, he withdrew from films entirely and devoted himself to his occult obsessions. On joining the Fraternitas Saturni (see Chapter 2), he frequently wrote and produced illustrations for its journal Gnosis, including portraits of Cornelius Agrippa, Eliphas Levi and Paracelsus. When the Fraternitas, like other occult groups, were declared illegal by the Nazis in 1936, Grau sought refuge in Switzerland. There is no factual basis for the frequently told story that he died in a concentration camp; in reality, he moved back to Germany after the war and settled in Bayrischzell, in Upper Bavaria. He died in 1971. Henrik Galeen Galeen moved to Britain in 1928, and directed a feature film – After the Verdict. He returned to Germany briefly in 1931, and made his

109

110

BFI FILM CLASSICS

last feature there: The House of Dora Green. In 1933, he went into exile in Sweden, then moved on to the UK and the USA. He died in 1949. Alexander Granach Granach was one of the many talented German Jews who fled from the Nazis and emigrated to America, where he went on to have a rewarding career on stage in New York and in Hollywood films. His most well-remembered role is that of the Nazi police inspector Gruber in Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943), scripted by Bertolt Brecht. Gustav von Wagenheim A committed socialist, von Wagenhiem also fled in 1933, in his case to the USSR. In 1945 he returned to his homeland and became the director of the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in East Berlin. F. A. Wagner Wagner’s career was a busy one: he shot over 140 films. Apart from his work on Nosferatu, he is mainly remembered for four films made at the end of the 1920s and the start of the 30s: M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), both directed by Fritz Lang, and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and The Threepenny Opera (1931), both directed by G. W. Pabst. He died in 1958. The Film The Remake Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht, written, produced and directed by Werner Herzog (1979), is a thoughtful and thought-provoking remake and revision of Murnau’s film. One of Herzog’s significant changes is to restore Stoker’s names to its leading characters: Dracula (played by Klaus Kinski in make-up which re-creates Grau’s designs for the Shreck/Orlok figure, though with a less exaggerated nose),

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz), Professor van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), Mina (Martje Grohmann – otherwise Frau Herzog) and Renfield (Roland Topor). But the characters of Lucy and Mina are exchanged, so that Lucy is now Harker’s wife. Despite the outstanding talents of Bruno Ganz and other cast members, Herzog’s film, like Murnau’s original, is somewhat compromised by a few weak performances, though in this remake the style of acting tends to err on the side of restraint rather than excess – with the exception of Topor’s Renfield, whose manic giggle pushes the part into broad comedy. (Short and squat and bustling, he is more like Mr Toad than Mr Knock.) Herzog remains largely faithful to Murnau’s plot until near the end of the film: here, and almost certainly inspired by the end of Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires, Harker becomes a vampire himself, and the final shots show him riding away into an ominous landscape, dominated by thunderclouds, to spread Dracula’s contagion throughout the world. Herzog’s Nosferatu

111

112

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Herzog’s few other departures from Murnau’s plot tend to make the film rich and strange in new ways. He returns to Stoker’s novel in making vampires vulnerable to the cross and the consecrated host – at one point the vampirised Harker is trapped in a corner by a line of wafers sprinkled on the floor. He nods to Goethe’s Faust by having Dracula called ‘The master of the rats’. In an inspired addition to Murnau, he shows the doomed townspeople engaged in macabre revels, feasting and dancing in the square. He expands Harker’s brief walk to Castle Dracula into a protracted and visually rich journey on foot, swathed in the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold. As S. S. Prawer has explained, this Fussreise or ‘journey by foot’ has its roots in German culture as far back as the Middle Ages. Herzog himself made a memorable Fussreise of his own in 1974, when he walked through a winter landscape from Germany to Paris, where Murnau’s champion, Lotte Eisner, was in her sickbed. Broadly speaking, Herzog’s tendency is to play up the innate Romanticism of the tale at all points. Thanks to the use of colour – the director of photography was Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein – Herzog’s acts of homage to Caspar David Friedrich are even more precise than Murnau’s. The tone of the film is grave and melancholic, and Kinski’s Dracula vastly more sympathetic than Shreck’s Orlok; the make-up, save for the rodentine fangs and pointy ears, is much less extreme than in Murnau, so that Kinski’s features are more expressive as well as more human. Adjani, supernaturally beautiful, floats through the film in wind-blown white gowns; it is hard to believe that Herzog did not have the Pre-Raphaelites in mind (for example, Holman Hunt’s ‘The Awakening Conscience’, of 1852, or Rossetti’s ‘Beata Beatrix’, circa 1863). One shot of Ganz appears to cite a famous portrait of Beethoven – the 1823 portrait by one of Austria’s leading artists of the Biedermeier period, Georg Waldmuller. Even if we did not know that Herzog revered Murnau above all other German directors, the earnestness of his tribute would still be self-evident.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

The biopic Shadow of the Vampire, written by Steven Katz and directed by E. Elias Merhige (born 1964), is an unusually witty and intelligent combination of black comedy, backstage drama and conventional horror film. Its main conceit is simple: that Murnau (played by John Malkovich) was so hell-bent on authenticity that he tracked down an actual vampire, Max Shreck (Willem Dafoe), to take the central role. In return for taking part in the film, Shreck/Orlock will be allowed to suck the leading lady dry. This idea had been floated before Katz wrote his script, notably by Ado Kyrou in Le Surrealisme au cinema (1953): ‘In the role of the vampire the credits name the music-hall actor [sic] Max Shreck, but it is well known that this attribution is a deliberate cover-up … Who hides behind the character of Nosferatu? Maybe Nosferatu himself?’78 The cast also includes Udo Kier, veteran of countless lowbudget horror films, as Albin Grau, the English comedian Eddie Izzard as Gustav von Wangenheim, Catherine McCormack as Greta Schröder and Cary Elwes as the cinematographer, Wagner. There are many interesting period details about the conventions of German film production at the time: the crew dress in long white coats that make them look like experimental scientists, and sport dark goggles to

Malkovich as Murnau

113

114

BFI FILM CLASSICS

protect their eyes from blinding lights and poisonous fumes; Murnau is always addressed respectfully by his team as ‘Doctor’; and instead of the familiar ‘action’ and ‘cut’, Murnau says ‘Begin!’ and ‘End!’ Though its fundamental theme is serious – in brief, it represents Murnau as an artist of the Faustian kind, who is willing to lie and bully and scheme, and in the end to encourage multiple murders in pursuit of his vision – almost every scene has some small joke. Quite a few of these are based on the unwillingness of the cast and crew to recognise that Shreck is anything other than the most dedicated actor they have ever met, one who never breaks out of character. (Murnau has explained to them that he trained in Russia – a nod to Stanislavski and his disciples.) Others derive from Shreck’s inability to behave himself, and not suck the blood of his colleagues; and from his growing enjoyment of his new role as a temperamental movie star – a ‘drama queen’. Dafoe’s performance is delightfully over the top, though he also catches some of the melancholy seen in Klaus Kinski’s Dracula: consumed by pale immortality, he reads Tennyson’s poem ‘Tithonus’ to himself, revelling in self-pity. As Merhige explains in his commentary for the DVD release, Shadow of the Vampire also picks up some of the themes from Nosferatu and from Dracula. In a spirit closer to Stoker than to Eddie Izzard as Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter), Willem Dafoe as Max Shreck (Orlok)

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Murnau, Merhige constantly emphasises the clash of the ultramodern (the film crew and its gadgets, including planes) and the ancient, the city and the country. Merhige – who is also interested in the history of occultism, and evidently knows a good deal about Grau – underlines the metaphor of cinema as vampirism, and vice versa, which is no more than hinted at in Murnau. And though its representation of Murnau is hardly less fanciful than its portrait of Shreck, the film deserves to be seen as a suggestive critical commentary on Murnau’s film as well as an accomplished and entertaining fantasy in its own right. The novel Nosferatu in Love by Jim Shepard (1998). Grau had been the one who approached Murnau with the idea of Nosferatu. Murnau had invited him to go ahead with the attempt to raise money. The idea of that creature of the shadows – twenty-one or -two, beetle-legged, longfaced, with the hands of an arboreal animal – as a successful film producer astounded him.79

Shepherd’s ambitious, impressively scholarly novel contains some brilliant commentary on Nosferatu. Alternating between a traditionally omniscient narrative voice and the imagined voice of Murnau himself, it dips into the director’s life at several points: in 1907, as he sets off to begin his studies in Berlin-Charlottenburg; in 1907, as he joins Reinhardt’s company; in 1917, as he is stationed in Verdun; in 1921, as he begins to prepare Nosferatu; in 1924, working on The Last Man; in 1929, in the South Seas; then a flashback to Riga in 1915; and then the car crash of 1931. But the central section of the book (pp. 91–125) concerns the Nosferatu shoot, and purports to be Murnau’s production diary: Twelve-hour days. Most of us are fighting sunstroke caused by the arcs. Crew members rub raw grated potato on their faces to combat the burn. The

115

116

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Nosferatu greeting Hutter as it emerges from the darkness of the castle archway. Wagner suggests we use magnesium flares with the arcs to increase the effect of moonlight. Take after take. Shreck sweats and suffers under his makeup, and his forehead looks as if it’s been varnished.80

Many of the details in this section – as throughout the book – are solidly based on biographical material that will at once be familiar to anyone who has investigated Murnau’s life. So solidly based, in fact, that Shepard’s more speculative flights seem just as convincing as passages from the historical record. Evidently of the opinion that Murnau’s gay sexuality was a supremely important factor in his art, Shepherd offers a convincing portrait of young Wilhelm and young Hans as lovers (which is almost certainly correct), suggesting that the loss of Hans remained a permanent wound for Wilhelm (probably correct) and that his wartime crash in Switzerland was a deliberate act of desertion (possibly correct). Shepard, in Murnau’s voice, offers a number of fascinating and plausible glimpses into the way the director’s thoughts may have run in the course of filming: FOR the vampire’s arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience.81 A discussion grows out of our enthusiasm. Endless polarities – west and east, good and evil, civilization and the wilderness, reason and passion, with the contested terrain in every case the body of the woman. The obsession is not with the oppositions as much as the areas between them – the possibility that they’re not such oppositions. Hence the connections between Hutter and the Nosferatu, Ellen and the Nosferatu.82 The film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable qualities that these images emanate.83

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

And: We evoke the pre-industrial world of superstition by creating an illusion that allows the viewer to forget the film’s technical base.84

The opera The American composer Alva Henderson collaborated with wellknown American poet Dana Gioia on a full-length (about two and a half hours) opera of Nosferatu. The opera had its world premiere in 2004, staged by the Rimrock Opera Company and conducted by Barbara Day Turner; a live recording has since been released on CD (Albany Records, USA, 2005). Dana Gioia has said of it: I was struck by how much the film resembled a bel canto opera – Like Lucia di Lammermoor or I Puritani. It depicted a strong and sensitive woman trapped by tragic circumstances beyond her control. It also occurred to me that there had never been a great vampire opera. Although the Vampire is one of the great Romantic myths, and opera was the greatest romantic art form, the two never came together.85

The characters and cast were: Ellen Hutter Eric Hutter Count Orlok Heinrich Skuller Marthe Link Dr Franz Harding

Susan Gundunas Robert McPherson Douglas Nagel Dennis Rupp Karen Carle Jan Michael Kliewer

Henderson’s music is lush and traditional, with echoes of late nineteenth-century operas. Gioia’s verse is also traditional, and at times memorable. In poetic terms, the high point of the opera is a ‘Nocturne’ for Nosferatu:

117

118

BFI FILM CLASSICS

I am the image that darkens your glass, The shadow that falls whenever you pass. I am the face you cannot forget, The face you remember without having met.

Other variations of the theme Nosferatu – or at the very least, the image of Shreck as Nosferatu – is so deeply embedded in popular culture that it would be an endless (as well as pointless) task to track all the references down. It has inspired, among other phenomena, the game ‘Vampire: The Masquerade’, which includes a ‘Nosferatu Vampire Clan’; the comic book Batman Nosferatu; the rock band Nosferatu; the Paul Whitehouse ‘tipster’ Nosferatu – aka ‘Monster Monster Monster’ – in The Fast Show. The vampire has even infiltrated the nursery: one episode of Spongebob Squarepants, ‘The Graveyard Shift’, shows Nosferatu playing a plank with lights. The cartoonists have turned his frown upside down, and made him into a jolly uncle figure. The rock band Blue Öyster Cult, who flourished in the 1970s, wrote a reasonably well-known song about Nosferatu for their album Spectres. It is faithful to the tale: Paul Whitehouse as ‘Monster Monster Monster’ from The Fast Show

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Verse:

The ship pulled in without a sound The faithful captain long since cold He kept his log till the bloody end Last entry read: ‘Rats in the hold. My crew is dead – I fear the plague.’

Chorus:

Only a woman can break his spell Pure in heart who will offer herself …

But Nosferatu’s legacy persists in more traditional forms, too. Nosferatu, a Polish play produced as a collaboration between TR Warszawa and Teatr Narodowy, directed by Gregorz Jarzyna, was presented in London at the Barbican in October–November 2012 – to largely negative reviews. At exactly the same time (28 October 2012), BBC Radio 3 broadcast The Midnight Cry of the Death Bird, by the English poet and dramatist Amanda Dalton, directed by Susan Roberts. The play’s title is taken from a different kind of title: one that is shown at the end of the film: Witness the miracle on the heels of the truth: at that very hour, the Great death came to an end, and as if confronted by the victorious radiance of the living sun, the shadow of the Deathbird was dispersed.

The central character of the play is Frau Hutter. And as I type these words, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has just opened a major exhibition entitled ‘The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst’, curated by the art historian Felix Kramer and others. The first exhibit to greet the visitor is a screen showing – what else? – Nosferatu. The death bird is still in flight.

119

120

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Notes 1 Kael’s qualifier ‘important’ is itself important. Many reference sources state that Nosferatu was the first vampire film; in fact, there were about two dozen films either containing or referring to vampiric matter. Some of these have little if any supernatural content: Vampires of the Coast (1909), The Vampire (1911), The Vampire’s Tower (Italy, 1913), The Vampire’s Clutch (1914), Vampires of the Night (1914), Trapped by a Vampire (1914), A Village Vampire (1916) … most of these use the word ‘vampire’ to mean ‘vamp’ – a seductive, destructive woman of the type made famous by Theda Bara. But one of Méliès’s earliest shorts, Le Manoir au Diable (1896), shows a bat metamorphosing into a vampire-like creature, played by the director himself, and there were several authentic vampires in films made around the world in the years before Murnau’s film, including (according to some sources) a lost Russian production, The Secret of House No. 5 (1912) and a Hungarian production, Drakula (also known as Drakula’s Death; directed by Karoly Lathjay and photographed by Lajos Glasser in 1921). This last film is now lost, but a number of stills have survived; the story has little to do with Stoker, and concerns a girl in a lunatic asylum persecuted by a man who believes that he is the immortal Count. 2 Cited in Prawer, Nosferatu, p. 49. 3 Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, p. 161. 4 Cited in Ashbury, Nosferatu, p. 59. 5 Perez, ‘The Deadly Space Between’, p. 28.

6 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 97. 7 Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p.152. 8 Brakhage, ‘F. W. Murnau’, p. 246. 9 Cited in Eisner, Murnau, p. 86. 10 Elsaesser, ‘No End to Nosferatu’, p. 13. Not all admirers of Murnau are necessarily admirers of Nosferatu. In polls of ‘greatest films’, it is more often Sunrise, or The Last Laugh, or even Tabu which wins votes. 11 Film Society Programme, 16 December 1928. 12 Many commentators have made this inevitable comparison. 13 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 107. 14 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 100. 15 Balázs, in Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), p. 108. 16 Two of the most important figures in the complex history of Nosferatu’s several restorations are Kevin Brownlow and Luciano Berriatúa: this book uses Berriatúa’s restoration, as issued on a Masters of Cinema DVD (Eureka, 2007). One of the best and most detailed accounts of the restoration history is the website Nosferatu: A Filmarcheology, a product of ‘Celtoslavika’. 17 Until recent prints restored the convention of tinting night-time scenes in blue, Orlok’s death by sunlight seemed baffling: surely we have already seen him wandering around in daylight quite unscathed. 18 Freud’s much-read, or at any rate much-cited essay, on the topic has often been deployed in essays on the film. To the best of my knowledge, the critic Hugh Haughton was the first to dwell on the fact that the essay, published in 1919, was a product of the same

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

troubled post-Armistice period as Murnau’s film. (See Haughton in Freud, The Uncanny, p. xlii.) Murnau had been a voracious reader since early childhood; it is entirely possible he knew Freud’s pertinent work. 19 See Stan Brakhage, Film Biographies, pp. 244–70. This essay might charitably be described as ‘imaginative’, and should certainly be treated with caution by anyone interested in fact rather than legend. Brakhage seems to be the origin for the urban myth, propagated by Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon, that Murnau’s death in a car crash was caused by an over-enthusiatic act of fellatio on his young driver. 20 See Chapter 6. 21 In an unpublished essay, kindly sent to me on 1 May 2013. 22 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 9. 23 Eisner, Murnau, p. 23. 24 Ibid., p. 14. 25 Ibid., p. 18. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., pp. 19–20. 28 Ibid., p. 61. 29 Symonds, The Great Beast, p. 397. 30 Script published in Eisner, Murnau, pp. 227–72. The following extracts are from pp. 250 and 256, respectively. 31 From the documentary Language of the Shadows, included in the Eureka! Masters of Cinema DVD package of Nosferatu. 32 My thanks here to the Director of Photography Spike Geilinger, who was kind enough to discuss the issue of such lenses with me at considerable length. 33 Article in Buhne und Film no. 21, translated by Craig Keller for the Masters of Cinema DVD.

34 Ibid. 35 See, among other articles, ‘La lettre oubliée de nosferatu’, by Sylvain Exertier in Positif, March 1980, pp. 47–51. 36 Eisner, Murnau, p. 59. 37 Ibid., pp. 61, 68. 38 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 39 See ‘La musique de la “fête de Nosferatu”’, by Berndt Heller in La Cinémathèque Française no. 15, November 1986. 40 Eisner, Murnau, p. 86. Eisner is referring, here, to three later films: The Last Laugh, Faust and Sunrise; but the principle applies to his earlier films, too. 41 Cited in ibid., p. 79. 42 Ibid., p. 86. 43 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 102. 44 Nezval, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. 45 Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting. 46 Murnau had previously filmed a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, Der Januskopf, and the theme of the ‘double’ was fairly common in Weimar cinema: four years after the release of Nosferatu, Henrik Galeen both directed and co-scripted one of the most famous, Der Student von Prag (1926). 47 Elsaesser, ‘No End to Nosferatu’, p. 7. 48 Including Brad Stevens and R. Dixon Smith in their valuable commentary on the Masters of Cinema DVD. 49 A fact discovered by Kevin Brownlow, and reported to me by Christopher Frayling. 50 See Blin, ‘Murnau: Ses Films’, in Revue du cinéma, 25 July 1931, pp. 24–34. 51 In his commentary for the BFI DVD of the film. 52 Kerouac, ‘Nosferatu (Dracula), p. 20.

121

122

BFI FILM CLASSICS

53 There is no credit for an editor; Murnau presumably had an assistant or teams of assistants, but seems to have been even more in control of the process than most directors of the day. 54 Stoker is generally assumed to have been thinking of the myth of Persephone, who was Demeter’s daughter. 55 Prawer, Nosferatu, p. 54. 56 The hand of Grau is again evident here. In later years, he would execute a portrait of Paracelsus for the journal Saturn Gnosis. The philosopher and critic Claude Hodin discusses the Paracelsian dimension of Nosferatu in a long appendix to his study Murnau ou les Aventures de la pureté, pp. 189–200. One of his topics is the analogy, a highly suggestive one, between magic and film-making. 57 Dalle Vacche notes that this type of composition is know to German artists and art historians as a Rückenfigur; Caspar David Friedrich excelled in the form – see his ‘Monk by the Sea’ of 1809–10, which inspired an essay by Kleist. 58 As a former equestrian, I can confirm that most riders will dismount in dense wood. 59 Commentary to the BFI DVD of Nosferatu. 60 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 February 2003; cited in Prawer, Nosferatu, p. 49. 61 Kerouac described this as ‘a horribly perverted love scene unequalled for its pathetic sudden revelation of the

vampire’s essential helplessness’. ‘Nosferatu (Dracula)’, p. 121. 62 Gide, Journals, pp. 872–3. 63 Ibid. 64 No. 79, January 1958, ‘L’enigme des deux Nosferatus’. 65 Breton, ‘De Chirico, p. 161. 66 Breton, Communicating Vessels, p. 25. 67 Ibid. 68 Cited at http://lespenseesimprobables deraybanana.blogspot.co.uk/2001/11/ la-beaute-convulsive.html 69 Lerand, L’Age du cinema no. 4–5, August–November 1951, pp. 17–20; reprinted in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow, pp. 98–101. 70 Kyrou, Le Surrealisme au cinema, p. 63, emphases original. 71 L’Age du cinema no. 4–5, August–November 1951, p. 2. 72 Brooke, DVD review of Nosferatu and Tabu, 2007. 73 Cited in Skal, Hollywood Gothic, p. 101. 74 Curious link: Lugosi had made his screen debut with a part in one of Murnau’s early films. 75 Skal, Hollywood Gothic, p. 161. 76 Eisner, Murnau, p. 186. 77 Quoted in ibid., p. 197. 78 Cited in Elsaesser, ‘No End to Nosferatu’, p. 19. 79 Shepard, Nosferatu in Love, p. 82: as

noted above, Grau was actually in his thirties in 1921. 80 Ibid., p. 118. 81 Ibid., p. 116. 82 Ibid., p. 109. 83 Ibid., p. 96. 84 Ibid. 85 Gioia, Nosferatu, p. 83.

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Credits Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror Germany/1921 Director F. W. [Friedrich Wilhelm] Murnau Screenplay H. [Henrik] Galeen Photography F. A. [Fritz Arno] Wagner Sets and Costumes A. [Albin] Grau Musical Score (1921) Hans Erdmann Production Company Prana-Film GmbH (Berlin) uncredited Producers Albin Grau Enrico Dieckmann Source Based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker CAST Max Schreck Count Orlok, ‘Nosferatu’ Gustav von Wangenheim Thomas Hutter Greta Schröder Ellen Hutter, Thomas’s wife

G. [Georg] H. Schnell Harding, ship-owner and Hutter’s friend Ruth Landshoff Ruth [Anny], Harding’s sister Gustav Botz Professor Sievers, town doctor Alexander Granach Knock, estate broker John Gottowt Professor Bulwer, a Paracelsian Max Nemetz ship’s captain Wolfgang Heinz first mate Albert Venohr first sailor Eric van Viele second sailor Heinrich Witte asylum guard Guido Herzfeld innkeeper Karl Etlinger student with Bulwer Hardy von Francois hospital doctor Fanny Schreck hospital nurse Jozef Sárený head coachman

Production Details Filmed from August to October 1921 on location in Lauenburg/Elbe and Lübeck (SchleswigHolstein), Rostock and Wismar (MecklenburgWestern Pomerania), the Westphalia region (North Rhine) and Heligoland (Germany) and in Dolný Kubín, Konc ˇistá in the Tatranská Polianka (the High Tatras mountain range), the Granáty mountain range, Vrátna dolina (‘Vrátna Valley’) and Starý hrad (’Starhrad’ – both part of the Malá Fatra mountain range) – all in northern Slovakia with interiors filmed at Jofa studios (Berlin-Johannisthal, Treptow-Köpenick, Germany) 35mm, black and white, silent, 1.33:1 Release Details German premiere at the Marmorsaal (‘Marble Hall’) of the Zoologischer Garten Berlin (Berlin Zoological Garden) on 4 March 1922. Length: 1,967 metres German theatrical release at the PrimusPalast (Berlin) on 15 March 1922

123

124

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Note Original credits do not survive. Some prints made from copies held by the Cinémathèque Française change the character names to match those found in Stoker’s novel, thus Max Schreck is credited as ‘Count Dracula’, Gustav von Wangenheim as ‘Jonathon Harker’ [sic] and so on. Although most sources credit the character played by Ruth Landshoff (playing Harding’s sister) as ‘Ruth’, some sources credit her as ‘Anny’. A re-edited/retitled version Die zwölfte Stunde was created circa 1930, probably without Murnau’s knowledge. Kino International 2005/2006 restoration credits © Friedrich-WilhelmMurnau-Stiftung (Wiesbaden) Production Companies TF – Transit Flm, Friedrich-WilhelmMurnau-Stiftung, Das Bundesarchiv

Restoration Luciano Berriatúa Laboratory L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna) Digital Processing OMNIMAGO GmbH (Ingelheim) Intertitles Trick Wilk GmbH (Berlin) Reconstruction of Hans Erdmann’s Original Score Berndt Heller Performed by RundfunkSinfonieorchester Saarbrücken Conducted by Berndt Heller Sound Recording Production RundfunkSinfonieorchester Saarbrücken Score Production, Recording, Editing and Mixing (5.1 Surround) Klangbezirk, Andreas Radzuweit Music Copyright/ Publisher Boosey & Hawkes Bote & Bock GmbH & Co. KG (Berlin) Music Excerpts ‘Fantastischromantische Suite Teil 1 und Teil 2’ by Hans Erdmann; ‘Der Werwolf’ by T. R. Leuschner; ‘De

Profundis-Suite’ by Giuseppe Becce; ‘Grande Fantasia’ from Un ballo in Maschera (transcribed by Émile Tavan) by Giuseppe Verdi; ‘Misterioso’ and ‘Überleitung’ by Berndt Heller; ‘Treachery and Vengeance’ by Percy E. Fletcher; ‘Misterioso Fantastico’ by Giuseppe Becce; ‘Galop (Le Bal)’ from Petite Suite pour orchestre after ‘Jeu d’enfants’ (transcribed by Hubert Mouton) by Georges Bizet; ‘Mefistofele’ (beginning of Act 3) by Arrigo Boito; ‘Kinotheken Nr. 24, 36 and 51’ by Giuseppe Becce; ‘Sturm’ by Ernst Wiedermann World Sales Transit Film GmbH (Munich) Release Details US DVD release by Kino Video on 20 November 2007. Running time: 91 minutes 52 seconds (total 94 minutes 15 seconds). 1.31:1 Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

N O S F E R AT U – E I N E S Y M P H O N I E D E S G R A U E N S

Select Bibliography Ashbury, Roy, Nosferatu (London: Longman/York Press, 2001). Balázs, Béla, ‘Merveilles et Fantômes’, · in L’Homme visible ou la civilisation du cinéma (Paris, 1924). Blin, Roger, ‘Murnau: Ses Films’, La Revue du cinéma no. 25 (July 1931), pp. 24–34. Bouvier, Michel and Leutrat, J.-L., Nosferatu (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Brakhage, Stan, ‘F. W. Murnau’, in Brakhage, Film Biographies (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1977), pp. 244–70. Breton, André, ‘De Chirico’, La Revolution Surréaliste vol. II no. 7, 15 June 1926, p. 4. Breton, André, Les Vases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1955 edn); trans. Mary Anne Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris as Communicating Vessels (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Brunius, Jacques B., ‘Dans L’Ombre ou les regards se nouent’, Minotaur no. 11 (Paris, 1938), pp. 38–42. Coats, Paul, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Collier, Jo Leslie, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Cronin, Paul (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber, 2002). Dalle Vacche, Angela, Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Desnos, Robert, Les Rayons et les ombres: cinéma (Paris, 1922).

Domamarchi, Jean, ‘Presence de F. W. Murnau’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 21 (March 1953), pp. 3–11. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt; trans. Roger Greaves from L’Ecran Demoniaque (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1952, rev. edn 1965; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Eisner, Lotte, Murnau; trans. from the French first edn, 1964 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973). Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘Six Degrees of Nosferatu’, Sight & Sound (February 2001); rev. as ‘No End To Nosferatu’ (2007) in the booklet for the Masters of Cinema DVD of Nosferatu. Exertier, Sylvain, ‘F. W. Murnau: La Lettre oubliée de Nosferatu’, Positif no. 228 (1980), pp. 47–51. Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny; trans. from Das Unheimliche [1919] by David McLintock (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2003). Gide, André, Journals 1889–1939 (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1940). Gioia, Dana, Nosferatu: An Opera Libretto (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 2001). Grau, Albin, ‘Vampires’; originally in Buhne und Film no. 21 (1921); trans. Craig Keller and published in the booklet for the Masters of Cinema DVD of Nosferatu (2007). Hammond, Paul (ed.), The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema (London: BFI, 1978). Herzog, Werner, Of Walking in Ice, trans. from Von Gehen in Eis (1978) by Marje Herzog and Alan Greeberg (London: Cape, 1991).

125

126

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Hodin, Claude, Murnau ou les Aventures de la purété (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). Jameux, Charles, Murnau (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1965). Kerouac, Jack, ‘Nosferatu (Dracula)’, in Kerouac, Good Blonde & Others, ed. by Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 2001 [1993]), pp. 119–24; originally written for the New Yorker’s Movie Series Notes, Winter 1960–1. Kerouac, Jack, Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (written 1959, first published in UK 1977 [London: Flamingo Modern Classics, 2001]). Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). Kyrou, Ado, Le Surrealisme au cinéma (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963, rev. from 1953 edn). Leutrat, J.-L., ‘Nosferatu’, Positif no. 428 (1996), pp. 73–6. McGilligan, Patrick, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (London: Faber, 1997). Nezval, Víteˇzlav, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; trans. David Short (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2005). Perez, Guillermo Gilberto, ‘Shadow and Substance: Murnau’s Nosferatu’, Sight & Sound vol. 36 no. 3 (Summer 1967), pp. 150–3. Perez, Guillermo Gilberto, ‘F. W. Murnau: An Introduction’, Film Comment vol. 7 no. 2 (1971), pp. 13–15. Perez, Guillermo Gilberto, ‘The Deadly Space Between’, from Perez, The

Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); reprinted in the booklet for the Masters of Cinema DVD (2007). Pirie, David, The Vampire Cinema (London: Quarto, 1977). Prawer, S. S., Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (London: BFI, 2004). Rottelar, Manuel, F. W. Murnau: Nosferatu (Zaragossa: Cine Club, 1950). Shepard, Jim, Nosferatu in Love (London: Faber, 1998). Skal, David J., Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula From Stage to Screen (New York: Norton, 1990). Stoker, Bram, Dracula (first published 1897; Harmondworth, Penguin Classics edn, ed. Maurice Hindle, 1993). Symonds, John, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (London: Mayflower, 1973). Wood, Robin, ‘Murnau’s Midnight and Sunrise’, Film Comment vol. 12 no. 3 (May/June 1976), pp. 4–9. Wood, Robin, ‘Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula’ Mosaic vol. 16 no. 1–2 (1983), pp. 175–87. Spoken Word Frayling, Christopher, commentary on BFI DVD edn of Nosferatu. Merhige, E. Elias, commentary on DVD of Shadow of the Vampire. Smith, R. Dixon and Stevens, Brad, commentary for the Masters of Cinema DVD edn of Nosferatu.