Nosferatu and the fascinating world of filmography

Original title: 'Nosferatu and the fascinating world of

filmography through the eyes of a shadow.' by Mario Orban

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 4

1.1 Nosferatu and the mythology 4

1.2 The connexion with Dracula 5

1.3 The plagiarised succes 6

1.4 More than a film 8

NOTE 9

Chapter 1 11

2.1 The artistic view at Nosferatu 1922 11

2.2 Murnau’s tricky mind 14

2.3 The beauty of Nosferatu 15

Chapter 2 18

3.1 Nosferatu and the Ghostly First World War 18

3.2 The horror behind the horror 19

3.3 Abusing the situation 21

3.4 Shadowy past 23

Chapter 3 27

4.1 The Cinematic Spectacle Behind Nosferatu 27

4.2 How was it made? 30

4.3 Shadows of humanity 31

4.4 Becoming more than an edit 33

Conclusion 36

List of References: 39

Introduction

1.1 Nosferatu and the mythology

Werewolves, ghosts, supernatural and many other superstitions were a trend and a complex subject for film makers and writers. Back in the 20’s but also nowadays.

People have been fascinated by mythology and its horror for a long time, before the camera even existed. Mythology has its own research fields, one of them is creatures or entities.

Each entity has its own characteristics. For example, the werewolf, who is supposed to be a man with wolf abilities, these are acquired either by a curse or by unknown reasons.

Another fierce creature is the vampire. The “human being” that feeds with human blood; Even Sherlock Holmes talks about vampires in his book The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire 1924. Vampires are more than a mythological creature but as nobody saw one in real life is hard to tell how a real vampire looks like. The only chance to assume how they look like is to trust film director’s creativity.

This work will focus on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film A Symphony of Horror (original title Eine Symphonie des Grauens) or simply Nosferatu from 1922, the first cinematic vampire.

1.2 The connexion with Dracula

Nosferatu was not the first film to be made having the vampire as a main character. In 1921, according to Gary D. Rhodes, Drakula Halala, a Hungarian/Austrian film made by Károly Lajthay was released, inspired of course by Stoker’s book, Dracula. Very little is known about this film as history made it disappear. (lost film) Shortly after, in 1922, Murnau’s film Nosferatu came out.

Writers like Anton Kaes,Ian Roberts, Stacey Abbott, Angela Dalle Vacche, mentioned and talked about Murnau’s film “Nosferatu” in their books. Writers that I will use in my work to follow Nosferatu’s different development that takes place through different perspectives.

To begin with, Dracula's myth (the vampire) was probably one of the most used in literature and cinema of the 20th century and will still be one of the landmarks of cinema in this century. The madness and adolescent success of vampire films prove it, of course. Even if everything seems to have started from Vlad Tepes (the Romanian emperor), which was signed in many documents with the name of Dracula (the son of Dracula), Bram Stocker started his madness with his 1897 novel, in which he took historical and folk sources, but also personal experiences to turn Vlad the Impaler into a blood-thirsty vampire and a world-wide character (more through films).

Of all the films that sought “to uncover the fear of German people as a republic from one crisis to another, the Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu) is certainly the best known.” (Roberts, 2008, pp 42)

Murnau’s Nosferatu is the most precious film of expressionism horror in the Weimar period. The confusion of a musical term in the subtitle of the film with supernatural motif is the era of Weimar's curious relationship with "unheimlich," as it suggests both the approval and the fear of the unknown, as well as the indication of the artistic representation of the terrible commonness in German culture. (Roberts, 2008, pp 42-43)

1.3 The plagiarised succes

Nosferatu, the masterpiece of the expressionist cinema, premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922, told the story of a sinister vampire reaper named Orlok, a story that reminded so much of Bram Stoker's famous Dracula novel that it was just about to bury definitively Murnau's film: For obvious reasons.

According to Roberts (2008, p 43), the producer Albin Grau argued that the idea of the film came from the stories heard from peasants in Serbia during the First World War. Later, he and co-producer Enrico Dieckmann hired Henrick Galeen to write the script, and Mr W. Murnau, to direct the film. What they did was an adaptation of Dracula, the novel.

Albin Grau even founded his own film company named “Prana Film” in 1921. The film company was focusing on paranormal films exclusively, but Nosferatu was the only film to ever be released. Roberts (2008, p. 43) says that “The film was intended to be an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897)” but legal complications occurred, and the creators Albin Grau and Henrik Galeen had to change and adapt the screenplay succeeding to disguise (somehow) the film`s origin.

Bram Stoker had been dead for nearly 10 years, and the rights to the work belonged to his widow, Florence Balcombe Stoker. Because the producers did not ask Mrs. Stoker permission, they changed some of the elements of the novel: the place of the action and the names of the characters, and they hoped everything was okay. Otherwise, everything could be found in Stoker’s novel, even the term of "Nosferatu" being extracted from Dracula's story.

Nosferatu, the film, was very well received by critics, but to a lesser audience and did not even have the desired success. In addition, as the promotional campaign cost a considerable sum, Prana Film, the production studios, were heading for bankruptcy.

At this point, the widow of Bram Stoker, who had seen the film, did not really appreciate the fact that someone had dared to adapt her husband's work to no avail. Thing which seems fair. (Recent research on Nosferatu, Dragos Cojocaru 2017)

Supported by the British Incorporated Society of Authors, Florence Stoker sued Prana Films and, when he learned that the studios had declared bankruptcy, he concentrated his efforts on the complete withdrawal of the motion picture. The authorities gathered and put on fire all the copies found, and Nosferatu was just about to disappear from history.

While Mrs. Stoker hunted and destroyed any copy of the film in Europe, one came to the US, far from her power. From this American copy there were more who circulated and built a considerable audience for Murnau's film.

Florence Stoker continued to fight Nosferatu until her death in 1937 approving the first official adaptation of the novel (Dracula, 1931, with Bela Lugosi). Murnau's film won the race with history, being recognized today as a masterpiece, states Cojocaru.

There are rumours that the only copy of the original film is owned by the German collector Jens Geutebrück. "Ironically," wrote the popular American critic Roger Ebert in 1997, "that Murnau would have helped Stoker long because Nosferatu has inspired dozens of other Dracula films, none as single and full of artistic merits ".

Murnau’s film “Nosferatu” is a very controversial film due its “plagiarised past”. The film has different ways in which the viewer can perceive its meaning. Drawing from the authors mentioned above this dissertation will observe Nosferatu as a film, as a shadow of the past but also as an art piece: For example I will use Angela Dalle’s book “Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film” I will have a look on the artistic aspect of the film, from Ian Roberts book “German Expressionist Cinema” I will analyse how expressionism is used in the film, from Anton Kaes book “Shell Shock cinema” I am going to inspect how Murnau used war in Nosferatu to show that the film is not just a film but more than that.

1.4 More than a film

Nosferatu can mean so many things even if the film was nothing more than “plagiarised scandal”. Some would say that Nosferatu can easily become a symbol in film industry after all the meaning behind it. Being such a complex subject, debated by many film experts, Murnau’s film is for sure an iconic work that should be investigated more. People don’t use to unearth the past anymore, so they can understand the present, thing that motivated me to do the research on Nosferatu. Murnau’s film Nosferatu from 1922 is more than a film and I am going to prove that in the following dissertation.

NOTE

Murnau’s Nosferatu is quite like Stoker’s Dracula when it’s about synopsis, the story sounds like this: the film begins with a columnist telling the plague triggering in Wisborg City in 1838: Knock Housekeeper receives a mysterious letter from Count Orlok through which he would like to buy a house in Wisborg. Knock, excited by the letter, sends his young man, Hutter, to Transylvania to conclude the business with the Count. Hutter's wife, Ellen, is worried, but he does not worry. He leaves Ellen in the care of his friend, Harding, and starts off. Arriving in Transylvania, Hutter stops for a night at an inn, where, in naming Orlok, the villagers react horrified. As a warning, the young man receives a book about "Vampires", which he takes in the mockery. The next day, a wagon takes him through the terrible forest, but the wagon is afraid to continue his journey. Hutter will then be picked up by a cage and taken directly to the castle. Count Orlok receives the visitor cold. During dinner, the young man accidentally cuts his finger. At sight of the blood, Orlok cannot help but try to suck his blood. But the vampire rushes and makes Hutter to go to bed. In the morning, he wakes up with strange traces of his throat and writes a letter to his wife. In the evening, the count sees Ellen's image in the medallion and decides to buy the Wisborg mansion, which is in front of Hutter's house. The second night, the Vampire approaches Hutter to suck his blood, but with a strange telepathy act, Ellen's sleeping cry makes Orlok withdraw. After that, Ellen will suffer sleepwalking every night. One evening, Hutter sees the Count as he loads a coffin with the ground into a cart and starts with it to the harbor. The macabre cargo is put in a vessel destined for Wisborg. Meanwhile, Hutter escapes from the castle and hurries home. On the ship, the count kills all the crew, so the ship gets empty in Wisborg. In the meantime, Knock has been hospitalized in the crazy asylum, where he now enjoys the arrival of the "master."(Knock being Orlok’s hypnotized adept) Hutter managed to return to Ellen, but it's too late: the vampire has come before him and spread the plague into the city thanks to the coffin rats. There is panic in Wisborg, and Knock is guilty of escaping from the asylum. In the Vampire Book, Ellen learns how to kill Orlok. She “vampires” the vampire into her room after she sends Hutter after a doctor and follows the instructions in the book: she sacrifices, making the vampire lose all night by sucking her blood, forgetting the sunrise. But when the light turns on, the sun's rays turn the count into ashes, and the epidemic stops. Interesting fact here: the film is different from Dracula: Bram Stoker doesn’t mention that the sun light kills the Vampire within seconds, so Murnau took his own ending for the closure of the film.

Chapter 1

2.1 The artistic view at Nosferatu 1922

Probably the first thing that comes to everyone’s while watching the film is that Murnau really tried to make us see the vampire’s presence even if he was not present in the frame, that’s how he is "bringing the monster to life" (Angela Dalle Vacche, 1996, pp 178-179) : Murnau is using our imagination to bring the vampire to life. Thing that wasn’t easy back in the days. In a way, it's the ability of us, as viewers to feel Nosferatu present throughout the movie, which is possible due to the misse-en-scene the director used. Film critic Roger Dadoun talks about how “the vampire's power is visualized in the movie's setting” (Vacche, 1996, p. 179). The absence of the vampire allows our minds to perceive something that is not in the frame. Dadoun writes: "... The structure of the global form must have an echo in other forms. It requires precise details and markers around which psychic crystallisation can take place." Dadoun's statement is visually confirmed during the film. For example, Nosferatu's hairless head is always highlighted by the Gothic structures of the arches, which point to Murnau's mise-en-scene: the shape of the Hutter castle door door repeats the narrow form of Nosferatu's skull; Murnau had a brilliant sense of aesthetically pleasant shots that were connected to each other. Another example from the film: The floor of Nosferatu's castle made of sandstone is also found in Ellen's balcony, and the vampire's ability to feel its presence anywhere, although there are barriers, is shown by the wind and curtains moved by the wind, making his presence either symbolic (Vacche, 1996, p. 179). As in a painting, Murnau uses the visual depth to show us that the monster is as invisible as the horror cultivated by our minds as spectators. The famous sequence in which Nosferatu climbs the stairs leading to Ellen's bedroom, where only his shadow is seen, was Murnau's intention to show us that what we see is actually “a fragment of our imagination” and “not a concrete object”. No matter how much we want, “we cannot fully guess Nosferatu's appearance, but we can just try to guess” states Angela Dalle. The huge corridors, the very large chairs and the tremendous fireplace "point to a feudal past". In the dematerialization of Nosferatu's body, Murnau plays with the density and substance from which it is made: From the fiery vampire, it turns into a shadow that seems to be able to easily hold Ellen's body.

Nosferatu's existence as a projection or manifestation of horror derives from Friedrich's interiorized way of making paintings (Vacche, 1996, p 171). After the exile in the "prehistorical realm" - the Carpathian forests – Angela Dalle states that ‘the vampire returns to history not only as a painting but also as a film. However, for Muranu, cinema is a two-headed creature with positive and negative connotations.’ She also claims that ‘Nosferatu as a cinematic painting is above all a picture marked by absence and death; The vampire is a fantastic entity so unimportant that once it arrives in Wisborg, it disappears for a good period of time, roaming the streets that complement its character type.’ Nosferatu's thirst for blood, which leaves the world alive, can be interpreted as "death at work" because "the art of movement is life with one image exhausting itself into the next."(Vacche, 1996, pp 51-52)

Nosferatu also has similar shots with Robert Wiene’s film Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari which resemble with Friedrich’s paintings. Both Murnau and Wiene used light to make each of their shots as an artistic representation. They showed how to use emotions and horror in an expressionist work.

The idea of cinema as death is played in contrast to Murnau's decision: He created a business between plague and a sale. This sale (trade) shows the status of the Germans, but also the nature of their lives; These were called "vanitas" (vanity from latin) (Vacche, 1996, p. 181) Even though Nosferatu has the castle in the wild and his long nails look like he's not a well-educated man in society (Vacche, 1996, p.181), it's not to be neglected, since he does not hesitate to have a building in Wisborg just to be closer to Ellen, writes Dalle (1996). As the owner of the castle but also the owner of the property vendor, the vampire becomes "vanitas" and at the end of the movie, when the sun rises, it disappears into a "puff of smoke", which also reminds us of the richness and fragility of the “filmic image ".

Murnau's capability to surprise the madness of his times is as unstable and harsh as the Expressionist experience that art historians usually put it in between 1880-1916.

This "death of the vampire as cinema" from 1922 “is not just an obituary for Expressionism but also a commentary on the romantic movement and its fascination for the obscure”(Vacche, 1996, p.181); This happened shortly after the electric light was discovered in 1879. In a brief sequence, Murnau shows us an old man who lights an oil lamp; it kills the cinematic vampire that can only exist in the dark.

2.2 Murnau’s tricky mind

Murnau's decision not to adapt to Bram Stoker's film is likely to have no obligations or restrictions: Instead of choosing England as the country for the film, he chooses Germany (specific time 1838), the Biedermeier period, a year before the official birth of the first photograph of 1939, and two years later after the death of Caspar David Friedrich. To value the Biedermeier, look in his film, Murnau selected an amateur actress as Harding's sister just because he had a similar appearance to a portrait made by Kaulbach (an artist specialized in domestic interiors and family scenes). This is one of the causes that made Albin Grau, Murnau's set designer, to set up a well-groomed garden with family portraits and flower paintings on the walls. Still, Grau's style is far too theatrical, it includes too many doors, windows and mirrors, which becomes annoying for the viewers. The stage that Grau creates, the perfect and happy place in the Biedermeier style is something that does not exist. Instead, this seemingly impossible ideal is embedded in the native earth coffin that Nosferatu carries with him from Transylvania to Germany and through the canals and streets of Wisborg.

Most significant, however, Murnau's allegations to the Biedermeier style denote the director's dissatisfaction with bourgeois conventions and sentimentality. (Vacche, 1996, p.183)

According to Angela Dalle (1996, p183), the couple in the film: Ellen and Hutter, seem to be happy but Hutter does not hesitate to leave his wife for a possible material gain. Even when Nosferatu is present and Ellen feels terrified, Hutter does not calm or comfort her, he doesn`t even join her in the bed, but he chooses to sleep on a chair nearby.

In some ways Nosferatu's presence in Wisborg worsens and disturbs the relationship between the two, but also their routine. After destroying the ship's crew and taking over the ship, Nosferatu appears on the screen-at a very low angle-and then disappears again. To some extent, the vampire takes over the ship, becoming a shadow, becoming one with the ship controlling its rhythm, as a machine capable of “mastering endless spaces” (Vacche, 1996, p184) making him even more powerful.

2.3 The beauty of Nosferatu

The sequence in which Murnau films the sea makes alludes to the Northern European "Marine Painting" genre. Artists who worked in this genre often used to paint boats caught in storms since "rough waves" and "stormy winds" allowed them to create more "daring compositional" schemes. such a painting can be found in the room where the captain's body is examined by the village experts.

However, when Nosferatu is in control of the ship, the sea seems to be calm; This makes the vampire even stronger than it seems: “This deviation from the conventions of marine painting makes the vampire’s invisible presence appear all the more powerful.” (Vacche 1996, p.184) The unseen force that pushes the ship eludes the beauty of Biedermeier's world from the landscape. Here, Murnau seems to adopt an “Expressionist fantasy of purrifying cataclysm". In his work, Woman before the Setting Sun, Friedrich “seems to welcome the landscape into the woman`s womb” while in the same time showing it`s vitality. Not a stranger to the word “plagiarism”, Murnau kind of adopts (in a pervert way) the painting to his film: but instead of a woman the director chooses to put Knock instead “whom the crowd subsequently turns into a scapegoat for the plague.” (Vacche 1996, p.184)

Murnau shows us a black-dominated country road where we can see the real estate agent, this being represented only by a black silhouette in the immense black and white frame. We see the citizens of Wisborg as dark silhouettes like the walls in Hutter`s house; Also, the crowd, which is feasting over the remains of the scarecrow. It is in a way an “anticipation” of the brutal punishment “reserved for Knock”.

Just as Nosferatu almost becomes one with the Wisborg’s architecture, he also becomes “cosubstantial” with the “photographic process at the heart of the cinema”. This is maybe the reason of Murnau of not really showing us the “special effects”: “amidst hazy shadows, but against a real, three-dimensional world brought into clear focus” (1996, Angela Dalle, cited in Cinema and Painting, p.186). Nosferatu as cinema, can easily vanish into the documentary type of images used in the film, while his presence exposes the “quality and life and real locations” (Vache, 1996, p.186). John Barlow clearly says about Nosferatu that “…the Count materializes in a double exposure sitting on a pile of coffins in the ship’s hold, while a sick man lies in the hammock in the foreground.” He also says that “stop action is used”: “When the ship’s mate smashes his axe into the coffin later, Nosferatu rise up in front of him…” He also says that these tricks are very “discrete”; “The stop action is a careless mistake […] Nosferatu popping up from the coffin as if on spring has a fascinating grotesqueness about it, while the double-exposure appearance and disappearance are stock-in-trade representations of ghostliness.” (Vacche, 199, p.186) If we add to Barlow's list the doors of Nosferatu's castle that open by themselves, we can associate these tricks with magic, and the vampire as the magical creature.

As a fantastic creature, Nosferatu is the bad influence of mercantilism and materialism of Germany in the 19th century “the underside of its celebration of science and technology” (Vacche, 1996, p. 187) – Two areas which were adopted by the cinematic industry of Weimar (according to Elsaesser) to allocate and enhance the technical quality of his “artistic” cinema.

Nosferatu is more than just an “anticipation” of cinema as a “technology of the imaginary”, he is a primitive creature of nature, related to humans in touch with various animals (Vacche, 1996. p 187). We see in the film animals like rats, horses and even spiders. This romantic and iconic relationship can be recognized from Franz Marc’s Horse painting. For the expressionist artist, the horse was a symbol of “power regaining” for men, where he could regain his contact with the nature’s forces given by God, almost renewing Darwin’s theory.

Chapter 2

3.1 Nosferatu and the Ghostly First World War

If we look at Nosferatu historically, we can easily see that an “another parallel emerges” (Anton Kaes, 2009, p 102). The World War I was a pure mass killing where thousands of people died, without being properly buried. Corpses were everywhere, on the battlefield, half buried in the ground, sometimes even the “trenches themselves” were the soldiers graves, writes Kaes. That’s when the “widespread of fear” appeared: people were afraid of ghosts of the unburied soldiers that could look for a place to rest. People started an “occultist movement” as they promised to the dead soldier’s families communication between them and their loved ones that were dead. The fear of ghosts and spirits is very old, especially in the folklore; The “vengeance of the spirits of the deceased” (Kaes, 2009, p 102).

In one of the films`s scenes where Hutter is curious enough to explore Nosferatu`s habitat in the castle grounds, he discovers his coffin, but he soon enough faces the vampire itself staring at him with (described by Kaes) “his huge animal fangs dominating the picture”. Nosferatu is half buried in dirt “an image reminiscent of Otto Dix`s 1924 (Kaes, 2009, p 106) etchings of decomposing dead soldiers peering out from muddy trenches with their eyes opened”(2009, p 106). Soldiers being buried alive was probably the most frequent “precipitants of the shellshock”, that shows a human being between life and death. Nosferatu is filled with shellshock images, even if the scenes are not specifically on one character only but it is Hutter “who displays symptoms of the shellshocked sodier” described by Kaes.

One scene that makes this very clear: After Hutter is hurt, trying to get out of Nosferatu`s castle, he is been taken to a hospital. This scene is intercut with an “aerial shot full of coffins”, of course one of them has the vampire in it. Now back to Hutter, he is in bed, next to him there is a nurse and a doctor: He suddenly wakes up from a dream, with his arm to the sky and shouts “Coffins…I see coffins”.

The horror seems to be the reality as we see the coffind coming to Wisborg. Somehow, Nosferatu’s coffin lands in the middle of a ship; “He himself, a spindly elongated body, is sleeping in one of them.” (Kaes, 2009, p 108) The vampire is in the middle of a rat reunion around his coffin (the similarity between rat’s teeth and his are is obvious) when one of the sailors opens one of the coffins nearby and a rat bites him. Just before this, the audience can see that none of the crew members are aware that there is Nosferatu down in one of the coffins. We as viewers, can see that sleeping in his coffin filled with mud and dirt overflowing with rats. This scene already associates Nosferatu with dirt and disease.

3.2 The horror behind the horror

In 1922 was a very common image to see soldiers sleeping “with rat-infested dirt” (Kaes, 2009, p. 108) but it also has an “added connotation drawn from the trench experience” (Kaes, 2009, p. 109): Because of the poor conditions at that time, during war men had to live with rats and other corpses. They were treated worse than animals, they had to dug themselves. Kaes mentions a student soldier that wrote “In what way have we sinned that we should be treated worse than animals? Hunted from place to place… […]in the end we are destroyed like vermin”. (Kaes, 2009, p. 96) Throughout the film, Nosferatu focuses on rats, especially with close-ups, giving them more importance than in Stoker’s Dracula. Nosferatu even shares the same habit as them: “sleeping in dirt” he is “likened to rats”, thing that back in the days become a symbol of dirt, contamination but also the difference between “civilization and repressed” (Kaes, 2009, p. 109) .

The rat was a perfect choice for symbolizing the life and death but also the misery of the times. Back in the day, Jews were associated with rats and “infectious diseases” (2009, p. 109). Nosferatu’s origin comes from Transylvania, a Hungarian territory located in Romania. Transylvania was invaded by Romania fact that made Jews immigrate. All the Jewish immigrants were accused of “cultural infestation”. We can say that the “vampire myth” is an “anti-Semitic” fantasy. As they were associated to a rat and a vampire they were also called “parasites” also “body eaters”. The obsessed people from the nineteenth-century trying to defend their culture and rights tried to “prove not only the racial inferiority of Jews but also their danger to -host- countries”. There was a phrase that was also popular back the to describe Jewish people: “a capitalist who drinks blood of the working class; and a foreign -element- that infects and kills the national body” (2009, p 112). Even Adolf Hitler mentions the vampire when he talks about Jews in Mein Kampf: “After the death of the victim the death of the vampire will come sooner or later” (2009, p 112)..

3.3 Abusing the situation

The film`s success is based on its meaning. The focus of the film is that it has so many meanings that it can be compared to almost everything that happened back then. The cinematics and the mixture of techniques and the documentary style blends in this film so good that it makes Nosferatu more than just a version of Dracula, makes it a symbol of destruction, horror, war, disease and cinematography; by its nature, the film is such a heavy piece that not many people could actually guess the meanings behind the images we see and the importance of Nosferatu as a character in the film universe. Nosferatu is a pillar of the horror genre, built on reality but also on a novel.

Because of the mass killing, many people were afraid of ghosts (as previously mentioned). The connection between life and death was a trend back then and people always tried to contact their deceased ones: “All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits” (2009, p 121)

This phenomena of “haunting souls” became a thing after so many soldiers didn`t return home to their families. Wives and families tried to talk to their missing husbands, brothers and dead relatives through occultism. Freud mentions that “a contact of this kind is not impossible”. Their weaponry was powerless compared to the actual paranormal belief German people had back then; “In war no one is master of his fate…He can only say ‘Thy will be done.’” (2009, p 122) They really believed that God or other entities were in control of their future and present; Their lives were already planned.

People were confused and scared, the war reasons were limited for them and they were unsure of what is going to happen to them tomorrow. As Eric Leed reports: “…It created the setting for irrational thoughts and unbidden associations” (citing Anton Kaes’s work on Eric Leed’s affirmation, p 122). The rational and the irrational blended together and not after a long time the technology lost the battle with the irrational: “a total loss of individual control over life and death, resulting in a regression to archaic forms of thinking that were less linear and logical than associative and evocative” ( 2009 p 123).

The formal structure of Nosferatu has a few chaotic correspondences. The film establishes some unexpected and possibly odd connections between characters: Sometimes during the film we can see Nosferatu as a double of Hellen, Knock and Hutter. This becomes not just a screening but a mirror that doubles the characters identities: “The constant endeavour to insinuate correspondences also creates a spatial complexity that undermines the linear progression of the storyline.” (2009, p 123)

The first intertitle of the film underlines the presence and the absence making the representation complicated: "Nosferatu. Doesn't this name sound like the very midnight call of Death? Speak it not aloud, or life's pictures will turn to shadows, and nightmares (spukhafte Traume or "phantom-like dreams"in literal translation) will rise up to feed on your blood" (2009, p 123). Nosferatu can be easily compared to a death “predictor” who lives in our minds: his vampiric manifestations like “shadows” and “horrific ghostly dreams” are occult symbols but at the same time they are linked to film. This message of terror results in a paradox: “as the danger of naming is spelled out, the phantom is names.” (2009, p 123) This confirms what the warning previously mentioned says: The film transforms the “images of life” into shadows and “horrific dreams” that suffocate the viewer.

3.4 Shadowy past

The film itself doubles its own vampiric thoughts, the unmentioned words of death that are slowly shaping a monster’s body. This helps Ellen’s temptation grow, fact that makes even more fascinated by the Book of Vampires, “which is forbidden to her” (2009, p 123). After the temptation breaks out, she opens the book which leads us to realise that she opens herself to evil, to Nosferatu; Again, the film needs the occult idea of: “forbidden knowledge is associated with secret writings” (2009, p 123).

There were actual reports of soldiers seeing things in the trenches: being in a constant situation where they were between life and death they started to see things and hallucinate. How can this film articulate these boundary experiences or to show what can’t be shown? How can the film bring a material image of a phantasmagorical world? The film based on the shadow’s interaction with light, has a clear goal: “its elusive materiality is most radically demonstrated by its conscious use of shadows.” (2009, p 124) In his study of shadow in Western art, A.E. Gombrich says that “shadows are not a part of the real world” and that “It was believe by ancient Greeks that when we take leave of the real world, we survive only as shades among shades”.

Schatten, by Artur Robinson, Eine Nachtliche Halluzination 1923, presents the world of shadows as a perception of a second reality in which revenge and scam can be represented in action. Just like Nosferatu, Eine Nachtliche Halluzination was shot by one of the best and most innovative cinematographer of those times (1920s), Fritz Arno Wagner and designed by the same Albin Grau. These two films are “self- reflexive “upon our perception of shadows and their powerful influence on how our minds are getting tricked by them. “Yesterday I was in the kingdom of shadows” (2009, p 125), that’s what Maxim Gorky, founder of the socialist realism literary method, said about “his first visit to a movie house” (2009, p 125), back in 1895. Maxim Gorky also says “If only you knew how strange it felt. There were no sounds and no colours…. this is not life but the shadow of life, and this is not the movement but the soundless shadow of a movement.”

The narration in Nosferatu is structured based on “fundamental cinematographic representation”. Murnau sees the film exactly as Gorky: “not life but the shadow of life” (2009, p 125). Nosferatu is a cinematic creature with “no life”. He doesn’t exist anywhere else outside the film. Even as a non-real thing, Nosferatu still “rules the kingdom of shadows” in his cinematic life. On his way to Ellen’s room, Nosferatu can be seen as a slowly growing shadow, helped by the lighting design, making the shadow to look bigger filling the wall. Even if we don’t see Nosferatu in the frame, we feel him, we see the “phantomatic figure” and that’s the proof that he is indeed a ghost.

Talking about spiritualism and phantomatic figures, he spiritualist movement of capturing the deceased ones in photographs started in the mid-nineteenth and was called “spirit photographs”. It wasn’t anything paranormal in those photographs, ad artist and photographers used simple camera tricks as double exposure or superimposition. According to Anton Kaes, people used to believe that the photographic camera could capture more than the human eye. Obviously, this thing has become very popular after the World War I, as photographers promised to capture their loved (and decease) ones in their family photos. The ghost films used to “possess a magic dimension” (Kaes describing) as they were able to show something that the human eye couldn`t not perceive. At some point, in Nosferatu, we see a Venus flytrap, in a close-up, giving us, the viewers an image that we couldn`t imagine or see with the naked eye. Even if the audience could identify what it was, the thing looked unreal, not because it was impossible but because it looked “too real” (2009, p 125). Murnau blurred the boundaries between science and mistery using scenes of “scientific observation”. The raw image of a carnivorous plant eating its dinner was also a connection between Nosferatu as a vampire in a “Darwinian universe” (2009, p 126).

At some point in the film, Ellen becomes Murnau’s focus. She takes the focus upon her engaging the viewers with her narrative. We witness her will to sacrifice herself to get rid of the monster and save her town. After Nosferatu and Ellen die, the last shot we see is very short: Nosferatu’s castle in ruins. A misty image of the remains is all we get to see. This shot frames the entire film in a single still photograph. It “summarize the film”. It almost looks like it was “suspended in time”, in a constant process of decomposition. Since a very long time ago, ruins were a symbol of curiosity and a sense of discovery., contemplation and reverence. The decomposing castle was once great: Imposing texture, a “phallic-looking emblem of power” (2009, p 127). Just as Nosferatu dies, all that beauty is now just remaining from a building, nothing more than an (quoting Anton Kaes) “overgrown pile of stone”.

Georg Simmel wrote in 1911 “What has led the building upward is human will, what gives it its present appearance is the brute, downward-dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature”. In the film, the human spirit is overcoming by the power of nature “death and remembrance”. The war experience is “elevated to a higher form of existence”.

Chapter 3

4.1 The Cinematic Spectacle Behind Nosferatu

Nosferatu is full of cinematic tricks, shadows and perception techniques. Stacey Abbott says that in a specific scene from Shadow of the Vampire, 2000 (a film made to show how Nosferatu was made), Max Schreck finds a film projector through all the filming equipment brought to the castle. He starts playing with it and discovers that placing his hand in front of the lenses, the shadow quickly becomes a horrific shape: “Schreck instinctively places his hand before the lens to project his own shadow on the screen.”(Abbott, 2007, p 43) Giving the shadow a meaning, Stacey Abbott affirms that “sequence actually presents a symbiosis rather than an opposition between the vampire and technology, a symbiosis that is key to the vampire’s representation in the cinema.” As Stacey asserts that "the movie is predominantly filled with ghostly and deadly shadows" reanimated by technological means, the final creation, the film itself has "striking parallels with vampirism" (Abbott, 2007, p 43). To recreate life and movement, the editor uses "a series of consecutive static images, sequentially projected at a speed of between sixteen and twenty-four frames per second." (Abbott, 2007, p 43) “You have only to freeze a film image and then set it in motion again to appreciate the difference [between photography and film]. A photograph embalms the ghosts of the past; film brings them back to life.” ( Quoting the statement made by Steven Neale, from Stacey Abbott’s work).

During the nineteenth century, the technological development was something that helped film makers to make their films more realistic. New equipment like the phonograph, the x-ray or even electricity were categorised as new and modern technology. Stacey says that “even if these technologies were seen as something uncanny at that moment by many”, they helped cinematography in many ways: They brought the dead to life and they “portrayed the ambiguity between the scientific and the occult. (2007, p 44)”

All this “technological necromancy” was necessary so that Nosferatu can be a real thing, so that the first ever cinematic Vampire to be alive in a film: “drawing upon the ambiguity between the living and the dead, the scientific and the fantastic” (2007 p 44).

At a first look, Nosferatu seems to be a high-quality adaptation of Stoker’s novel Dracula. Still, the film is not a perfect adaptation of the novel as it “appears to mark a decided break from the novel with respect to its relationship to modernity.”(2007, p 45) After renaming the main character, the vampire, to Orlok, Murnau and Henrik Galeen moved away from Stoker’s fascination upon the modern world: First, Nosferatu’s action took place earlier than Dracula in a different city named Wisborg, in Germany, totally different from London’s modern world. Completely different from Berlin as well, as Stacey Abbotts states. Second, Orlok is associated in an “explicit” way with disease and plague and not with “the modern business practices, transport, and technology described in the novel” (2007, p 45). The vampire’s aspect is very similar to a rat: Long nails, and creepy facial expressions that look unhuman, making the audience uncomfortable. Nowadays, vampires are used as a sex symbol, more as a film prop (example: Twilight series).Murnau and Schreck made a vampire that would stand up by it’s look and the way they used make-up, lights, angles and shadows. A creature of fear and disease, in real life but also on the screen.

A recent research on Nosferatu shows a statement made by TCM, that “Schreck is certainly a nightmarish apparition with his bulbous head, pointed batlike ears and long, talon-like fingers and fangs. His ratlike facial features also associate him with the rodents who spread the plague across Europe. And Schreck's eerie, stammering, zombie-like walk has since become a feature of numerous screen monsters, from the stammering gait of Frankenstein to the deliberate, determined pace of the killer Michael in Halloween (1978). This inspired interpretation of Stoker's monster suggests, in an almost subconscious way, the world of death and parasitism and decay created in Stoker's novel. Schreck's vampire was a thoroughly original creation […]” (Classic Movie Hub - CMH, 2011)

Even if the film looks so different from the book, Nosferatu has more in common with the novel, more than we can see at a first sight. In the original book, Dracula, the story is presented as a “product of modernity since the very manuscript is produced through a range of modern technologies, including stenography, the phonograph, and the typewriter” (2007, p45). Just like Nosferatu, Dracula is a non-visible presence in the novel. He is only a “story” told by the others through documents. Dracula’s hunters were presented as “modern” hunters. Using technology to hunt down the vampire, as a “product of the technological union of the documents.” (2007, p 45) Murnau’s count Orlok, is a technological result of the cinematography used back in the days, and the techniques (used) from the nineteenth century. In this chapter, I will explore how this “bridged the gap between the scientific and the supernatural” so that Nosferatu has “become a defining part of the vampire film’s cinematic heritage.” says Stacey.

4.2 How was it made?

The most interesting and one of the most important “precursors to horror cinema was the Phantasmagoria” (2007, p 45). A machine designed to work as a magic lantern. It worked as a “little cinema”: it used light to project painted images on a “diaphanous screen”. Along with the images, the screening was usually accompanied by sound effects, such as bells, rain or any other horrific sounds, that could create atmosphere. The slides used were often inspired by Gothic paintings or Gothic tales, according to Stacey.. They could simply bring dead to life. Historical characters such as Shakespeare and Napoleon Bonaparte were brought to life using the machine. Stated by Stacey Abbott in her book, “Paul Philidor, the creator of Phantasmagoria even invited members of the audience to bring photographs of their deceased ones, so he can bring them to life.” (2007, p 46)

This invention faded out from the cinematographic industry around 1840s, being replaced with an invention like Phantasmagoria: Pepper’s Ghost. The new machine didn’t use paintings but real actors. With a few mirrors the machine could create amazing effects of fading out or walking through walls.

These early films not only that had a chance to explore the dead’s world combined with our world but also had the chance to “facilitate the exploration into the borderland between the known and the unknown” (2007, p 51).

Nosferatu was always a different “relative” to any other expressionist films made in Germany at that time. Stacey Abbott gives as an example the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the film uses its own studio and sets in the making, unlike Nosferatu, which uses real places and real locations. While Dr.Caligari uses odd mise-en-scene and make-up along with weird costumes, Nosferatu doesn’t need that much to show what it wants: it uses “photographic realism through its effective use of real locations, long takes, and mise en-scène.” (2007, p 51) Andre Bazin affirms that “Murnau’s intention was to actually capture reality more than manipulating the image using different techniques and montages”. Thomas Elsaesser stated that “Murnau’s ability to combine real life places with ‘exquisitely crafted artifice’ “was a signature of Murnau’s style of making films: Style that can be found in Nosferatu. Murnau used the magic lantern and other different tricks to guide his uncanny way of making Nosferatu. He created his own vampire “through a legacy of spectral technology.” Angella Dalle Vacche describes Nosferatu as it follows: “Nosferatu is bloodsucking, which drains the world of its vital forces, plays on the notion that cinema, the art of movement of life, may also be a form of death at work, with one image exhausting itself into the next.” (2007, p 51)

4.3 Shadows of humanity

The early cinema was frequently “described as as the capture and projection of the shadowy images of the living.” Nosferatu uses the image of a shadow to show the vampire as a “shadow of humanity”. When Hutter meets Orlok’s carriage, the man driving says that he can’t go further as the land is haunted. To show this in the film, all these scenes are filled with ghostly frames: it also uses negative frames to create an artificial shadow in their world; Plus, there are the intertitles which are full of references regarding Orlok’s connexion with the shadow world: when Hutter reads the Vampire’s book, it warns him that he should not let the vampire “burden [his] dreams with horrible fears,” (2007, p 52).

The second night is intercut with “The ghostly evening light made the shadows of the castle appear to come alive again,” (2007, p 52) showing to the audience the documents exchange between Orlok and Hutter. Here Orlok becomes the shadow that comes alive: “comes alive after dark and recedes with the sunrise.”(2007, p 52)

In two of the main (key) scenes of the film, we can see how Orlok is parallel with the “shadowy nature of the cinema”, thing sustained by the film to only suggest the vampire’s presence: Hutter’s attack at the Castle and later the attack upon Hellen in Wisborg. Hutter falls in terror realising that the creature is a vampire, scene which is shown to the public using a mid-shot, seeing Nosferatu’s shadow growing upon Hutter’s body. The terrifying long nails of Orlok can be seen in a later scene, where Ellen offers herself to the vampire, and Orlok, going up the stairs, shows his shadowy long fingers pointing at the door. Orlok’s shadow is constantly appearing on white surfaces, such as Hutter’s bed or Ellen’s nightgown.

Gilberto Perez Guillermo says that this “absent presence” of Nosferatu is “a mere phantom disconnected from the physical world, an impotent shadow struggling to possess the young woman’s body.” What this represents is that the vampire is over the corporal and the spectral borders. For example, when Orlok gets to Ellen, his arm shadow stops next to her heart: Ellen then begins to suffer in pain when Orlok “clasps shut” his arm next to her heart, which shows that his shadow has not only physical form but also spectral. According to Mary Albert, while the vampire shares film’s shadowy properties, “he is also associated with its ability to manipulate time.”(2007, p 53) Before the advent of sound, when a standardized camera and sound speed became a necessity, cameras and projectors were hand-cranked. Albert argues, “Film audiences must have taken for granted slight oscillations of temporality when unintended, and no doubt fully appreciated full blown spectacles of manipulated time when it was carefully constructed by the film-makers.”(Quoting Albert from Stacey’s book, p 54) In Nosferatu, when Hutter is met by the carriage that will take him to Orlok’s castle, the coach’s approach is shot in fast motion, and later Orlok himself is filmed in fast motion as he packs his coffins of earth onto a cart bound for Wisborg. This is a proof that only cameras can record supranatural movement, such as vampires walking with such a speed; Making the limits between supranatural and science even stronger.

4.4 Becoming more than an edit

The given examples are pretty much based on cinematographic properties of the film, but talking about Nosferatu, it becomes much more as the film (through editing) can “manipulate the perception of time and space”. By 1914, crosscutting between parallel actions was commonly used in American cinema, though it took longer to become standardized in Europe.

Stephen Kern says that “The ability to experience many distant events at the same time, made possible by the wireless . . . was part of a major change in the experience of the present” (quoting Stephen Kern from Stacey’s book, p 55). With the advantage of crosscutting, the present was not “a sequence of single local events”(2007, p 55) but more of a “simultaneity of multiple distant events”(2007, p 55). In a way, Murnau is focusing his paranormal potential of editing to “suggest the uncanniness of the modern conception of space and time.” (2007, p 56) For example, the arrival of the vampire in Wisborg, where Orlok arrives to the port, crosscuts with Hutter’s trip but also with “Ellen and Knock’s psychic realization of Orlok’s arrival”(2007, p 56). This sequence begins with the dead captain, Nosferatu being the only one alive on the ship. At the same time we see each character’s location, the film even cutting from the sailing ship to Ellen’s balcony. Straight after this shot we see Hutter, and soon after the “race between Orlok and Hutter to reach Wisborg has begun”. Ellen feels Orlok’s presence not only spiritually but also on camera: Different shots of her in a tranche can be seen. Soon after this, Ellen even realises that she has to meet with this Orlok saying “He’s coming. I must go to meet him”. Even Orlok’s madman, Knock, feels his master’s presence: He starts climbing the cell’s wall to try see his master.

The film suddenly cuts to the ship, sailing on its own, and then to Knock which shouts “The Master is coming! The Master is here!”. The sequence keeps going once the ship arrives to Wisborg, following Orlok getting away with a coffin in his arms. Knock’s power and anger had amplified once Orlok was in town: He attacks the nearby guard.

Because the new home of Orlok is close to Hutter’s house, all this scene can be seen as a “race to reach Ellen first”. Now we see Orlok haunting the town, making his way to his new home while we see intercuts of Hutter in a hurry to reach Ellen first. As a “happy ending” to the suspense, Hutter reaches the girl first, and then, while kissing each other, we see Orlok’s disappointed face , like he felt that Hutter got to Ellen before him.

In one of his studies, Thomas Elsaesser underlines that the intercutting in this sequence wasn’t a conventional way of how classic narratives used to be. He says that “Murnau builds up here is a kind of architecture of secret affinities, too deep or too dreadful for the characters to be aware of, and even for us happening only at the edges of our perception, but none the less lodging in the viewer, too, that pull between horror and fascination which the vampire exerts on the protagonists.” (2007, p 57) This whole segment, is more than just connexion between the characters, is more of a telepathic ability. In a way, Orlok becomes an element of this “wireless” communication as it shows Dracula’s capability of talking to his victims: like “an internal telegraphy system”.

In this “symbiotic” relationship between cinematography and vampire, Nosferatu showed up the concept of “new” and how modernism became a thing. Even if the film seemed to be modern back in the days, many different film techniques and technologies were discovered since. It is indeed a real proof that technology is like a spiral vortex, if today we call it “modern” tomorrow could be old already if something better is discovered: “replacing what was once modern with a more up-to-date incarnation.” (2007, p 60)

Conclusion

Nosferatu is a subject I have enjoyed doing my research on. From a cinematic fascination to studying this subject is a great personal achievement. Although I have spoken in this dissertation about various aspects of the vampire in Murnau's film, I feel the subject is too complex to leave it uncovered. This leads me to expand my personal research on the topic of "Nosferatu".

When you first see the movie, you do not realize how much effort and cinematic technique has been done to make this film. Even if the movie seems outdated for our century, back then, the technology has made it an impact movie even for the present times. The technology used to make the film (stop-motion, magic lantern, shadows, camera angles and simple camera tricks) are new research areas for me as an individual.

From the magic lantern to moving shadows and the connection with war, disaster and art, Nosferatu was a complex "field" that deserves more attention from film researchers but also by students. By its nature, the film is a controversial piece. Simply because of its atmosphere, history and morbid feeling. Blended into society with so much controversy, the film is easily recognisable even if only a few sequences are shown.

Based on my research, Nosferatu also reminds a bit of Faust and Marguerite (1900) by Edwin S. Porter (an adaptation of Charles Gounod’s opera, Faust 1859), a short film in which the action is similar with Nosferatu from the romantic point of view. An amorous triangle, a bad entity and two supposed lovers. More than a horror fantasy, Nosferatu easily can become a love story: Hutter and Ellen and Orlok’s thirst for blood.

The film is a fascination itself and it has a few details that are almost impossible to see if you watch the film only once. For example, Count Orlok can be seen blinking during the whole film only once, somewhere near the end of part 1. In a recent research on Nosferatu (Classic movie Hub, 2011) it says that Murnau thought that Count Orlok, Max Schreck, was “strikingly ugly” so the long fake ears and the oddly long rat teeth would be enough as his make-up. The most interesting fact about Nosferatu is that he can be seen for no more than 9 minutes through the entire film; the full running time is one hour and approximately 20 minutes, which means that we can see Nosferatu for around 11% of the film. Not because Murnau didn’t want to show us his creation but more because the film makes Orlok’s presence felt by visuals and mise-en-scene. (as mentioned before)

Murnau choses Orlok’s castle to be a real location, situated in Orava, Slovakia, and it’s the place where the first bloody moments of the film take place. Memorable scene for the cinematographic world took place there: one fot them is when Orlok is walking through the castle, along the walls, leaving his shadow behind, which scares the audience more than his own appearance. Another example of a memorable scene is when Orlok wakes up from his coffin while sleeping during the day.

Through all this rust of time, the movie looks very good and fresh. The restored version of 2005-2006 by Luciano Berriatua looks impeccable. It’s relly hard to say that the movie was made almost 100 years ago. Not to be ignored, Max Schreck's interpretation of Count Orlok ("schreck" means "fear" in German) is one the greatest assets of this masterpiece. He even tends to look like Ebenezer Scrooge performed by Jim Carrey from 2009. For viewers, 100 years ago, Orlok was a dark and unknown monster that could only be defeated by the sun's rays. A picture that was drawn from all the happenings from back then. Germany as a film character can be identified with Nosferatu, the creature. Only the sunlight could make vampire die and revive Germany.

The movie is a "must see" for every horror or silent film fan. Not for its amazing special effects or for the original story but for the historical piece that it is. Murnau's creation deserves its place in film history; Inspiring many film directors, Nosferatu is an important piece also for the film's technical aspects: Creating a whole new world using shadows, negative film frames and few colours, Murnau combined the morbid look of the century and mixed together every single aspect of that time to create his own “Symphony”.

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.” Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (cited from online source, Russell McNeil, 2007)

List of References:

Books:

Kaes, A. 2009. Shell Shock Cinema – Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press

Vacche, A.D. 1996 Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. Texas: University of Texas Press

Roberts I. 2008 German Expressionist Cinema – The World Of Light and Shadow. London: Wallflower Press

Online Book:

Abbott S. 2007. Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World. [e-book] Texas: University of Mississippi Press. Available through: Anglia Ruskin University Library website <https://libweb.anglia.ac.uk> [Accessed 1st of May 2019]

Online Website:

Classic Movie Hub - CMH. (2011). Facts about "Nosferatu”: Classic Movie Hub (CMH). [online] Available at: http://www.classicmoviehub.com/facts-and-trivia/film/nosferatu-1922/ [Accessed 1 May 2019].

Filmography:

Nosferatu (1922). (1922). [DVD] Directed by F. Murnau. Germany: Prana Film.