Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Germany – 1922
Screenplay: Henrik Galeen
Cinematography: Fritz Arno Wagner Günther Krampf
Production: Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal Prana-Film GmbH
Language: Silent, English / German intertitles
Duration: 94 min
Color: Black and White
Synopsis: Hutter, a German property broker, is dispatched to Count Orlok’s castle in Transylvania to finalize the sale of an estate in Wisbourg. The property happens to be just across the way from Hutter’s own home, where he lives with his dear wife, Ellen. The Transylvanian peasants are nervous at the mention of the Count, and Hutter’s stay at castle Orlok proves quite unsettling as he feels the constant presence of a shadow preying on him—even in the daytime, when the Count is unusually asleep. When Hutter stumbles into the crypt, he begins to fear that there more here than mere superstition and legend. To avoid discovery, Orlock imprisons Hutter and ships himself to Wisbourg inside a coffin, bringing death to every port along the way. Hutter escapes and tries desperately to get home before the Count, also known as Nosferatu the vampire, makes his way to Wisbourgh and brings ruin to the little town – and to Hutter’s own family. In Wisbourg, Ellen can feel the impending darkness as Nosferatu draws closer. She learns that to defeat Nosferatu, a sinless woman must sacrifice herself by luring and killing the vampire.
Notes:
F. W. Murnau made his mark as an Expressionist filmmaker, revolutionizing cinematic vision by using the camera subjectively to suggest the emotional state of a character, a technique that was very effective prior to the arrival of sound. In Murnau’s first major work, Nosferatu—of which complete prints survive—the director eschews psychological overtones and treats his subject as pure fantasy. With the aid of cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, he produces appropriately macabre, and for their time revolutionary visual effects, such as negative images of white trees against a black sky. The unsettling effect of the film is augmented by the ghastly, cadaverous appearance of actor Max Schreck (whose name is German for “maximum terror”) in the role of the vampire.
Although the credits of Murnau’s Nosferatu acknowledge Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the fictional source of Henrik Galeen’s screenplay, most German critics tend to dismiss any thematic connection between novel and film. To Lane Roth, for instance, Nosferatu, far from being “an individual filmmaker’s vision of a literary work” is essentially “an expression of the German Zeitgeist” of the Weimar Republic and, particularly, of the “mysticism and fantasy” that the expressionist Schauerfilm had inherited from traditional German Romanticism.
Initially, the reason for the difference between film and novel (the absence of Professor Van Helsing from the film, the method of destruction of the vampire, different names and locations) was attributed to an attempt to circumvent copyright by rewriting the story. But there may have been another reason why Nosferatu differs so much from Stoker’s novel and includes elements from German literature and folklore. Germany in 1921-22 was suffering through a period of real, not romantic, storm and stress. Instability was ubiquitous, and the new German government was but an experiment in democracy. While many officials in the Weimar Republic looked to the political right to put things in order, Bolshevism was exerting an influence from the East. Seeds of discontent took root in the economic plight of the country following a currency collapse, and riots led to the formation of popular, reactionary militant groups. In the words of Siegfried Kracauer, “Germans obviously held that they had no choice other than the cataclysm of anarchy or a tyrannical regime.” Artistic freedom in a democracy was to be found somewhere along the continuum between anarchy and tyranny, and since German artists were caught between fighting for change and submitting to authority, the unresolved conflict offered a third way. The German inclination toward mysticism offered a way out of the refusal—or inability—to make a “correct” political choice. The artistic movement that flourished was, fittingly, Expressionism, described by Manveil and Fraenkel as “essentially a movement designed to get away from actuality and to satisfy the desire to probe seemingly fundamental truths of human nature and society by presenting them through fantasy and dramatized mysticism.”
Excerpt from Roth, Lane. “Dracula Meets the Zeitgeist: Nosferatu (1922) as Film Adaptation.” Literature Film Quarterly 7, no. 4 (December 1979): 309. and Catania, S. “Absent presences in liminal places: Murnau’s Nosferatu and the otherworld of Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature-Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (January 1, 2004): 229-236.