November 18: Nosferatu (1922 -- F.W. Murnau)

★★★★★

A year after the Phantom Carriage, European audiences would have seen this triumph of Expressionist mood.  Carriage works in the space where the natural and supernatural interface; Nosferatu lives in a separate, non-natural world.  Everyday people die and their souls are collected in Sweden, but in Wisborg, real estate agents read occult glyphs, women bond with their husbands via ESP, and rat-toothed undead strive to extend their geographic reach.  Nosferatu takes place in a silent, threatening, Expressionist realm where vampires are real.

Murnau manages to tie a lot of disparate elements together to create his nightmare.  The world of Nosferatu conflates vampire imagery – coffins, stiff movement, big teeth, corpses with long fingernails – and imagery of rats, who have long, menacing front incisors and are themselves linked to darkness and decay.  And this web of images naturally expands to include the Plague, spread by rats and leading to death.  It’s an effective set of imagery with a strong affinity.

There are powerful cinematic elements in Nosferatu that reinforce the web of creepy imagery.  The unnatural coach arrives and departs in fast motion, and during its voyage, the countryside loses its substantiality as the film stock goes from positive to negative and the sky becomes solid, the landscape clear.  Max Schreck’s Nosferatu is a corpse that has lost the agility of life.  He moves slowly and stiffly, bending his dead, stiffened joints only as much as locomotion requires.  His over-stuffed back and tiny lower body are otherworldly, and his white make-up and long fingernails hearken back to the features of a corpse.  And his long ears and rat/vampire front teeth link him to the animal world and to the world of the dead.  The acting and prosthetics here work in fine harmony to the rest of the imagery.

Nosferatu's animal world, in fact, is menacing and threatening,.  At one point, the film shifts to a biology class where the students watch a Venus Fly-trap catch a victim and a tentacled polyp snare its prey.  These digressions hearken to a contemporary interest in short films about the unusual, but they don’t move the story forward at all.  Their main function in the film is to work with the rest of the predator/prey and death imagery.  If such plants hadn’t exist, Expressionism would have invented them for this movie.

Watching Nosferatu, I remain in awe of how quickly film language developed.  With no zoom lens or concept of it, Murnau uses the iris to focus audience attention when he wants to.  And while Sjöström had used editing for flashbacks, Murnau uses it to create montages of simultaneous actions (Ellen worries while Thomas suffers; Orlok and Hutter travel at the same time on different routes).  Eisenstein would soon find other applications for montage.  And Expressionism made ample use of exaggerated lighting.  Some of the strongest images in Nosferatu are silhouettes of the vampire.

We don’t have the original music, but I wonder what it would have sounded like.  I’ve watched Nosferatu with a full orchestra soundtrack and with an organ soundtrack, and while each has its own strengths, each is also oddly intrusive at times.  Given how meticulous Murnau was about all the detail in this film, I wonder what the experience would be of watching it with the music Murnau preferred.

It’s the creepy artifice of Nosferatu that makes it such a great film, and that’s why we can still enjoy it today.  Murnau mustered every element of his medium that he could imagine in service to the effect he wanted.  And we have a great work of art to enjoy as a result.