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"Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the call of the Bird of Death at midnight?" The appropriation of the Dracula mythos alters Stoker for the benefit of Camus, Orlok (Max Schreck) has a rodent skull fit for a harbinger of pestilence. His guest at the Transylvanian castle is the traveling real estate agent (Gustav von Wangenheim), who's highly amused by a book on the occult but properly unsettled by the host's interest in a drop of blood at dinner. "Your wife has a beautiful neck," says the vampire of the picture in the locket—she (Greta Schröder) is the maidenly soul waiting back home, so sensitive that she mourns the flowers plucked for a bouquet. (She slips into a sleepwalking trance just as her husband is attacked, her cry is noticed by the fiend, who moves through the doorway as if buried standing up.) F.W. Murnau has a few tricks: Undercranking makes a stagecoach scuttle across the Carpathian Mountains, negative stock puts a drained landscape against a black sky. Mostly, however, he shares Griffith's and Feuillade's faith in the uncanny side of the natural, in the strangeness of real forests and the sea. ("Nature and its unifying principles" also figure in the little lecture on carnivorous plants, a famous joke on symbolism.) "Unholy cargo" in the vessel's hold, a stout sailor takes a hatchet to it and rats pour out, later a remarkable panorama finds the unmanned ship sliding into view at a placid coastal burg. Faust revisits the deranged cackle in the face of the plague, here it's the goblin (Alexander Granach) perched on the rooftops. (An ignoble poignancy infuses his last view in the asylum cell, bowing his head for the slain master.) The threatened couple, a persistent Murnau theme, the shadow claw that falls upon the heroine's bosom. The dénouement is Pandora reversed. "Not so fast, my young friend. No one can outrun his destiny." Herzog's remake is a painter's copy, cf. Dalí's Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. With John Gottowt, Ruth Landshoff, Gustav Botz, and Max Nemetz. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |