c-blauvelt Review of Nosferatu

Nosferatu (1922)

The original vampire film and most famous example of German Expressionism.

[7/10 · 27 January 2006]

Nosferatu (1922) by F.W. Murnau--F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu may be the most famous example of German Expressionist film-making in the 1920s, and yet it is probably the least representative of the overall movement. The first tale of Dracula to hit the big screen, Nosferatu tells the tale of the vampire, Count Orlok, who brings terror to a village in Germany in the 1830s. The film is slowly paced in keeping with the Expressionist movement's emphasis on slow pacing to highlight nuance in the acting and detail in the mise-en-scene, but also in this case to orient the viewer to the background folklore of vampires, a mythology not in the forefront of the public consciousness in 1922. Compared to the highly distorted exaggerated sets of Expressionism's most representative film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu was mainly shot on location in order to emphasize the idea of the unnatural coming out of the natural, a very different notion from that of the carefully crafted, internal, emotionally subjective reality created in the mise-en-scene of most Expressionist films like Caligari. The acting of Max Schreck as Orlok is highly expressionistic, however, with his extremely distorted body movements. In fact, his acting was so unearthly for its time that many wondered if Max Schreck himself might not be a vampire as chronicled in the film Shadow of the Vampire (2000). The cinematography highlights a sense of claustrophobia through its alternating wide-shots and close-ups with scenes edited together using iris transitions. These edits complement the chamber-drama atmosphere of the tale, as do the many arches in the film, a dramatic motif to define a limited, claustrophobic space. Interestingly, whereas Caligari was a commentary on a hypnotic, but misguided power leading the passive masses to their doom in Germany in World War I, Nosferatu is a commentary on the death of the Great War. So profoundly is this film about death, that every character in some way orients himself or herself to it and establishes a relationship with death. Ideas of the supernatural and death pervade the editing together of disparate scenes, a variation of parallel editing in which two or more actions are perceived by the viewer to be taking place at the same time but there is some sort of supernatural connection between these simultaneous occurrences, such as when Hutter's wife perceives his danger at Orlok's castle when the vampire prepares to drink his blood. Ultimately, while the originator of the vampire film, and a classic of horror and silent cinema, the film's pacing is too slow for so minimal a story. As with many German expressionist films I fear that the emphasis on distorted mise-en-scene and acting betrays what is truly unique to the cinematic medium, editing. Paintings can have emotionally-subjective, distorted imagery as well as in the Expressionist paintings of Munch and Kandinsky, and many German plays in the teens displayed the overwrought performances of films like Nosferatu and Caligari, but this to me is a betrayal of what should be truly emphasized in cinema, editing. Editing is what truly differentiates the cinema from all other art forms, and is why I feel that German Expressionism with films like Nosferatu runs contrary to the soul of film-making. B+