...or... Nosferathree?
Nosferatu - 2024, d. Robert Eggers - in theatre
Nosferatu the Vampyr - 1979, d. Werner Herzog - tubi
Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens - 1922, d. F.W. Murnau - youtube
This was unintentional experiential cinema. Eggers' film is a chilly damn film as is. It is so desaturated and bereft of colour at times as to be completely black and white (the rhyme and reasoning of the actual black and white footage within the film I could not completely grok). Shadows, as well as the cold, have an equally heavy part to play in conveying the vibes of the film to the audience. The dark of the the theatre, especially a cold theatre, welcomes the light of the screen, and psychosomatically one can seemingly feel the heat emanating off the flames of a fireplace or candle that offer the only salvation from the frigid blackness.
Needless to say, I was kind of swept up in it all. While not outright scary, there's a simmering intensity that always threatens to erupt into a roiling boil if it can ever get up to temperature. There may be a startle or two in the film, but mostly it's just raising one's blood pressure (makes it all the faster to extract from one's veins). It was my heartbeat shaking my whole body not shivers.
Nosferatu originated as a German bastardization of Dracula, a German production featuring German characters in a German setting for a German audience. Like a monster from a classic movie, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu was targeted for its evil (copyright infringement against Bram Stoker's estate) and ordered destroyed...but still it survives. What's more, Murnau's story is considered perhaps the superior of the early cinematic vampire tales. Much like Bram Stoker's Dracula by Coppola revitalized that classic tale in the 90's for modern audiences, restoring the character's menace after years of being reduced to a camp figure, I think Eggers' masterful expansion of Murnau's film into a gorgeous gothic epic will cement the Nosferatu as the superior cinematic vampire, even if Dracula remains the most widely recognized name.
What Eggers does with Murnau and Henrick Galeen's Dracula riff is quite remarkable. The allure of vampires has, for generations, been a sexual one, at least subtextually. The idea that the victim of a Count Dracula or Orlok is helpless before them, perhaps even drawn to them, and then, in some regards, excited or aroused by the act of bloodsucking has been made text before, but here it's the whole backdrop.
Ellen (played by Lily-Rose Depp, a long way away from Yoga Hosers) is the first face we see, a flashback to her younger years. If not immediately clear, the brief prologue finds Ellen in her burgeoning womanhood, lonely and longing for some form of connection. This draws Orlok to her, and a connection is formed through her desire, broken only upon meeting and wedding Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, About A Boy). Following their nuptuals, Thomas returns to work, eager to climb the ranks and provide for his wife, and is immediately assigned by Herr Knock to Count Orlok's affairs, as Orlok (a completely unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård, Barbarian) wishes to emigrate from his Transylvanian estate to a local Wisborg manor. Thomas is tasked with the extensive trek to Orlok's home to finalize the paperwork. What Thomas doesn't know is that Knock is Orlok's servant in darkness, and this all seems to be a set-up.
Upon Thomas' arrival and, in a manner of speaking, subjugation at Orlok's castle, Ellen's connection to Orlok returns, and her troubles worry her friends to whom her care was entrusted. They seek the help of a doctor who, after long bouts of sedation, speculates that her disposition may be supernatural in nature, and turns to an blackballed professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe).
In Eggers' telling, it's not just that Orlok is enamoured with Ellen, but he's metaphysically drawn to her. Von Franz discerns that Ellen is possessed, and the incoporeal being inside her is what has enthralled the Count, but it was her primal urges that let it in (Depp's physical performance in expressing the possession is incredible and unsettling). The metaphor here of women's sexual awakening, and demonization at the hands of the patriarchy, is pretty exposed, but necessary in its bluntless.
I had not seen Nosferatu in any of its iterations before (I may have read a comic adaptation once...maybe), and yet its story was not unfamiliar to me (as it is such a spin on the Dracula tale). But the spin I love is how Orlok's travels from Transylvania to Wisborg brings with him plague, first on the ship he and his caskets are transported upon, and then upon arriving to the town's shores. The rats that spill out from the ship then become an ever-present backdrop within the film. (Seriously, if you have musophobia, avoid this or any of the Nosferatu films).
Where the first act is largely Thomas' story, and the second act is squarely Ellen's, the third is devoted to the shadow of the vampire. It's not Orlok's character that gets explored, but his impact upon everyone and everything as his plague spreads.
Having immediately turned to watching, in reverse order, the Herzog version and the Murnau version, I had thought Ellen's bravery at facing Orlok on her own to be Eggers' invention, as she is the clear hero of the story, but no, this is an element present in each of the tales. If anything, in the prior versions, it's Ellen's own initiative that she does this, whereas in Eggers it is partly by Von Franz's suggestion. It doesn't rob her explicitly of any agency, and it is a more logical solution that this man who studies the occult does have the answer, but I think Ellen finding the answer on her own is just that much more resonant.
The production of Eggers' Nosferatu is gorgeous and massive and so particular and detailed. It is a feast in its own right. But what Eggers does, which neither Murnau nor Herzog do in their versions, is tell a story that is character-centric. Eggers invests in Ellen and Thomas and the Hardings in a way that neither previous films does. Eggers shrouds Orlok in shadows for much of the film, he's a towering, intimidating figure with an affected, slow, rolling, gravelly Balkan accent that forces your attention upon him, but you never see him clearly, not until the final moments of the film. It's a stark juxtaposition to the Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski versions who are thin, sallow, and intimidating more in their eeriness than any physical threat. They are presented in stark light, casting shadows darkly behind them, instead of living among them. It's a pointed difference.
The Herzog version, now 45 years old, is a tough watch. Herzog has his ways about him, some good, some not-so-good, and those ways are quite present in his adaptation. For some odd reason, Herzog decided to revert the characters to the Bram Stoker-originated names. Huller becomes Harker once more, Ellen is Mina, Orlok is Dracula, and Knock is Renfield. It didn't seem right, Nosferatu having taken on its own distinct life, to marry it so boldly back to its source (it would be like turning the 50 Shades of Grey characters back into Twilight figures).
Herzog casts his best frenemy Kinski as Dracula, the stunning Isabelle Adjani as Mina, and Bruno Ganz (looking distractingly like Noel Fielding here) as Jonathan Harker. It seems the majority of the other roles were just people pulled into production, and not professional actors. There's a real fly-by-night, no-rehearsal atmosphere to this. The actors all seem all be at odds with the material, and there's no tangible connection between the ADR line readings and the material. If Eggars' version was a cold production because of the atmosphere of the film, Herzog's version is a cold one by the sheer detachment everyone seems to have with the material.
If anything, Herzog's desire is to capture the imagery of the original but in his own manner. There's clearly reverence to Murnau's film, but also deference. Herzog retains or directly translates scenes from Murnau's film that should have been modernized for a "talkie" or adapted into his own sensibilities.
The edits in Herzog's films lack fluidity. It's a staccato production that doesn't seem to possess an inner logic of its own, the events that happen seem to happen as reference to the classic film, not as its own story progression.
As much as I found this 1979 production of Nosferatu to be stiff and very, very awkward, it does feature some affectionately captured imagery of the Czech countryside and the city sequences in Delft, Netherlands (standing in for Wisborg). The film also features an immensely powerful score with music by the collective called Popol Vuh -- and including some classical tracks and folk songs -- but it's never more potent than in the opening moments as Herzog-the-documentarian lingers on imagery of real Mexican mummies (the Mummies of Guanajuato) which become more unsettling the more you stare at them... the expectation that they will move, or are moving is hard to escape.
Kinski's Orlok is, as to be expected from the performer, quite an odd presence. There's no outright threat that Orlok presents, but there is an inferred menace. Kinski's vocal performance is pinched, quite, a bit whiny, and his demure physicality (borrowed from Schreck but even further receded into itself) has a certain self-consciousness to it. In none of the films do we see anyone else present at Orlok's estate (he notes that the staff has been dismissed for the evening upon Thomas/Jonathan/Hutter's arrival, but it's later clear there is no one, just Orlok) but it's only in Herzog's film to we feel that absurd loneliness, and the realization that the elaborate feasts prepared for Jonathan were made by Orlok. Just the image of him in a kitchen slaving away all night (and then for Jonathan to only eat the grapes!) is absurd and hilarious. We find Orlok doing his own physical labour, many times, and he comes off as a sad, lonely old vampire, a weaselly wimp who would not be worth paying any attention to if not for his control over the plague he's brought.
Herzog did unleash his own plague of rats on the location of this film, and while it's much more staged than the presumably cgi-accentuate rats of Eggar's version, the ever-presence of rats in the third act is just as squick-inducing. There were allegations that Herzog's treatment of the rats and other animals were exceptionally inhumane, which makes this already disappointing film that much harder to like.
Stepping back to Murnau's original silent black-and-white, I first had to find a version that didn't seem too modern. The iterations that first pop up on Tubi or YouTube have a score that seems far too modern. The version I wound up watching had a vibrant orchestral score, but Hans Erdmann's original orchestral score for the film is mostly lost to time with only partial elements preserved. I believe score for this 2005/2006 restoration was by Berndt Heller, and serves the film well by and large.
The cards in this restoration are said to be the original German cards (with new English subtitles), and what's interesting is much of the tale is being told to the audience by a narrator. I'm not sure if the narrator is intended to be a character in the film... I suspect it could be Harding, the shipowner, but it's not conclusive. Unlike later "talkies" which have a narration which intones the telling of a tale, this narration doesn't at all take away the immediacy of the story. It's the magic of silent films.
I was worried after watching Herzog's film that Murnau's original would be similarly stilted in its storytelling, but it is an absolutely fluid tale, with Murnau at times getting lost in the minutiae of it all (especially in the plague scenes). The transitional moments is clearly what was missing from Herzog's film, but they rarely feel labored here, instead providing necessary context and an overall natural sense to the world.
Like I mentioned with Herzog's version, Murnau's story is straight story, not incredibly focused on character or motivation. In a radical departure from what would come in the later adaptations, Huller here (played by Gustav von Wangenheim) is an exceptionally happy-go-lucky fellow. He seems overjoyed by the opportunity presented to him by Herr Knock, and every step of the way, up until the moment he reaches the castle, he approaches with the dopiest smile on his face. At one point a Romani woman gives him a book about vampyrs, witchcraft and the like and he looks at it briefly before tossing it carelessly over his shoulders and falling off to a troubleless sleep. In the morning he picks it up again, has a good laugh, and throws it to the ground mockingly. This performance reminded me of much of Billy Magnussen's repertoire of playing conceited idiots too ignorant to see the trouble before them.
This tone to Huller, of being just a generally jovial fellow, is so starkly different than what either Ganz or Hoult did with the character, that it doesn't convey nearly the same foreboding sense of doom before him. And yet, being so upbeat, it kind of accentuates the threat to the shadows that will fall upon him. The score finds a middle ground between foreshadowing and Huller's mirthful attitude, but the moment he encounters Orlok, in the guise as his own coachman, it goes to full symphonic intensity.
Murnau's version is never scary, because it never truly invests us in the figures at play, but it is exceptionally accomplished in its storytelling and its clarity of intent. The first act here is mirrored very similarly by its successors, but the second act is largely transitional. The events on the boat, which heavily foreshadow the plague to come, continue to build the menace that comes to full fruition in the third act, but there's no characters carrying us there.
The spread of plague is and the city's reaction to it is, as in Herzog's version, my favourite part, but for very different reasons. Here it's the details, the specificity, the measures the town goes through to try and alert people to the plague and to halt its progression. It's all for naught as it's not a common plague.
After consuming all three films in a 24 span, I can safely say that Eggers' version is my clear favourite. It's the only one of the three that held me rapt in attention. It seemingly embraces both Herzog and Murnau's versions, and takes many steps beyond what both of them even attempted to accomplish with the story. It's not a perfect film (held back only by some puzzlingly abrupt cuts and perhaps too theatrical of a performance from Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Harding) but it is so very strikingly visual and takes the story and characters to a whole other level. Murnau's version is a classic, and retains some vitality over 100 years later, if now completely overshadowed by Eggers' revision (the only thing that won't be bettered is the visual of Count Orlok, which is a permanent fixture in pop culture). Herzog's version can just fade into the background as irrelevant.
All you needed was Shadow of the Vampire to finish out this quartet and I saw you use the phrase, which made me chuckle.
ReplyDelete