Nosferatu 1979!

Vampires are incredibly popular now.  How many of you have seen the Twilight films or read the books that the films are based on?  How many of you know someone who is obsessed by the series?

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is a very different kind of vampire film.  As you can see, Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu looks like an "old" man; he does not look like a teenager.  His victim, Lucy, is a young married woman, not a girl.  Also, as I mentioned in my entry on Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu came out in 1979, over thirty years ago.  Therefore, it reflects a very different kind of film aesthetic from what you may be used to.  Herzog did not rely on CGI, his film emphasizes image & atmosphere over plot, and his "takes" are longer than what you may be used to since the actor's reaction to situations and the buildup of atmosphere are very important in this type of film.  Also, in this particular film, there are a lot of long and extremely long shots, and in some of them, the actors are *not* facing the camera.  This is not to say that there is no plot or character in the movie.  Instead, Lucy takes a subtler approach to rescuing her husband.  She does not strap on an automatic weapon and start shooting garlic bulbs at the count...or whacking him over the head with a silver crucifix.

Below is a picture of the count's encounter with Lucy's husband, Jonathan Harker, a naive real estate agent.  At this point, the two men are in the count's castle in Transylvania.



Even before we see Count Dracula, we sense that we are in a different world.  (The film appears to be set during the 1800s, during the Romantic era when the Brothers Grimm were alive.)   Lucy's husband's journey to Count Dracula's castle is slower and more mysterious.  Lucy has premonitions of disaster--as she reveals to her husband in the scene below.

Here we see Lucy wandering throughout the city of Wisnau as she seeks to rescue her husband once he has returned from Count Dracula's castle.  Do you see the rats in the background?

The rats have arrived in the city with the count and his coffin-laden ship.  Naturally, all of the humans on the ship are dead...or undead.  By the way, officials in Delft, the Dutch city where Herzog began filming Nosferatu, forced him to stop because of the rats.  Perhaps there is something to be said for CGI.


Here are some links to information about Herzog's Nosferatu:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079641/

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19791005/REVIEWS/908319998/1023

The film is based on a 1920s silent film by Murnau, which was based on Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula.
http://filmsufi.blogspot.com/2008/10/nosferatu-werner-herzog-1979.html

http://www.kinoeye.org/02/20/chaffinquiray20.php

Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth (Part 2)

Link

If you would like to explore more about creation myths, feel free to click on the link above.  The picture above the link is Herb Roe's illustration of the Hero Twins from the Mayan myth of the Popol Vuh.

More Creation Myths

We will start off EN 211 with some Native American creation myths, so I thought that I would post a few sites that my students in last semester's mythology class found.  Not all of these myths are from the Americas, however.

The picture above is of Bill Reid's sculpture of Raven and the First Men, a creation myth from the Haida nation, a people from Canada's Pacific Northwest.  The sculpture is now in Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology.

Let's begin with an overview from Worldhistory.net, a British site.  This overview will give you the differences and the similarities between various creation myths (Greece, Japan, The Bible's, and so on).

http://historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab83

Wikipedia's overview is more extensive with many more examples. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth

In fact, you may find the Haida's creation myth here, explaining the sculpture above & below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth#Haida


You may also enjoy this creation myth from Hawaii:

http://www.mythome.org/hawaiicreation.html

Here is a picture of the goddess Pele from Twisted Cocktail Party Physics, a blog.

These Cherokee myths recount the origins of various parts of creation like game animals, corn, and medicinal plants.

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore80.html

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore82.html

Being a New Englander, I have to include the Mik'Maq's creation story:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore21.html

As a point of comparison to the Native American creation myths, here is a link to a retelling of the Greek creation myth.  The article was originally posted at Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080424092313/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths_16.html

In addition, here is a link to a retelling of Genesis' creation myth, also originally from Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080430155831/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths
/myths_15.html

The picture below is one of British poet and artist William Blake's illustrations from Paradise Lost.  In this illustration, Satan is spying on Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  This picture is from Wikipedia, and the illustration itself is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Or you may prefer to read the Japanese creation myth of Izanagi and Izanami, a story that my student found to be beautiful yet tragic.

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Iz-Le/Izanagi-and-Izanami.html

Below is a contemporary illustration of this story by Gospodar Svemira, which I found at Wikipedia.

To put these stories into perspective, you may want to look at what Joseph Campbell and others have had to say on myths and sacred tales:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/perspectives1.html

Ovid, Myths, and Epics

Link

Ovid is a poet and, specifically, the painter's poet, so I thought that I'd post a link to my EN 201 entry on the myths in his Metamorphoses.  The painting above is by Eugene Delacroix, and it depicts Ovid in exile.  (The Emperor Augustus exiled the poet from Rome.  Why?  There are a number of stories.)

I am also posting a picture from Mary Zimmerman's theatrical adaptation of the Metamorphoses.  Here Silenius the satyr is expressing his gratitude to King Midas for rescuing him.  I wish that MC would stage this play!!!