Nosferatu 1922!

<
This session we'll be headed back to where movies (about vampires) began...the German film director F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) or Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

This film is a silent film as movies did not have soundtracks until the late 1920s.  The first movie with sound was The Jazz Singer (1927) although it took a while for sound technology to be prevalent. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018037/trivia?tr0626469

Instead, a live musician (usually a pianist) or musicians accompanied the film.  For more information on the musicians and their music, see this article:

http://www.mont-alto.com/photoplaymusic.html

Cara Schreffler provides more information here:

http://www.markmusicproduction.com/blog.php?id=34

Even today there are silent film musicians.  Ben Model talks about the process of accompanying another film by Murnau:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT6jeBC1dSs&feature=related
Here you can listen to him playing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6hgc6I4-s
Rosa Rio played from the silent film era to 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_kZzmpAU8Q&feature=related

As you can see from the picture of Rosa Rio from the 1930s, movie theaters back then could be fairly elaborate.

Additionally, Nosferatu is an Expressionist film, rather than a realistic one.  Therefore, mood and imagery are especially important even if they don't seem terribly realistic.  I'm not sure that you may classify Nosferatu's colors as part of its expressionism.  Although movies included some color much earlier than I had thought, this technology was used fairly sparingly until after WWII.  See Adrienne Redd's article for more information about the use of color in film:

http://www.criticism.com/md/film2.html

I'd like to close with a few scenes from Murnau's film.



span class="insertedphoto"> It's interesting to note that almost all of the scenes I can find are of Max Schreck's Nosferatu!

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