Classic Silent Film: FW Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922)

Bram Stoker started it all.  He was an Anglo-Irish writer and theater manager who met a Hungarian writer, Armin Vambery, and through him started researching Eastern European folklore.  From that experience came his most famous novel,   "Dracula" which he published in 1897.   Stoker died in 1912.   As such he completely missed out on the first world war. 

He had married Florence Balcombe in 1878, having bested Oscar Wilde, a rival suitor for Florence's hand.  Now in the early 1920s, as the executor of Stoker's estate, when she was informed in 1922 that the German director FW Murnau had  without permission made a film which was derived from the Dracula novel, she sued.  I wonder if she might also have had some left over animus against the Germans from the late war.    It took a couple of years, but she successfully litigated against the film and obtained a judgment that not only won her damages but stipulated that all prints of the film be destroyed, which they were.  Fortunately, however, not ALL the prints were destroyed.  The film survived in various corners of the civilized world, including America.  For this, I for one am grateful, because Nosferatu is a great silent film.  Here is summarize the story.  If there is even one person on the planet who does not know the basic plot of the Dracula story, they should stop reading now. 

In Murnau's version the hero, Hutter,  is an estate agent in Bremen and he is sent by his boss Renfield to negotiate the purchase of a home in that town for one Count Orlok of Transylvania (aka Nosferatu).  Renfield is not quite all there and is seen reading a letter which is in a strange pictographic type of writing.     Orlok was looking for fresh blood, and figured a city like Bremen would provide it.    Once there Hutter concludes the real estate contract but realizes also that there is a lot that is really strange about Orlok. 

None of the locals want to have anything to do with him, and the animals and livestock are on edge.  He is served a fine meal at Orlok's castle, but when he cuts himself Orlok seems unusually interested in his blood.  He also happens upon some bedtime reading which describes the legend of the undead, but he isn't buying any of it. 

In the morning he wakes to discover some bite marks in his neck but he shrugs it off as some kind of spider bite.  However when he finally investigates his host by coming upon his daytime sleeping arrangements, he becomes alarmed and endeavors to escape, which he does by tying sheets together and climbing out a window.  Eventually he makes his way back to Bremen.

    Meanwhile that night Count Orlok books passage on a ship bound for Bremen.  He takes a sleeper, just him in a box, like freight, and some extra rats.  This turns out to be disastrous for the captain and crew of his ship, as they die one by one from the plague.

By the time they reach Bremen, all of the crew is dead, yet in spite of this, the ship moves as though by remote control to its destination.  

The stevedores puzzle over this turn of events,  the corpse of the captain at the wheel,  and the rats and dirt in boxes below deck.   Meanwhile Renfield, the boss of the real estate office that sent Hutter on his ill-fated trip,  has lost his mind, and is locked up where he catches flies and tries to escape.  Under cover of darkness Nosferatu is shown emerging from the hold of the ship, and calmly if deliberately walking with his box to his house across the street from the Hutters.  

 At this point plague breaks out in Bremen and a drummer goes from street to street alerting the population and reading aloud the proclamation that they are to stay in their houses and not bring their sick to the hospitals, because this will spread the disease. 

In spite of his bites, Hutter returns overland from Transylvania, but it is his wife that pieces together the awful truth about Nosferatu.  

Although directed by her husband not to read the book he brought back with him, titled "The Book of the Vampires"  his wife reads it, and discovers that only a woman pure of heart can defeat him, by keeping him by her side until the cock crows and the sun comes up.  This she does, in a sequence of images which is unforgettable as the bizarre fanged creature, staring hungrily at her from across the street comes over for a drink.  

A word about silent films and about this venerable masterpiece: 

what we are seeing is only through a glass darkly.    You have to bear in mind the technology and the nature of preservation through which the film has come down to us.  Film used to be made of cellulose acetate and before that a clear plastic that was chemically identical to guncotton, which is explosive.  As such the films carried the seeds of their own destruction.  Nor were the film studios much concerned with historic preservation or the temporary nature of their art.  Cellulose acetate breaks down releasing acetic acid over time and leads to what is known now as the "vinegar syndrome".  Thus prints of a film, even if they don't catch fire, slowly degrade and become brittle with age.    Thus it is, without periodic copying or the happy accident of optimal storage, they would no longer exist.  

It also takes some getting used to the monochromatic limitations of film and the somewhat different nature of screen acting and storytelling in the silent era.  The "night" scenes in the film where Nosferatu is walking outdoors about are obviously filmed in broad daylight.  The illusion of night was accomplished by a blue filter on the projection, but in the DVD version of the film I have, this is not seen.  Also the exaggerated gestures and expressions of the actors compensates somewhat from the absence of sound and the subtleties of acting which did not occur in the sound era.  

In this age of film where even the relatively primitive special effects (circa 1977) of the first Star Wars film are sneered at by a subsequent generation raised on increasingly sophistocated computer-generated special effects, a film like the 1922 Nosferatu is not well appreciated.  Today in big budget film, nothing is left to the imagination, and the films as a result are often quite boring and predictable.   What too often is forgotten is that imagination is the driver all entertainment, and without it, it is just a lot of 1's and 0's.