User:Andrzejbanas/Nosferatu

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
Directed by	F. W. Murnau
Screenplay by	Henrik Galeen
Based on	Dracula by Bram Stoker
Produced by	Enrico Dieckmann Albin Grau
Starring	Max Schreck Gustav von Wangenheim Greta Schröder Alexander Granach Ruth Landshoff Wolfgang Heinz
Music by	Hans Erdmann
Production company	Prana Film
Distributed by	Film Arts Guild
Release dates	February 1922 (1922-02) (Netherlands) 4 March 1922 (1922-03-04) (Berlin)
Country	Germany
Language	Silent film

Plot

Nosferatu (1922)

In 1838, in the fictional German town of Wisborg,[confirm] Thomas Hutter is sent to Transylvania by his employer, estate agent Herr Knock, to visit a new client, Count Orlok, who is planning on buying a house across from Hutter's own home. While embarking on his journey, Hutter stops at an inn in which the locals are frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name.

Hutter rides on a coach to a castle, where he is welcomed by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away. Hutter wakes up the morning after to find fresh punctures on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house and notices on the table a miniature portrait of Hutter's wife, Ellen, an image that the young man carries with him in a small circular frame. Admiring the portrait, the count remarks that she has a "lovely neck." Later, Hutter continues to read a book about vampires that he took from the local inn. He now begins to suspect that Orlok is indeed a vampire. With no way to bar the door of his bedroom, Hutter desperately tries to hide as midnight approaches. Suddenly, the door begins to slowly open by itself; and, as Orlok enters, a terrified Hutter hides under the bed covers and falls unconscious. Meanwhile, at the same time back in Wisborg, Ellen arises from her own bed and sleepwalks to the railing of her bedroom's balcony. She then starts walking on top of the railing, which gets the attention of her friend Harding, who is in the adjacent room. When the doctor arrives, Ellen shouts Hutter's name and envisions Orlok in his castle threatening her unconscious husband.

The next day, Hutter explores the castle, only to retreat back into his room after he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant in the crypt. Hours later, Orlok piles up coffins on a coach and climbs into the last one before the coach departs, and Hutter rushes home after learning that. The coffins are taken aboard a schooner, where the sailors discover rats in the coffins. All of the ship's crew later die, and Orlok takes control. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carries one of his coffins and moves into the house that he purchased.

Many deaths in the town follow after Orlok's arrival, which the town's doctors blame on an unspecified plague caused by the rats from the ship. Ellen reads the book that Hutter found; it claims that a vampire can be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts the vampire with her beauty and offers him her blood of her own free will. She decides to sacrifice herself. She opens her window to invite Orlok in and pretends to fall ill so that she can send Hutter to fetch Professor Bulwer, a physician. After he leaves, Orlok enters and drinks her blood, but the sun rises, which causes Orlok to vanish in a puff of smoke. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband.

Count Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains is later shown destroyed.

Style

European art critics of the early 1900s used the words "expressive" and "expressionism" to differentiate and separate current painting styles that moved away from Impressionism. Between 1910 and 1914, art movements that collectively would be later termed as expressionism began flourishing in Germany, with its ideas and themes moving into other mediums such as cinema and theatre. Discussion of expressionist cinema generally emphasizes the visual elements such as the low-key lighting and dramatic shadows.

The shadow of Count Orlok walking up the stairs in a dramatic moment in Nosferatu. Film historian Lokke Heiss wrote that the scene has become a defining image used to represent German Expressionism.

Following the positive critical reception of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) in Germany, and was exceedingly popular in countries such as France. The film is visually dynamic, featuring visual ranging from crooked roofs, inclined surfaces and other stylized sets, leading to several similarly stylized productions to follow such as Genuine (1920), From Morn to Midnight (1920) and Raskolnikow (1923). Summarizing these follow-ups, art and film critic Rudolf Kurtz said in 1926 that "Caligari struck a chord. Its successors have not managed to resonate more richly or more powerfully." Film historian Lokke Heiss said that only a few other directors working in Germany such as Fritz Lang and Paul Leni followed-up these works by assimilating elements of The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari by using the stylization associated with expressionism to show the emotional and psychological state of their characters. Murnau's Nosferatu would follow this small trend. Heiss described these films as being stories featuring psychological conflict where actions are internalized and filmmakers were freed from the need to recreate mimetic or realistic images. By 1922, Nosferatu's visual stylization of these films had become what Kurtz described as more subtle than Caligari and its early follow-ups. In more dramatic moments in the film, Nosferatu becomes a shadow play, where figures offscreen stand next to a source of light and suggest malevolent force which cannot be described. Heiss stated that scenes in Nosferatu produce scenes so memorable that certain moments, such as the shadow of Count Orlok walking up the stairs, have become defining images used to represent German Expressionism.

Production

Background

German cinema has had made films with supernatural themes prior to Nosferatu. These include Stellan Rye's The Student of Prague (1913), Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen's The Golem (1915) and Richard Oswald's Unheimliche Geschichten (1919) and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

Nosferatu began on January 31, 1921, when Heinrich Dieckmann joined with artist and occultist Albin Grau in founding Prana Film GmbH, with the aim of creating films with a supernatural theme. Their first announced film was Nosferatu.

Director F.W. Murnau received 25,000 Reichsmark for directing Nosferatu.

In the book The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972 (1989), James C. Robertson cited that Murnau had directed directed a film in 1920 titled The Twelfth Hour based on Dracula, with Robertson citing a review in the film magazine Close Up from January 1929 from Oswell Blakeston. Matthew E. Banks suggested that the film in question was most likely Nosferatu, despite Blakeston naming actors such as Werner Krauss and Alfred Abel appearing among the cast. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation suggested the film viewed was Die Zwölfte Stunde Eine Nacht des Grauens, the sound version of the film.

Release

The Marmorsaal Theater (pictured in 1900) where Nosferatu had its Berlin premiere.

Prior to the release of Nosferatu, a Berlin correspondent for Variety reported that the promotion for the film was "one of the most expensive publicity campaigns yet waged in Berlin for the showing of a single feature." Prana-Film even hired airships to promote Nosferatu.

Nosferatu was first screened to the public in The Netherlands in February 1922. The premiere in Berlin on March 4, 1922, was part of an elaborate Fest des Nosferatu transl. Festival of Nosferatu. The Berlin premiere was held at Marmorsaal Theater on Kurfürstendamm. A report in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung reported that the Marmorhaus "was full to bursting and literally not a single empty seat could be found." The screening began with Hans Erdmann conducting Heinrich Marschner's "Vampire Overture", from the opera Der Vampyr (1828). Erdmann composed an original score for the film, which one critic in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger described as a "sophisticated reflection of the feature film." Following the screening, there was a ballet performance by Elizabeth Grube of the State Ballet company.

Nosferatu had been advertised that it was ready for distribution in the United States as early as 1924. The Film Daily announced that a film titled Nosferatu the Vampire will have its American premiere at Film Guild Cinema in New York on May 18, 1929. It was postponed until June 1. The screening of the film was done in order to take advantage of the reputation Murnau had gained; in particular from Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

Nosferatu was readapted in 1930 for sound film, under the title Die ZwoelfteStunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens (transl. The Twelfth Hour – A Night of Horror) which includes includes a new character, a priest, played by Hans Behal.

Reception

Newspapers responded to audience reception in Berlin to the film. Vorwärts reported that "Because rational people do not let themselves be duped by unearthly creatures very long, the audience quickly preferred to move from the poisoned atmosphere of slavish submission (to horror) to the clean air of a carefully considered chuckle." The 8 Uhr-Abendblatt expanded on this, stating that when a hearse moved at high speed or when Count Orlok runs around his coffin "as if her were in a cartoon" gave the audience laughter, that otherwise "the atmosphere is uniform and the impact strong". Other publications such as Lichtbild-Bühne wrote that "“One can be assured that a few women who attended the premiere of Nosferatu had a bad night" Der Tag reported that at the end of the screening, "The applause was lively and well deserved."

Film historian Gary D. Rhodes described the reception following the Berlin premiere were "collectively more positive than negative."

In the United States following its release in 1929, "V.S." of Daily Worker found the film derivative of either the play or novel Dracula and the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari concluding that "this one sends you out insulted, and ashamed of whatever yielding to the glamor of the photography you may have felt, because of the childishness of the plot." "S. M. S." of The Billboard found that the film "hold to some degree the salient incidents" of the introduction, but "soon loses itself in a slough of strained hocus-pocus proceedings that tend to raise the hair on edge in the worst way." and that "Little cinema patrons will alternately shudder or giggle over it." The review found Max Schreck was "made up in the most terrifying screen characteriziation since Lon Chaney's Phantom struck fear in theater-goes' hearts." but found that continuity of the film was so amateur that this effect quickly wore off. The German-language American newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung found that much of the film had been edited while still finding it to be "a deeply disturbing film that effects the viewer in a way which he will not soon forget afterwards."

Legacy

In his essay on early vampire films in Continuum, academic David Baker described Nosferatu's immediate influence as not clear due to the destruction of film prints. Baker said that while it is chronologically the first significant Dracula inspired vampire film, it only developed considerable prestige, influence and impact over time.

References

Sources

• "Nosferatu". 8 Uhr-Abendblatt (in German). Belin. March 6, 1922. p. 5.
• "Das Fest des Noferatu". Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (in German). No. 111 (Morning ed.). March 7, 1922. p. 8. Retrieved September 19, 2024 – via Berlin State Library.
• "Film-Echo". Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (in German). March 6, 1922. p. 1.
• "Filmschau". Vorwärts (in German). Berlin. March 21, 1922. p. 6.
• Baker, David (2021). "Browning's Dracula and the Development of the Classical Screen Vampire: Genre, Form, and Figure". Continuum. 35 (2).
• Banks, Matthew E. (2024). "Nosferatu at 100: The Fight for Life". In Bacon, Simon (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-36252-1.
• Heiss, Lokke (2024). "Nosferatu and Its Relationship to German Expressionist Film". In Bacon, Simon (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-36252-1.
• Jones, David Annwn (2023). Vampires on the Silent Screen: Cinema's First Age of Vampires 1897-1922. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-38642-8.
• Kurtz, Rudolf (2011) [1926]. Expressionismus und film [Expressionism and film]. Translated by Kiening, Christian. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-86196-922-7.
• Robertson, James C. (1989). The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-03291-1.
• Rhodes, Gary D. (2014). Tod Browning's Dracula. Tomahawk Press. ISBN 978-0-9566834-5-8.
• Rhodes, Gary D. (2024). Vampires in Silent Cinema. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978 1 3995 2574 9.
• Trask, C. Hooper (April 21, 1922). "Berlin Film News". Variety. Vol. LXVI, no. 9. Variety Inc.
• S. M. S. (June 15, 1929). "New Films Reviewed in New York". The Billboard. Vol. XLL, no. 24.
• V.S. (June 4, 1929). "Vampires and Water Power on the Cinema Guild Bill" (PDF). Daily Worker. Vol. VI, no. 75 (Final ed.). New York. p. 4. Retrieved September 19, 2024 – via Marxists Internet Archive.