Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night (1979) [Rerun] – Vampiric Projections

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht Tyskland 1979 Regi Werner Herzog Manus Werner Herzog Foto Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein Med Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruo Ganz, Roland Topor 1t 47m DCP Tysk tale, norsk tekst Aldersgrense 16 år

“Herzog invited [Lotte Eisner] to attend the shooting on the North Sea of Nosferatu, a remake of the classic German silent Eisner had written about so eloquently in both The Haunted Screen and her book on Murnau. When the film was finished, Eisner was not disappointed. In the newest German edition of The Haunted Screen, she wrote:

His Nosferatu is not a remake of Murnau’s masterpiece, it is an uncannily subtle, musical theme with ringing, reverberating variations, where a lonely vampire damned to an undeath searches for love.” (Eisner, 1979, 353)

(quoted from: W. H. or the mysteries of walking in ice, by Jan-Christopher Horak – from The Films of Werner Herzg: Between Mirage and History)

Werner Herzog:

“I consider the vampire myth one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. The images it contains have a quality beyond our usual experiences as film-goers; there is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions and fear. Although my film is based on Murnau’s, I never thought of Nosferatu as being a remake. It goes its own way with its own spirit and stands on its own feet as a new version. I like what Lotte Eisner said: that Murnau’s film was reborn, not remade. My Nosferatu has a different context and a somewhat different story.

I set out to connect the film to Germany’s genuine cultural heritage, to the best of German cinema, the silent films of the Weimar era, to filmmakers of the past whose vision was brought to an abrupt end by Nazism. A filmmaker can’t function without some connection to his culture. Continuity is vital.

When I finished Nosferatu I remember thinking, “Now I’m connected. At last, I’ve reached the other side of the river.” The film acted almost as some kind of bridge for me; the ground under my feet felt much more solid.

As the first real post-war generation, we were orphans with no fathers to learn from; we had no active teachers or mentors, people in whose footsteps we wanted to follow. This meant it was the grandfathers – Lang, Murnau, Pabst and others – who became our points of reference. At the time I felt strongly about finding my roots as a filmmaker, and chose to concentrate on Murnau’s masterpiece, knowing full well it would be impossible to better the original. This wasn’t nostalgia or me trying to emulate a particular filmmaking tradition. I was just expressing my admiration for the heroic age of German cinema, one that gave birth to Nosferatu in 1922. Many of my generation shared a similar attitude to Murnau and his contemporaries: cinema as legitimate culture.

In Murnau’s film the creature is frightening because he has no soul and looks like an insect, Kinski’s vampire has a real existential anguish. I tried to humanise him by presenting the vampire as an agonised, sad and lonely creature, desperately thirsty for love, but terrifying at the same time. I wanted to endow him with human suffering, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality. He is deeply pained by his solitude and inability to join with the rest of humanity, by his profound terror of forever remaining undead.

[Kinski] resisted using any make-up as the vampire, but eventually relented and would sit with Reiko Kruk, the make-up artist, for hours at a time, listening to Japanese music as she sculpted him every morning, putting his ears and fingernails on, fitting his teeth and ears, and shaving his head.
The finest compliment I can give him for his performance is that there is a palpable sense of doom and terror and anxiety even when he isn’t on screen. Everything in the film works towards those seventeen minutes. We will never see a vampire like Kinski again.”

(quoted from Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed – Conversations with Paul Cronin)

Suggested readings:
‘False Thresholds and Imaginary Lines:’ – pages 16-19
&
‘Labyrinth:’ – pages 75-80
&
‘Why Make Another Version of Nosferatu?’ –
pages 134-137 from (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Films