S.S. Prawer - Nosferatu (1979)

Filming Nosferatu: (left to right) Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein (Director of Photography), Henning von Gierke (Art Director), Werner Herzog

For Sir Alan and Lady Budd in friendship and gratitude

Contents

Werner Herzogs Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (1979) weaves a self-conscious web of its many aesthetic influences. Drawing on an exceptionally broad body of knowledge, Siegbert Salomon Prawer connects Herzogs sounds and images to their antecedents, one after the next. Prawers wide-ranging associations include nods to Ann Radcliffes Gothic novels as well as to the Swiss painter Henry Fuselis ghostly work The Nightmare (1781). The stony, weathered, uninhabitable edifice behind which Herzogs vampire appears to reside calls Radcliffes vivid depictions of crumbling castles to mind. Both her writing and Fuselis painting have each come to be associated with the Gothic style, which, owing to its indirect association with Gothic architectural modes in contradistinction to Greco-Roman examples was originally considered to be Germanic. Although the imagery indeed resonates with Radcliffe, and one of the films major sources was Bram Stokers Victorian Gothic novel Dracula (1897), Herzogs most overwhelming influence was the German director F. W. Murnau, whose film he was reworking. Murnau had studied art history and philology, all of which worked their way into his films, including his highly synthetic 1926 adaptation of Faust, his Phantom (1922), based on Gerhart Hauptmanns eerie Germanic story, and his own Nosferatu (19212), in which, for example, a Gothic turret in the opening shot plainly echoes one of Ludwig Kirchners Expressionist paintings.

Prawer is right to return to the sources: like Murnau, Herzogs cinematic style is strongly influenced by contact with other arts, starting with his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968), in which landscapes lined with windmills deliberately evoke etchings by the Dutch artist Hercules Seghers. Over four decades later, Herzog was still preoccupied with similar fascinations, speculating into the origins of human pictorial production in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). The numerous artistically impacted compositions in Nosferatu can, in this sense, hardly be seen as a detour.

In an inspired and remarkably associative interpretation of Nosferatus artistic inheritance, Kenneth S. Calhoon notes resemblances between Herzogs imagery and works by Dutch artists including Pieter Claesz.has been vacated, and time, at least in the form of the films ever-progressing frames, continues on.

The Nietzschean desire to affirm mortality to own the brutal truth of death, embrace ones finitude and rejoice in it suggests that Herzogs worldview is informed by a belief in an infinitely remote God, a phrase Prawer uses more than once in the present study. The fact that Herzogs shot is staged similarly to da Vincis famous painting in that the diners sit at a long rectangular table, facing outward, toward the observer, indicates a knowingness where its theological provenance is concerned. Herzog struggles with Gods infinite remove, or the effective absence of divine will, throughout his films, particularly those from this period, such as his documentary La Soufrire (1977), which dealt with an active volcano on Guadeloupe and the small number of men who either because of choice or circumstance lingered at its base, anticipating disaster. Herzog made that film less than two years before Nosferatu, and its scrutiny of the lassitude with which people confronted their imminent deaths runs along similar lines to these images of Wismar at Nosferatus denouement.

The idea of resigning ones self to the here and now, and directly confronting the actuality of mortality, calls to mind the attention Prawer elsewhere paid to Martin Heideggers concept of Geworfenheit, or thrownness. For Heidegger at least for the Heidegger who wrote Being and Time our thrownness was little

In this regard the vampire in Nosferatu can be perceived as delivering not a plague, but rather a message to the people of Wismar. The plague can be seen as a gift. He suffers the pain of immortality so that humans may appreciate their finitude. In an exchange with Lucy, Herzogs Nosferatu explains that time is to him an abyss as deep as a thousand nights. She responds with her certain knowledge that the rivers will run on long after our deaths. She comprehends, in other words, mortality, and for this reason, she explains, she is capable of fully embracing her love for Jonathan; it is a mortal love born from finitude and thus in her words something she is not even willing to share with God. Lucy is thus not only Nosferatus redeemer, who ultimately, at the films end, releases him from his unending prison of a life, but she also understands the possibilities associated with living and loving in a world in which God remains wholly inaccessible; she is Nosferatus existential counterpart. The axis around which the film turns is not, then, the difference between Jonathan and Nosferatu; those two are kindred insofar as Jonathan can be understood to have sought out the vampire and, in the end, he is the one who extends the bloodthirsty legacy. The heart of the film is rather the difference between Nosferatu and Lucy, who are two sides of the same conceptual coin.

The themes of mortality and finitude appear universal, but Herzogs film was set in one specific age and produced in still another. Prawers interpretation draws on both of these histories, noting that Herzog made the decision to retain the middle-class and mid-nineteenth-century atmosphere from Murnaus film, the Biedermeier milieu associated with the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the revolution of 1848. Scenes of Jonathan and Lucy at the films beginning even imitate the Biedermeier style in the visual arts, and they evoke paintings by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmller. Herzogs visual style here corresponds to his content. In this case Herzog, drawing on Murnau, relies on Biedermeier motifs to suggest the narrowness of the couples domestic world. From this perspective,