Films 1970s
(1979) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
Director: Werner Herzog
Release: 1979
From that ice emerged sanguine Werner Herzog, whose enthusiasm for a new German voice in film generated several important movies, but in "Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht" reached its nationalist apotheosis. Looming like a god, a returned spirit of German narrative, Klaus Kinski as Dracula not only heralds the return of pre-War art cinema to German theatres, but the resumption of threads left untouched for over 30 years.
A remake of German director F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens," Herzog moves author Bram Stoker's Whitby, England to Wismar, Germany. There, real estate agent Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) travels to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains to arrange for a massive purchase in Wismar. Harker's boss, Roland Topor's already-maniacal, high-giggling Renfield, recommends abandoned property near Harker's Wismar home.
At the castle, things go wrong quickly - and Harker is imprisoned by the vampire count. Dracula fixes upon Harker's wife Lucy - and the entirety of Wismar - as his new home and place of revenge for Harker's intrusion. The Demeter, sets sail from Varna, and brings Dracula and his plague of rats to the urbane German town. Soon death is upon the people there, and madness fills the streets and squares. Wismar becomes a parade of misbehavior and rage. Dracula slinks and skitters through its streets, draining Lucy of her life until she makes a discovery and choice that leads the parasitic monster to his ultimate destruction.
As such, Kinski's Dracula, is a neurotic and vicious symbol. He is the vengeful return of the carnal, artistic spirit to Germany. No longer is Wismar able to drift through its pleasant afternoons and oblivious family life behind closed doors - the community is plunged into naked time, forced onto the cobblestones to take control of its own overwhelming destiny.
It is Herzog recommending the embrace of the old to prompt pathways to new opportunity. With his own culture at stake, Herzog throws the symbol of cultural desiccation onto German screens, but in choosing a triumphant character from pre-Nazi German film he points at the familiar Max-Schreck-redux as the reminder: The icons of his country's cinematic history are back, and they want blood.
Herzog posits that the old stories and the spirit of Old Europe are as much an injection - a catalyzing force in Wismar - as Dracula is a leaching and enervating presence. Faced with the draining effect of the outside evil, Lucy becomes the new and young force that fights back, reaching into history to find the solution to Germany's new plague.
Unlike her audiences' Reich-seized predecessors, Lucy becomes the self-sacrificing impulse - the generational resistance to further stripping of the "German" from Germany. By luring the beast into her bedroom, and causing it to forget its purpose until sunlight can cleanse its infection, she sets Wismar - and the people - free of their prison.
Herzog's "Nosferatu," however much it deviates from Stoker's novel by obsessing upon plague and the Grand Guignol of townspeople dancing with goats in the end times, shaves closest to the bone of Stoker's deeper themes. Kinski's Dracula is at once pathetic and horrifying - projecting at once strength and rodent-like cowardice. His motivation is genetic, historic - a drooling, vengeful force of ancient and discarded concepts. Like Stoker's Whitby, Dracula is the agrarian lord railing against obsolescence. He is a memory-thing - in this case manifesting at once for German cinema and the Old World - in the final days of the Old World, as the industrial revolution leaves behind the previous powers of castles and kingdoms.
It is easier, perhaps, to equate Herzog's Dracula as some sort of Nazi phantom. He is not. There is a similar effect of cultural upheaval, neighborhood destruction, total conversion of the masses to one goal - but in this case there is no imperial or targeted parallel. Dracula is no Hitler, no fascist bent on control. He is a primal creature, an underground current suddenly arcing through a dormant landscape. In Herzog's world, Dracula is the post-Nazi weapon - the new volley of ammunition lobbed at the yet-to-wake-up countrymen for which the director so wanted to make new and important films.
"Nosferatu" is a statement of return. It is the proclamation that German film - like the cadavers in Herzog's haunting opening - is mummified. The quiet acquiescence of Lucy passive watching a Wismar sunset is a counterpoint to the heaving finale, when she lets a sunrise into her chamber and gasps out her final breath for the future of her family, her people, her country.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, 1979
The quiet acquiescence of Lucy passive watching a Wismar sunset is a counterpoint to the heaving finale, when she lets a sunrise into her chamber and gasps out her final breath for the future of her family, her people, her country.
