NOSFERATU (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1921)

In the context of silent German cinema, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu looms, perhaps, a bit larger than is fitting. The film cannot compare to Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Destiny the same year, or the two parts of Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), or to G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925). Even Murnau, most agree, is better represented by The Last Laugh (The Last Man, 1924). But we tend to place Nosferatu into a smaller category where its renown is entirely appropriate: the horror film; more specifically, the vampire film; more specifically yet, films based on Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century novel Dracula. In this last subcategory, only one other film may have a greater claim to brilliance: from West Germany, Jonathan (1973), by Hans W. Geissendörffer, lensed in delirious, dark colors by Robby Müller.

Hardly anyone is unaware of the premise of the plot. A vampire-lord sucks the blood of the living in order to maintain its own posthumous existence—an eerie, decadent variant of the ancient figure of the Wanderer (Cain being an example), in which human life is indefinitely extended, along with, ironically and tragically, both human fear of and sorrow over death. But Stoker departed from the religious significance, usually attached to this figure, that identifies it with the redemptive capacity of human suffering. Instead, Stoker courted sensationalism by relating his nocturnal fiend to the sexual anxiety and repression of its victims—a slant that Murnau will have nothing to do with. Nor, to tell the truth, is he all that interested in the story per se, which the scenarist, Henrik Galeen, has reduced to its bare bones. Rather, Murnau gives his material a fresh and captivating theme: a woman’s torment in an unfulfilling marriage.

The woman, Eillen, is deeply in love with Hutter, her spouse. Knock, the real estate agent for whom Hutter works as a clerk, has the boy travel from Bremen to the Carpathians and the castle of Count Orlock. The count—in reality, the vampire Nosferatu—is a client; Hutter’s mission is to convince him to purchase a home whose location, oddly, is exactly opposite his and Eillen’s own residence. The young clerk succeeds, but at an unexpected forfeit when his strange host drinks his blood, enfeebling him, and locks him up—a parody of the employer Knock’s tyrannical treatment of the boy. Hutter escapes, finally; back home, meanwhile, mystical nightmares visit Eillen, impressing on her a widening danger. Nosferatu takes up its new residence. Through the window it stares at Eillen, who, guided by her love for her husband, knows she must decisively act. In order to save her husband, and to free Bremen from the pestilence Nosferatu has brought with it, she avails herself of the one proven way to destroy a vampire; thus she submits to its loathsome advances in her bed chamber, detaining the thing until the crowing of the cock, whereupon Nosferatu dissolves into nothingness, like a nightmare, at the dawn’s light. For Eillen, the necessary forfeit is her own life.

Murnau does not dwell on the momentousness of this strong woman’s heroic sacrifice; he is, however, moved by it, and so are we. Murnau’s primary interest lies instead in rigorously analyzing this material in order to show that Eillen can more easily embrace a course leading to her own death for the release it provides from a perpetually frustrating marriage. As part of his analysis, Murnau establishes a series of fascinating correspondences. For example, the lowly clerk’s blood enters the lordly Nosferatu; the puncture left on the boy’s neck, from the bite, is a grotesque parody of a signature on a contract, in this case certifying the “business transaction” between the clerk and Nosferatu. In Bremen, there are the face-to-face living quarters and the “wife”—legal, for one; symbolic, for the other—that they share. Cumulatively, this mirror-imaging links the two “male” characters Hutter and Nosferatu.

On the surface, perhaps, this linkage is perplexing. But its basis is given early on, prior to Hutter’s trip, before we have even set eyes on Nosferatu. In an “idyllic” passage outdoors, we are able to glimpse the character of Hutter and Eillen’s marriage. The boy acts most lovingly; he is kind, affectionate, doting. However, Hutter’s frolicsome behavior, especially when contrasted with Eillen’s graver, more mature demeanor, suggests a life-partner less than it does a playful child. Hutter, then, seems “outside” his own marriage, much as Nosferatu is outside of life. He brings Eillen wildflowers, which he has (absurdly) rompingly gathered; she responds, tellingly, by longingly caressing the bouquet as though it were a baby—the child, the image implies, that marriage to Hutter hasn’t given her. Blissfully unaware, Hutter fails to respond to Eillen’s heartache. Acting more like a toy husband than a real one, inattentive to how unfulfilled the person he most loves is, Hutter is draining Eillen’s lifeblood. He is an “innocent” version of Nosferatu.

So disconsolate is Eillen in her stunted marriage that she desires Nosferatu, which is to say, death, as much as it desires her. Murnau makes this plain when the two neighbors stare at one another across the square. For Eillen, Nosferatu is a husband-substitute. But to submit to Nosferatu, even to save Hutter from also becoming the living dead, is to betray her marriage. In effect, this would mean admitting to herself the pointlessness of her marriage. Eillen’s death, then, releases her from a loving though disastrous union. As it happens, it is the very end that her nightmares foretold.

Murnau’s film achieves a captivating form in the phantomlike effects he conjures; he locates, in imaginative space, a twilit blending of fantasy and reality, shadow and substance, death and life, and, following Kierkegaard, the twin components of dread, attraction and repulsion, revulsion and desire. In the same vein, Nosferatu’s sea journey to Bremen impresses as a journey of the mind—Eillen’s shrouded, twisted, storm-tossed unconscious to which the failure of her marriage has given birth. Some of the film’s most powerful and hauntingly, eerily lovely images shows the “death ship” sailing across the sea or, toward the camera at an angle, out of the frame. Finally, there is the frightening image of Nosferatu itself, evoking indefinable horror. A critical contributor to the effectiveness of this image is the silence of the silent film itself; it is as if sound had been suspended, as in a dream. Above all, in a masterpiece of makeup, the actor playing Nosferatu, Max Schreck, brilliant here, is at once so hideous and yet so bodily insubstantial that the thing’s final disappearance seems as natural as a dream’s passing.

Spare, chaste, analytical, Murnau’s Nosferatu is the stylistic opposite of Werner Herzog’s sweeping Romantic remake (1978), where the wife’s submission and sacrifice yield no benefit in order to accommodate a pessimistic view, of the continual rebirth and rejuvenation of evil, that looks back to Lang’s fine, silent Mabuse films (1922), and dismally ahead to the misogynistic Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), a vampire film in disguise. The genre’s masterpiece remains, of course, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), which immerses us the viewer in a shifting dream of mortal anxiety; it and Lang’s Destiny are the two most darkly magical films in creation. And there is the haunting, intensely violent Jonathan (1970), where Geissendörffer relates his Dracula material to Germany’s Nazi past, creating a vision of evil so somber, so sorrowful and full of pain that it suggests our inhumanity as it weighs upon a loving God.

DIARY OF A LOST GIRL (G. W. Pabst, 1929)

Dubious soap opera launches Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s last silent film, which is full of blatant moralism. Much of Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, moreover, is close to being lurid.
     A governess, impregnated by Thymiane Henning’s father, a bourgeois pharmacist, is tossed out; she is later found drowned. When Thymiane is raped and impregnated by her father’s assistant and refuses to marry him because she doesn’t love him, her baby is given away—soon after, the baby dies—and Thymiane is tossed out, in her case, not into the street, but into a “home for wayward girls.” When she escapes, Thymiane ends up in a brothel. Her downward trajectory reverses upon her father’s death and, ironically, another suicide. In the end an empowered, compassionate Thymiane visits the reform school.
     Pabst presumably is taking aim at bourgeois depravity and hypocrisy, but the point is lost amidst considerable unpleasantness. Thymiane’s initial trick in the brothel occurs after she is drugged unconscious with alcohol; it is another rape, and therefore the insistence on Thymiane’s innocence is (for me at least) hard to take. In this context, Thymiane’s innocence becomes as grotesque as all the sliminess that’s arrayed against it. In between, the scenes at the reformatory are cruel in the extreme. Opposite rows of girls must eat spoonfuls of soup to the rhythmic beat of a rattan. Angled closeups magnify the oversight of a sadistic matron. The quick cuts suggest the fragmentation of Thymiane’s life.
     Later scenes, such as one at a funeral, are richer, more emotionally satisfying. By this time, Thymiane is the widow—and, because she is played by Louise Brooks, she is very beautiful. However, she is also klutzy when she moves—oddly, a fate that befalls many onscreen dancers when they aren’t dancing.

BECOMING JANE (Julian Jarrold, 2007)

Anne Hathaway as young Jane Austen is a significant obstacle to embracing Becoming Jane, which Julian Jarrold directed from an ingenious script by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams. (Hathaway’s performance lacks punch, and she mumbles many of her lines.) Otherwise, this is a probing, deeply affecting romantic film laced with wit.
     James McAvoy is achingly good as the boy whom conclusive script identifies as the future Lord Justice of Ireland—here, rural Austen’s love interest whom she rejects, reversing their planned elopement, because his mother and numerous siblings depend on the allowance he is given by a rich uncle, who disapproves of their match. “Money is necessary,” Austen’s mother (Julie Walters, excellent) has told her, as indeed Austen would tell us in her novels, and Jarrold’s film is brilliant and compelling at showing how money and the need for it dictates an intricate structure of socio-financial connectiveness in nineteenth-century Britain—this being, of course, one of Austen’s own persistent themes.
     It’s great fun to detect glimmers and gleams of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in her own fictionalized life-story, which reveal themselves in ways, I might add, that go beyond clever correspondences to suggest how literary imagination, when calling upon autobiographical elements, transformatively works. This is another brilliant aspect of the film.
     The film provides a years-later coda, when Austen, now a famous unmarried author, crosses paths with Tom Lefroy, her old love, who is accompanied by his daughter, who idolizes her. Austen is about forty (she would live only a little longer) and is composed, at least superficially serene; he is all dried up. This ending, absent “Way We Were” sighing and sentimentality, devastates. Austen knows she long ago made the necessary choice.
     Eigil Bryld’s color cinematography, gorgeously dark and haunted, is the year’s best.