Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (1979)

Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Though Murnau's Nosferatu was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Herzog based his film largely on Murnau's conceptions--at times directly quoting Murnau's images--but manages to slip in a few references to Tod Browning's famous version (at one point the vampire comments on the howling wolves: "Listen, the children of the night make their music."). Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a distinctly feral quality. But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning for Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love. Bruno Ganz's sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife, Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's plague-like curse. Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a quintessentially Herzog vision. --Sean Axmaker Amazon.com

Second-best "Dracula" ever made

The image is good, but not fantastic, probably taken from a master video tape, but without restoration. The black is sometimes too grey without enought contrast, the colors are granular and twinkles a bite the way video (tapes) images use to.
The movie is absolutly great, probably the second-best "Dracula" ever made after the 1958 Hammer film. October 11, 2008

Outstanding

Werner Herzog is an artist out of his time....and that's a very good thing for lovers of great films. His own great 1979 film Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night (Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht), which was released in America as Nosferatu, The Vampire, is less a classic vampire film and more a Post-Apocalyptic tale, having more in common (especially image-wise) with films like On The Beach, The Quiet Earth, the Vincent Price classic The Last Man On Earth (based on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend), and even the first Night Of The Living Dead, than with the Hollywood Dracula mythos, and even its silent filmic predecessor, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's 1922 classic Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors (Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens), because Herzog is a filmmaker not afraid to turn his camera eye on ugliness, and use that as a way to limn reality better and more clearly in his search for his own `ecstatic truth.' Herzog has always specialized in eye level realism, wherein he generally eschews those glossy gorgeous postcard-like shots that many filmmakers often substitute for depth, and this results in his ability to push his stories forward without relying on obvious techniques, substituting elements that hit at a viewer's instinctual reactions rather than merely the intellectual. This comes from his great screenplays, such as this one, which are usually his own creations; albeit with a little help from the novel he adapted it from, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
This 107 minute film melds the best parts of Murnau's classic film with the Dracula legendry we all know, yet is unlike either, nor any other vampire film ever made. The film is not a remake nor an homage, which it is usually lazily called, but an artistic vampire of a vampire of a vampire film, because, unlike the silent film, the Count is called Dracula, not Orlock, for by the time Herzog made his film Dracula had fallen into public domain. The original film weathered legal litigation for copyright infringement from the Stoker estate, but this film, part of the 1970s wave of New German Cinema (Das Neue Kino)- which were really the troika of Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is possibly that loose movement's height; although one might argue Herzog's own earlier masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath Of God was its pinnacle. It was filmed in the Dutch town of Delft, in English, to satisfy American investors' demands for marketability in the United States, and then dubbed into German, with subtitles for other countries. Several of Herzog's films were done this way, including Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo.... The camera work by Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein is among the best in not only the Herzog canon, but in all of film. It is subdued, subtly shifts color palettes depending upon the mood of the lead characters, makes use of shadows the way the black and white classics of Carl Theodor Dreyer do, and has a colorful monochrome which dissonates the expectations of the viewer, much as the slow motion images of bats in flight- borrowed from a science documentary, do. The fact that the bat sequences are also drenched in a great film score only adds to the moments. Yet, this is Herzog at his best, whether stealing from himself- note the raft load of black coffins going down yet another river, or pioneering hand held shots in an age when they were eschewed, all to further the sense of the real, the vaunted eye level realism that shows the past as it was- dirty, grimy, and filled with generally pathetic souls, just as his earlier The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser did.
Yet Herzog never is heavyhanded in his use of artistic techniques. Look at the subversive symbolism in a shot of Dracula in the town square, when a ring of streetlamps in the background blur to form a diadem or halo about his pate. This can be interpreted several ways, but the interpretation is not as important as the very boldness such a shot entails. Or note how emotional scenes are never displayed closeup, as in Hollywood tearjerkers, but from a distance, and usually shot from behind the actors- a technique Herzog manifestly borrowed from Ingmar Bergman. He also allows the viewer to fill in narrative interstices with what is known from the Dracula mythos, thereby focusing on character- not horror, which is immanent in all vampire tales. This allows him to throw in narrative dissonances and unexpected moments, such as Dracula's clock chiming at midnight, or the appearance of a strangely deformed dwarf man to arrest Van Helsing, yet having no legal authority nor knowledge nor power to do so. Both of these moments are absurd, but horrible in the most existential sense. Their absurdity and displacement from conventions foster a feeling of illogic that gnaws at a viewer who cannot grasp why, thus making its unknown provenance another bit of horror.
Also, consider the film's end, where Lucy sacrifices herself in vain, becoming a vampire of the vampire by passively, then actively, soliciting his feeding upon her neck. Only Herzog could make a death-obsessed seductress out of a victim. In all of the films of his, I have never witnessed a single clichéd nor trite scene, image, nor even moment. This fact lifts Herzog not only into the top rank of filmmakers, but of artists of all time, alongside Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, and Picasso. His great film is one of the finest character studies of a wholly fictive character ever filmed, for it first deconstructs, then reconstructs, then recontextualizes the whole mythos from the fairy tale horror many critics see Dracula as embodying, to a symbol of the worst of humanity- not its evil, but its cowardice and inaction. Only Lucy takes action, but because of her being alone in doing so she is doomed, as might be the whole world that Jonathan Harker rides away to infect. Sadly, I know what Lucy feels. Thanks, Werner.
September 15, 2008

The collage works

Almost every scene reminded me of something else: not just Murnau. Although there was dialogue, it could easily have been silent, with dialogue cards, since very little of the information was verbal. No one had more than a few lines. Visually, a lot of the shots were 100% Caspar David Friedrich. Adjani from the back, looking out to sea. There was a bit of Coleridge and Doré's Ancient Mariner. A bit of Füssli. A bit of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Browning if not Grimm. The Woman in White? Was there a bit of Rocky Horror? The geography fascinated. How do you get to Transylvania? Either overland on horseback, and by hitching a ghost coach, or by ship from the Dardenelles via the Bay of Biscay. If you go north from Wismar, which actually seems to be Delft, you get to Riga. If you do the subtitles, a van becomes a von. Jonathan is too straight and dumb to be anything but English, but Reinfeld ? --- Swiss? Austrian? Bavarian? Levantine? Carpathian? At one point I almost thought I was in Wales, where I have been. Nothing matters that much in this Wunderland, which should defuse it, but still it works. Held the attention in spite of the pace. Lovely stuff; although I still like Cushing and Lee. September 13, 2008

When a horror film isn't a horror film

Viewers who pick up this film expecting a good old Hollywood vampire horror flick will be utterly disappointed, because Herzog's "Nosferatu" just isn't intended as a scary movie. Herzog uses the Dracula legend, as did the expressionist film maker Murnau, as a vehicle for a film with a non-horror genred message.

In the commentary accompanying the disk, Herzog says that he wants to establish continuity with the greatest period of German cinema, the expressionist era. The themes that preoccupied the early expressionists (in addition to innovative cinematic technique) are the cultural ones explored here by Herzog: the limits of human knowledge, the dark, wild side of humans, the arrogance of the Enlightenment, the loneliness of life, chaos, the certainty of death. As poor Nosferatu says at one point in the film, "The absence of love is the most abject pain." Exploring claims like this, not scaring an audience with gore, is what Herzog is up to.

The plague (la peste) plays a larger role in Herzog's version than in Murnau's. Like Camus, perhaps Herzog wants to suggest the ubiquity of death and decay, and the different ways in which people respond to mortality. Some, like Lucy (played by Isabelle Adjani, who wonderfully vamps and at times overacts to match the cinematic style of Greta Schroder in Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu"), defy it with loving self-sacrifice. Others, like van Helsing (played by Walter Landengast, who also features in Herzog's "Caspar Hauser"), deny it out of scientific hubris; others, like the anonymous people in the doomed town square who in Brueghel-like style make antic revel in the face of death, throw themselves into diversions. But in the end, everyone shares the same fate, as Herzog suggests in that wonderful and terrifying scene in which columns of coffins, held aloft by an army of black-clothed undertakers, converge on the empty town square. This scene, by the way, is as perfect a one as Herzog has ever choreographed.

Herzog's film is loaded with irony, which is probably his way of saying that there are no happy endings to life. Lucy sacrifices herself to slay Nosferatu (played by Kinski, who--thankfully--doesn't get a lot of screentime in the film), but the threat of death continues, because Jonathan (played by Bruno Ganz), emerges at film's end as one of the undead. Van Helsing's arrogant refusal to admit that any corner of reality isn't absolutely open to scientific explanation is finally defeated by Lucy's example. Liberating himself from his small scientific worldview, he quite heroically drives a stake through Nosferatu's heart--only to be arrested as a murderer. The one guarantee in life is that there are no guarantees, and that life is painful. In fact, as Herzog explains in the accompanying documentary, all his films are born from pain.

One of Herzog's finest experiments in film. My only regret is that apparently a great deal of the antic revels in the town square wound up on the cutting room floor (some of the deleted scenes are shown in the documentary). They would've made Brueghel proud. July 26, 2008

Hauntingly beautiful

This is the first Werner Herzog movie I've seen and now I'm interested in seeing his other movies. As a big Dracula fan I can tell you this DVD rates in my top three list of the best Dracula movies. For those who do not like subtitles there are two versions here. I think the German version is superior. Enjoy! July 21, 2008

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