Now Playing on Radio@NewYorkReview.Org
|
|
Home  Film + Theatre Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night
|
|
Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night |
|
|
|
|
Written by Dan Schneider
|
DVD Review Of Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night
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 film begins in Wismar, where Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz), a
real estate clerk, seeks a large commission by selling a local
'haunted house' to Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski- in another
magnificent role), so he can but his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani, a
somewhat sexier version of Shelly Duvall). Yet, Lucy seems to have
psychic abilities- something new to the mythos, and senses danger
awaits, so begs him not to go. Yet, he takes four weeks traveling
through the Carpathian Mountains, where all warn him not to
proceed. This is a memorable sequence in the film, for we again see
real people- real Gypsies who are not pretty and polished, as in
Hollywood films, and we see real landscapes that seem to forebode
in their immanence. Shots of the sky, at dusk, are gorgeous and
drawn out, but gorgeous in a real way, a depressing way that
perfectly sets up the first encounter with the Count, at night,
when Harker arrives at his castle. Yet, this whole transition
passage through the Borgo Pass goes on over eight minutes in
length, with nary a word spoken. Who but Herzog (and possibly
Antonioni?) would allow such a silent interlude? Yet it works
subliminally, and eases one into irreality and the coming of the
death represented by the vampire.
Kinski looks very much as Max Schreck did in the original
Nosferatu, yet with one major difference. He is weak, sniveling,
pitiable; a pathetic creature at home and in command of rats, bats,
and the Black Death. Whereas Schreck's vampire exuded menace and
rigid power, Kinski's beast is more a living pathogen than
predator, or even a scavenger. He gets physically and sexually
excited by both a cut Harker makes on his finger and a photograph
of Lucy. He soon infects Harker and buys the property, then sails
for Wismar, bringing his hordes of rats and the Bubonic Plague with
him.
Harker tries to get back to town before Dracula does, but is
too sick. When he arrives, the Count has already infected many
others- although we never see a moment of violence in the film
(merely a brief sexual grope of Lucy's breast by Dracula), and
Harker's memory is gone, as his wife quarantines him with known
anti-vampire aids, knowing he is doomed to vampirism if her love
cannot save him. Scenes of a desolate Wismar, with rats loose, dead
horses in the streets, garbage strewn about, and coffins piled up,
make this film an Apocalyptic tale, as well as a vampire story.
Lucy knows the only way to kill Dracula is to seduce him into
feasting on her until sunrise, whereupon he'll die at the first
rays of light. Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), the
town's medicine man, refuses to believe Lucy's vampire theory,
ascribing it to the Black Death, but when he sees that both she and
Dracula are dead in her room, and Harker is imprisoned by a trail
of consecrated crumbs, he takes a stake and hammer and makes sure
the Count is done. The film ends with Van Helsing humorously
arrested for the murder of Dracula, even though no police remain,
while Harker gets his maid to clean up the crumbs, setting him free
on his new life as Dracula's replacement in Death, his wife's
sacrifice all in vain. When we watch him ride off on a horse, in a
wonderful dreamscape of sand and clouds, to carry on the plague, we
know that the vampire conventions have both been usurped and reset
back to Stoker's strict constructionism, by the Apocalyptic, and
its is a masterstroke of storytelling.
In what should not be a surprise, many of the critics of the
day were left puzzled as to the film's meaning and import. Vincent
Canby, of the New York Times, wrote 'Herzog has done what he set
out to do, but when you come right down to it, one wonders if it's
worth the trouble. Dracula, after all, is not Hamlet or Othello or
Macbeth. He's not some profoundly complex character who speaks to
us in more voices than most of us care to hear. Dracula is Santa
Claus turned mean. He's a fairy tale character. Though he
represents something vestigially scary, he's not endlessly
interesting.' This is all true….in other tellings of the
tale, not in this one, which is why the film was made. In this film
Dracula is not mean, nor a fairy tale character. He is not The Big
Bad Wolf. He is someone struggling explicitly and implicitly with
death, love, and his own immortality. He tells Harker, 'Young men.
You are like the villagers, and cannot place yourself in the soul
of the hunter.' Yet, despite his professed longing for death, over
the centuries he has never merely waited for the sunrise. It is not
until he is duped into believing Lucy has any form of love for him
that he relents, and knowingly chooses to die. Frankly, and as much
as I love the above troika of some of Shakespeare's best
protagonists, Herzog's Dracula is FAR more complex; which only
proves Canby's stolidity as a critic in not rising above his
biases, and reviewing not the film he saw, but the film he wanted
to see and did not. Ironically, fiction writer Donald Barthelme
wrote of the film, 'The problem here is that Herzog was unable to
bring new life to his much-handled material.' Not only is this
clearly wrong, as Herzog's film stands above and outside all
vampire cinema, but coming from a writer like Barthelme, who was so
delimited and hackneyed in his own art form, such a criticism makes
one wonder if there was not a wink and a nod going on. Or am I
merely being too generous in expressing that hope?
Perhaps the reason many other critics balked at this great
film was because 1979 saw the release of two other Dracula films,
John Badham's Dracula, starring Frank Langella as a sexy Count,
and Stan Dagoti's Love at First Bite. wherein Dracula, played by
George Hamilton, was both sexy and silly. Yet, another factor in
the film's early diminution was likely that year's later release
of another great horror film, another remake of sorts, albeit a
much more Hollywood film, and that was Ridley Scott's Alien. That
film also featured a vampiric monster who kills off the whole
population and is aided by a surrogate (an android in that film,
Renfield the realtor in Nosferatu), yet provided a moviegoer's
easy out by having the heroine defeat the monster at the end.
Nosferatu did not give its viewers an easy out.
This commitment to unease is rife in the film, from the
opening shots of dried mummies (filmed in Mexico), to slow motion
shots of bats in flight, eerily lit, to Lucy's telepathy with the
Count (or is it empathy?), to the almost preternatural way Herzog
films landscapes to suggest that they are seething with life and
malice, to the lingering camera, which looks upon the world with an
unwavering eye. Perhaps only films like Michelangelo Antonioni's
best films or Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation rely on
extended looking, to the point that a viewer may be uneased. Also,
the change in color, darker to reds and blues, eases the frame of
mind a viewer has into what Herzog subliminally wants it to be.
Herzog is a master of image, as well as sound, and his score for
this film, from Popol Vuh and Florian Fricke, is, again, masterful.
Yet, even supporters of this film often miss the point. This is not
'one of the greatest horror films ever made,' as critic John
Azzopardi claims, for it is not a horror film, even if it I,
technically, a monster film. A Post-Apocalyptic film is not a
horror film, it is what comes after the horror has passed. We never
see violence, not even Van Helsing's staking of Dracula's corpse,
which remains, unlike in Murnau's film, where the sunlight fades
the vampire out of existence. We merely see death. Herzog's film
is remarkably peaceful, subtle, and languid. Note the scene where
Dracula slinks into Lucy's room, as a shadow in the mirror, and
begs her to love and save him, and he will return her husband to
him. She refuses, and in any other film the vampire would have
attacked. In this film he slinks off like a rejected puppy. No
wonder Hollywood addicted critics rejected it, despite always
professing to want something more. When they got exactly what they
asked for, they whiffed on it.
As for Klaus Kinski? He gives another toweringly great
performance, which ranks aside his roles as Aguirre and
Fitzcarraldo. He plays the ultimate nightmare creature, yet there
is also pathos and comedy- note the scene where he is lusting for
Lucy from outside a window, and Renfield (Roland Topor) shows up to
play sycophant. Kinski's look of disgust and dismissiveness
reveals that his character is not the one dimensional bloodsucker
of a Christopher Lee. And this is all wonderfully conveyed despite
the makeup job, the only special effect in the film. Yet, it is not
the intense, haunted eyes within the darkened, hollowed sockets,
nor the gaunt, wasted mien, nor the feral yet timid movements of
his angular form, nor even the bald pate and pointed ears which
convey these depths. It is Kinski who does it. It is a gift that is
inseparable from the artist.
The DVD, part of Anchor Bay's great Herzog-Kinski
boxed set, is terrific. It is presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio,
and comes with a thirteen minute featurette made back in 1979. It
also features two American film trailers and a Spanish trailer, and
comes with another of Herzog's incisive film commentaries,
prompted by Norman Hill of Anchor Bay. He speaks of problems with
filming, and how Delft banned some scenes being filmed within city
limits with the eleven thousand rats they imported and painted
gray. Some scenes were shot in the nearby town of Schiedam. He also
rightly dismisses the special effects crapfests of Steven Spielberg
as well as Francis Ford Coppola's big budget filmic stab at
Dracula. The big disappointment with the DVD is that, despite its
being filmed in English, we merely get the German version, with
English subtitles, which, ironically, show the actors lips out of
synch. It is odd as to why the original English language version
was not included.
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.
--
Dan Schneider
www.Cosmoetica.com <http://www.Cosmoetica.com>
Cosmoetica: The Best In Poetica
www.Cosmoetica.com/Cinemension.htm
<http://www.Cosmoetica.com/Cinemension.htm>
Cinemension: Film's Extra Dimension
--
Dan Schneider
www.Cosmoetica.com <http://www.Cosmoetica.com>
Cosmoetica: The Best In Poetica
www.Cosmoetica.com/Cinemension.htm
<http://www.Cosmoetica.com/Cinemension.htm>
Cinemension: Film's Extra Dimension
|
|
|
Who's Online
We have 2 guests online
|
written by Duane on October 24, 2007
Very insightful review, however a factual error slipped in. The film was not shot in English and dubbed into German. English and German versions were shot and edited concurrently and both are presented on the disc (on the flip side of the single disc version, on separate discs on the 2 disc version).
written by Duane on October 24, 2007
My error. This was for the boxed set, which only includes one version. The rest stands, however.