nosferatu

It’s tough to be critical of films that were essential to the development of cinema itself. After all, the challenges faced by F.W. Murnau in shooting Nosferatu in 1922 were incomparably more difficult than those that came even 5 or 10 years later. We’re talking about the creation of a cinematic language: wide-shot, medium shot, close-up, mise en scene, essential filmic vocabulary tools that are mostly instinctual today. Not to mention introducing the world’s most famous bloodsucker 9 years before Bela strapped on his cape.

Murnau had made several shorts and features in his native Germany before adapting (without legal permission) Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, for the screen. The result, when viewed with modern eyes, can be tedious at times considering Stoker’s story has been told and retold from so many different perspectives. And the acting, although perfectly in keeping with stage-inspired techniques of the time, remains a tough sell. What makes Nosferatu an undisputed classic is Murnau’s groundbreaking visual approach and his iconic interpretation of one of the most famous movie monsters.

A hairless, clawed, shadowy nightmare, the image of the vampire created by Murnau and actor Max Schreck has been far more influential in the modern age that that of Lugosi’s more romantic approach. It’s an otherworldly, animalistic amalgamation: part rat, part bat, part penis (the film has more phallic imagery than Magic Mike). And Murnau stages the action with expressionist menace; the vampire’s shadow climbing a flight of stairs, rising from the hold of a ship or simply staring hypnotically from an abbey window. Nosferatu utilizes every aspect of the burgeoning art form – performance, make-up, cinematography and editing – to create an illusory world that collides with our own. And it does so without a single line of dialogue.

A successful lawsuit by the Stoker estate demanded all prints be destroyed…an impossible task but one that makes it much harder to find a pristine copy. Culled from multiple prints, this is exactly the kind of hi-def treatment you’d expect from Kino Classics, who has quite a bit of Murnau material still in the hopper. For anyone familiar with the numerous public domain discs, the clarity here will knock your socks off. To be sure, it’s still a degraded image that bears the wear and tear of its 90 plus years, but the new trend of reproducing the original color tinting (yellow for day, blue-green for night) helps to hide some of those flaws and enhances the mood.

The soundtrack is Hans Erdmann’s original 1922 score remixed into DTS-HD 5.1 (or 2.0 stereo if you prefer) and works beautifully over both versions of the film, which include English intertitles or the original German intertitles with English subs. Other extras include a 52-minute 2007 documentary, The Language of Shadows, covering Murnau’s career and the making of Nosferatu. It’s informative but a bit dry and under produced. But it might perk one’s curiosity to view the lengthy excerpts from several other Murnau films and browse the image gallery.