"Nosferatu,"
a German horror film directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1921, may now only
receive a "PG" rating from the British Board of Film Classification, but
I still problems watching it. Count Orlok's unnatural features and movement,
the shadows, and the sense of foreboding may now only be advised as "mild
threat" by the BBFC, but their cumulative effects beat the jump scares of a
flash of red, a spray of blood, or a hunk of flesh.
Meanwhile,
auteur theory, centralising a film’s director as the prime creative force in
its making, is just as pervasive in film culture as horror movie tropes, making
artists out of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas,
and even its proponents, like Jean-Luc Godard. The critic Pauline Kael saw
through it, preferring to look at each film individually, through the
collective effort of everyone that made it: “The auteur theory is an attempt by
adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their
boyhood and adolescence, that period when masculinity looked so great and
important.”
I
only mention auteur theory because I can only assume this is why F.W. Murnau’s
skull is still missing from his grave. It remains unknown who broke into it in
July 2015, but wax found at the site suggest candles were used in some sort of
ritual. I assume the grave has now been sealed by the cemetery, as this was
being considered due to previous break-ins – Murnau’s brothers, buried in the
same plot, were untouched. The prevalence of auteur theory in how people
discuss film still does not mean that Murnau, still revered for “Der Leitze
Mann” and “Sunrise,” is entirely responsible for “Nosferatu” as we know it -
it’s a bit like saying Wes Craven made “A Nightmare on Elm Street” because he
was a psychopath.
"Nosferatu"
was deliberately designed to be an occult, supernatural film by its producer
and distributor, not the director. Prana Film planned many similar films, had
an occult mail order catalogue as a side business. Its co-founder, Albin Grau,
a German version of Aleister Crowley, was also the production designer, filling
props and backgrounds with occult symbols. Prana Film went into bankruptcy
after the release of "Nosferatu," infamously an unauthorised
adaptation of “Dracula,” in order to avoid the copyright infringement lawsuits
from Bram Stoker's estate.
Before
“Nosferatu,” Murnau had already directed one film about a fractured
personality, that was also an unauthorised adaptation of a British novel -
"Der Janus-Kopf" (1920), starring Conrad Veidt and Bela Lugosi, was
based on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This
film is now lost, but we know the it formed part of the wave of German Expressionist
films trying to examine the forces that German society found in itself following
the First World War, leading to films like Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari”, Paul Wegener & Carl Boese’s “The Golem: How He Came Into The
World” and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” and “Metropolis.”
However,
no-one used the power of German Expressionist cinema to disrupt the graves of
those directors, or that of Albin Grau.
No comments:
Post a comment