The Films of Werner Herzog by Corrigan Timothy;

Author:Corrigan, Timothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1582715
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

8 Rereading Murnau in order to rediscover Stoker (Nosferatu the Vampire)

8

Herzog, Murnau, and the vampire

Judith Mayne

Lotte Eisner described Friedrich Murnau as “the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known” (Eisner, 1973a, 97). Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu, in many ways an homage to Murnau, seems to confirm the relevance of Eisner’s judgment to the New German Cinema. Murnau’s 1922 version of the Dracula legend is surely one of the best-known and most successful films of the silent German cinema. Herzog’s self-described goal in retelling Murnau’s cinematic tale is to affirm a kind of spiritual bond between the contemporary German cinema and the past: “We are trying in our films to build a thin bridge back to that time, to legitimize our own cinema and culture. We are not remaking Nosferatu, but bringing it to new life and new character for a new age” (Andrews, 1978, 33). How appropriate that Lotte Eisner should affirm Herzog’s “rebirth” of Nosferatu, declaring that “the film is not being remade, it is being reborn” (Andrews, 1978, 33).

The “rebirth” of Nosferatu suggests that just as Murnau and screenplay author Henrik Galeen read and transformed the vampire legend as presented in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, so Herzog undertook a similar process of revision, this time with the Murnau film as his source. (As we shall see, Herzog’s retelling of Murnau’s film also involves a return to Stoker’s novel.) To consider Herzog’s film in relation to the Murnau source runs the risk of a facile adaptation analysis, now between two film texts rather than the more common comparison of literary source and cinematic adaptation. But if it is understood from the outset that “adaptation” is always a process of reading and interpretation (and not the simple transposition of a narrative from one medium to another), then an analysis of Herzog’s Nosferatu as an adaptation of Murnau raises some key questions of film narrative.

Perhaps the most obvious of these questions is the relationship between the classics of the cinematic tradition and the present. Herzog himself offers a Kracauer-like reading of his project: “Murnau’s Nosferatu … prophesied the rise of nazism by showing the invasion of Germany by Dracula and his plague-bearing rats. And it gave a legitimacy to German cinema that was lost in the Hitler era” (Andrews, 1978, 33). Certainly the persistence of expressionism and its wide array of cinematic and narrative devices in the contemporary cinema in general, and the New German Cinema in particular, is a fascinating area of inquiry. However, Herzog’s description of Murnau’s film, suggesting the interface between the two Nosferatu’s as the pre-fascist prophecy and the post-fascist rebirth, is misleading. True, both Herzog and Murnau represent their vampires as obstructive forces in the staid middle-class environments of Delft and Bremen, respectively. But despite the claim that he is transposing a pre-fascist film to contemporary circumstances, Herzog initiates a dialogue with Murnau that has little to do with the political metaphor of vampirism. Rather, Herzog’s Nosferatu uses Murnau’s film to explore questions of authorship, sexuality, and narrative voice.

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