Nosferatu By Bilge Ebiri Bilge Ebiri is a filmmaker and writer living in New York. His reviews and features appear regularly in New York magazine, Time Out New York, and Minneapolis City Pages.

Few have addressed the paradox behind the fact that Nosferatu is generally considered one of German director F.W. Murnau's greatest masterpieces. For Murnau, in later films such as Faust, The Last Laugh, and Sunrise, would come to be known for his experimentation with moving cameras, tracking shots, and enormous sets. But Nosferatu exists on the opposite end of the spectrum from these feverishly kinetic films. Indeed, it's marked by stillness and a mysterious sense of calm, by figures caught within their frames. Sunrise, perhaps Murnau's greatest film, is among the pinnacles of cinematic movement; Nosferatu, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of paralysis.

What's remarkable about Murnau's film, which is a reasonably faithful retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula tale (filmed again so many times it's basically a genre unto itself), is how cinematic it manages to be without relying on the kinds of things we regard today as cinematic. Murnau's background was in painting and art history, and there's a strong sense of painterly composition throughout the film. Its visual style is very static, as if the film were a series of paintings at an exhibition, with each space a different work. When characters move through these spaces, they creep in through the edges of the frame.

This eerie quiet finds its foremost representative in the figure of the vampire himself, played with mythic creepiness by the enigmatic Max Schreck. Throughout the first half of the film, Nosferatu moves very little, and almost never crosses into frames, the way other characters do; he inhabits the spaces in and around his castle as if he were part of the dead air itself. He either enters from deep within the space, or appears through some sort of special effect. There's an overwhelming and unnerving sense of power to his inanimateness: the film's most terrifying images are probably those of almost no movement, such as those of the vampire's face seen through the cracks of his coffin.

When Nosferatu finally exits his castle and travels to town, in the second half of the film, he becomes far more transgressive, a small black figure navigating his way with ease through the spaces of the city, which already seems to be nearing death by its stark emptiness. But once he settles back into his new enclosure, the vampire re-establishes his sense of quiet, deadening power.

It is this death-in-life, the mark of the vampire, that haunts Nosferatu, and perhaps this is why the film remains so powerfully frightening all these many years later. The vampire has the power to render ordinary men and women as still, quiet, and lifeless as he is. Those who come into contact with him either become trapped in their beds, or trapped in the spaces of his castle, unable to navigate out of their frames. For a film of few close-ups, this is a remarkably claustrophobic work. The fear in Nosferatu comes from a fear of the inanimate, or a fear of becoming inanimate. Murnau the artist, so close to painting yet working within a medium of movement, who would later use technological advances to liberate the camera, must have been aware of this notion.

The deliberately designed and composed nature of Murnau's film reveals Nosferatu to be a film about movement just as much as the director's later films. Kino's new DVD of it comes as a welcome edition' although previous releases have been serviceable, they've all presented an image that was slightly cropped at its edges. Finally, when the vampire springs out from his coffin, the top of his head is no longer cut off by the television frame. For a film whose sense of composition and framing is so significant, that's a major development.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002