Werner Herzog Season – Nosferatu (1979)
Ominously opening in an eerie mausoleum, to a throbbing heartbeat score we are confronted with a wandering, hand-held mosiac of entombed cadavers and mummified corpses – clearly this isn’t going to one of Herzog’s earlier, ‘funnier’ works. I first became aware of Nosferatu at an early stage of one’s cinematic development, it was a horror movie and therefore included in the movie anthology books I rifled through for details of a new ghoulish conquest, equating this as probably the first Herzog film I ever saw. Klaus Kinski features in the titular role as the ominous 19th century vermin visaged count, a wretched soul who feeds on the blood of the living to prolong his unholy life, a ghoul currently seeking a decant from his Carpathian lair to stalk new hunting grounds in Western Europe. If that sounds familiar then of course it is, Herzog’s Nosferatu is a rekindling of F.W Murnau’s silent classic Eine Symphonie des Grauens, which in turn drew heavily from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its sordid source material. Stoker’s widow sued the producers of the 1922 original which resulted in many of the original prints being destroyed, but some canny international distributors disobeyed the court instructions and world cinema retained a highly influential masterpiece. Both versions are back on the cultural agenda following the news of a planned remake and the rather odd incident of Murnau’s skull being stolen from his Berlin bordering mausoleum, in what has to be one of the strangest publicity stunts of recent years. So the time seems deliciously ripe to reassess Herzog’s 1979 iteration of one of the all time classic horror tales, and for Werner it’s a remarkably atmospheric and brooding affair, with definitive attention lavished on the mood and aura of the film. This movie feasts upon gloom and melancholy, rather than coagulating on character trials and tribulations, the usual medicine that beats at the centre of Herzog’s oeuvre.
Nosteratu closely follows the core text of Stokers gothic masterpiece, with a mysterious figure summoning a young property lawyer to his Transylvanian castle in order to negotiate the purchase of a new foreign property, only this time the location is Wismar in Germany rather than Whitby in England. Bruno Gantz plays the unsuspecting Jonathan Harker, animated by one of the most talented and recognisable German actors of the post War period, probably known best as the inquisitive angel in Wings Of Desire and the densely disseminated Hitler in 2005’s Downfall, exposing him to an entire generation via internet gifs and humorous hybrids. Kinski is a quiet revelation as the verminous, venomous count, a wonderful evocation of Max Shrek’s original nightmare inducing cladding, reigned in by Herzog to deliver a quiet, almost mournful performance of a beast succumbed to immortal and eternal dreads. This near perfect cast is completed by Isabelle Adjani as perhaps the screen’s most perfect evocation of Mina Harker, virginal, pallid and ethereally beautiful, yet with a courageous strength of heart to sacrifice her soul and entrap the count as dawn rises, her bravery scourging the land of his ungodly infection. Herzog engineered the film as a direct celebration of his homelands cinematic prestige, intending his ‘remake’ as a cultural resuscitation of Murnau’s original, placing German cinema back on the global map after many years of rotting decomposition. We should remember that before the second world war Germany was considered the equal of America in terms of its mastery of the adolescent art form, with the evolution of the entire Expressionist movement snaking its shadowy tendrils to influence the global cinematic culture, with prestige productions such as Metropolis and Sunrise combating Hollywood’s claims to dominate the form.
Having thundered through the work of Herzog over the past eight months this film is something of an unholy aberration for the worshippers of Werner, as the key word here is atmosphere. Normally (at least at this fatigued point of the season) Herzog trades in rather direct character centred tales, yet here he weaves a quite beguiling film with his groaning collaborators, a grimoire of grief which is shrouded beneath an overcast and oppressive sky. From the opening frames the film is amplified by another wonderful Popol Vuh score, indeed my entire discovery of this soundtrack pioneer has been one of the great discoveries of this entire expedition, as once again their eerie soundscapes perfectly complements the premonitions of Nosferatu’s anguished aura. Brilliantly utilised is also Wagner’s prelude of the Nibelungen, prefiguring Malick’s appropriation of immortal hymns by at least two decades. Most unusually for Herzog the film is quite clearly photographed and composed with a rich visual constitution, in rather a contradictory manner to his working method statements I replayed during the last review of Woyzeck. Cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein (whom has schemed with Werner since 1971’s Fata Morgana) deftly manipulates shadow and light, fog and filaments to drape the film with a suffocating shroud, a technique which Herzog acquiesced to as it operates as a natural homage to Murnau’s masterful command of visual aesthetics. The pace and movement of the film is similarly languid, the counts ruinous journey to Wismar glides with the momentum of an asthmatic zombie, with the spooky materialisation of a Marie Celeste deserted vessel emerging ominously from the mist. The slow decay of the town is also examined without purifying pomp or ceremony, including a memorable sequence where a small coterie of plague sentenced villagers enjoy a final Lewis Carrolesque last supper among the ruins.
Through these ancient, weakly pulsing influences the film remains saturated with history and time, an intended Xerox in places, before nodding toward a definitive destruction of a malignant, slumbering menace. Some of the images that capture the narrative events are particularly striking, primarily the flesh crawling images of a weary Wismar overrun with those plague spreading rats, they formed quite the logistical challenge for the filming with Herzog having to account for the health and mortality of each and every individual animal following the principal wrap. Kinski himself is the stuff of nightmares, with the crypt dusted skin, the gravestone incisors, those skittering, chittering elongated talons – all I can think of is woe betide the make-up artists who weathered Kinski’s legendary tantrums while applying those cosmetics to his furious frame for exhausting weeks of lensing. Curiously Tobe Hooper also resurrected this specific, hungry look for screen vampires in quite the terrifying fashion for the same years TV adaptation of Salem’s Lot, it’s all an aeon away from contemporary emo-boyband Twilight Young Adult friendly bloodsuckers ain’t it?
Nosferatu palpably drips with a yearning menace, the count a more pathetic parasite than demonic killer, his eternal days wandering alone a Sisyphean curse instead of an immortal blessing. This is what Herzog is really driving at I think, he’s less interested in surface, traditional horror modules than dissecting the unfathomable dimensions of an immortal existence, as he decides to break with Stoker’s source material or the original film’s conclusion by having the once pure Harker elope in the films final frames to spread the plague of vampirism (Nazism?) across Europe and potentially usher in a new dark age of woe. As something of a satanic horror fan this film is precisely in my wheelhouse, a picture with a definitive, spine tingling atmosphere rather than those saturated in screaming chainsaws and bisected limbs. Now don’t get me wrong, those atrocities can be a lot of ghoulish fun but its always the films with a genuine mood and atmosphere that tend to withstand the ravages of time, and remain cold clasping classics for generations to come. So we are finally approaching the final bend of this seemingly eternal series, I have one more movie of the box-set to digest and I’m also going to throw together a hybrid post on two of the documentaries of Werner’s work and his key collaborators – My Best Fiend and the immortal nominee for possibly the best filmmaking documentary on film-making ever made, Burden Of Dreams. That kinda reminds me, I’ve also revisited Fitzcarraldo from that BFI screening a couple of years ago, just to be a good soldier completest you may be amused to learn that today I weathered through the commentary of that movies hilarious production as part of this marathon, as now we face the final stretch. For me though this is among Herzog’s finest work, scheming within the immediate and immortal, a grip of a gothic classic beyond a Hammer or Universal;
Universal Studios Monster Movies – Dracula (1931)
Velcome my fiends, please leave your cowls with Ygor and let ve provide you vith some vreshment , yes we are finally continuing with my ungodly and unholy trawl through the original lifecycle of Universal’s classic monster movies – let the fainthearted flee. A quick trivia question before we tuck into this tasty morsel, how many actors can you name who have played Dracula over his long and decrepit on-screen life*? I managed 11 without electronic assistance which I think is a reasonable haul, for a fictional figure whose iconic appearance is so thoroughly etched into popular culture he has made numerous appearances over the decades across many international boundaries, from comedies and exploitation, from horror to humour, and that was without knowing the names of the dudes who played him in Scream Blackula Scream, or the bizarre Kung-fu hybrid The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires which would have taken me to the unholy number of thirteen. I was going to park this series during January well we’re already into February and appropriately enough Canary Wharf is being sheathed in lightning amidst a raucous downpour which seems appropriate timing, and despite a serious downturn in home movie watching due to work demands and the pleasures of the early year distributors choking the multiplexes with intelligent fare one doesn’t prosper if you don’t set yourself some ravenlofty ambitions, so I’ve moved heaven and earth to also get the first significant gravestone of this programme buried, burned and the consecrated ground salted to prevent any future resurrections, as it’s time to gaze upon the hypnotic visage of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula of 1931;
It’s taken a little longer to beguile these thoughts together for a number of reasons, chiefly the outstanding first disk of the boxed set is bloated with juicy morsels including documentaries on Bela Lugosi’s accursed career and a rather stilted half hour studio approved anemic piece on the movie from 1999, the former has much more bite with talking heads commentary from the likes of Joe Dante, Clive Barker, Ramsay Campbell and Chris Frayling which is well worth sacrificing a few precious minutes of your limited time on this Earth. Some so-called ‘experts’ out there probably smugly assume that this classic was the second on-screen iteration of Bram Stokers 1863 gothic classic, invoked a few years after F.W Murnau’s deeply creepy and eeriely influential Nosferatu silent picture, right? Well, they’d be wrong as in fact a slithering progenitor preceded both these generations, the sadly lost Dracula’s Death which one hopes will arise from the dead just as other allegedly lost movies have been recently unearthed. The film was the brainchild of Carl Laemdale Jr. the son of studio founder Laemdale Senior, who as a fan of all things macabre on stage and in print recognised the potential for a creeping blockbuster after the success of the theatre version of the novel which first brought the tale to a wider audience. With a reduced budget director Tod Browning, a stalwart of the silent movies was devastated when his first choice of Lon Chaney took himself out of the running for the titular part by dying of cancer in 1930, leaving Lugosi begging for the part – a part which he had made his own through hundreds of stage performances it should be stressed – for a paltry $500 a week. Given that the Great Depression was still biting and production budgets were being slashed both Laemdale and Browning had to work within the parameters of severely reduced resources, so they accepted his offer and a screen legend was birthed…
Naturally the film has dated quite considerably but it retains a strange and unearthly gothic charm, as one of those films birthed during the perverted period when cinema was shifting from silent to sound it is stilted and stammers in places, but that can actually add to the strange brooding atmosphere in which certain scenes unfold in a pregnant silence. Today of course you must have any manner of Foley artists and ADR running all over the underlying orchestral score which instructs you just how to feel and react to the scenes and sequences – just witness the three spooky handmaidens which prove that sometimes less is more. This first appearance of Van Helsing is also a departure from subsequent Dracula lore, he’s more a nebbish librarian that the fearless and steely eyes hunter we’ve come to know since Peter Cushing inherited the role in the 1950’s, and both Lucy and Mina are the theatrically clipped, upper middle class sexless clones at the mercy of the Count’s hypnotic urges. Nevertheless there is something about seeing all these icons on-screen for the first time, this was quite the controversial shocker for the pre censorship code afflicted 1930’s, and Lugosi is one of the legendary figures of horror cinema as well as being a hysterical ham with his grandiose theatrical movements and that dripping, glacial intonation. Crucially though he does emit that eeriely elusive screen presence in the role, there is a diabolical aura to the performance that has haunted the screen for over eighty years, as you still imagine him as the Count whenever the name is mentioned, as the ultimate icon of those foreign devils invading our countries and literally stealing our women’s virginity and purity. The restoration gives the picture a fresh reinvigorating new pallor, although there is something to be said for the slightly unnerving atmosphere provoking by a stuttering, cobwebbed and distressed print the significant efforts deployed by Universal to exorcise the infection accrued over the decades as part of their centenary celebrations last year is welcomed by the horror community, including the resurrection of the elusive Spanish version of the classic……
I’d never seen the Spanish version before which was quite a surreal experience to excavate, of course when the talkies swept away the silents the format of films which were previously international by virtue of their lack of dialogue and easily translated title cards suddenly had to battle international language obstacles, and it was a fairly common practice for films to be made for alternate territories with indigenous casts, utilising the same screenplay and storyboard framework, the same sets and technical infrastructure. When Browning, Lugosi and the crew wrapped up the days shoot at 6.00pm the Spanish crew would commence at 8.00pm and film throughout the night, the similarity yet slight amendments to the visual presentation of the tale refracted through two directors imaginations is quite an instructive experience, with the Spanish version certainly being a more risqué and daringly sexual translation, with more in the way of optical tricky yet a laughable figure of the Count portrayed by a mugging Carlos Villarías. Tod Browning on the other hand musters his talents through Lugosi’s immortal performance and cameraman Karl Freund’s dexterous camera which prowls the sets like a bloodthirsty wolf, they both have their strengths and weaknesses which make for a intriguing viewing exercise.
The English language film is now widely considered a classic in a myriad of ways, firmly embedding the vampire mythology in popular culture, when our minds ponder the concept of a vampires the first terrible version conjured to mind is a noble blue-blooded, angular featured member of the aristocracy with a clipped pronunciation and leering persona, the 1% parasite on the body politic in opposition to the cosumer obsessed zombie or poor blue-collar working class Wolfman, although I guess we must concede that for some the phrase ‘vampire’ now denotes a jealous, elderly pederast boyfriend who hangs around schools in order to control every function of his young mate’s life – whom she sees and socialises with, her future career, her relationship with her family – and culturally and socially speaking that’s pretty horrific stuff. The marketing of the original film also introduced a new weapon in the arsenal of the Hollywood advertising blitzkrieg, it never fails to amuse me when some relatively lurid new horror movie is released and the press eagerly devour some ludicrous story of disturbed patrons passing out or being removed from theatres in straitjackets, it’s the oldest marketing gimmick in the necronomic book which we’ve recently seen deployed in the likes of the Paranormal Activity franchise and some the later Saw movies, it’s a tradition that started over eighty years ago with Dracula although to be fair these incidents did actually occur and ambulances were called for screenings of The Exorcist. I should also vocalise the numerous scores available on the disk, I opted for the special Philip Glass composition which was commissioned back in 1998 which gives the movie a pulsating tempo, there is a choice of other soundtracks and commentaries which provide a wealth of aural accompaniment. I can’t imagine a more perfect way to begin this long and treacherous trawl through the Universal monsters folio than with this absolute classic, a superb transfer and lovingly restored update of one of the silver screens most nourishing classics, don’t be afraid as we still have a long road to travel, and it’s not as if the Pope has abdicated now is it?
* *In a vaguely historical order, Max Schrek, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Udo Kier, Klaus Kinski, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, Leslie Nielsen and Gerard Butler, I’m sure there is a whole nest of others….?
The Quantum of Solace
I think I’m going to have a quiet word with the UK’s film exhibitors. Halloween evening and the only horror film on at the flicks is ‘Saw V‘ which I refuse to spend my hard earned cash on given its execrable reviews and the fact that the franchise’s premise was essentially exhausted after the first installment. So, what’s a boy to do? Given that I was not in the right frame of mind for anything challenging or worthy my choice of cinema visit was essentially relegated to the latest Bond picture, ‘The Quantum Of Solace‘.
First things first, I am not the world’s biggest Bond fan. Heresy I know but even as a kid I found the Connery installments boring, the Moore era tacky (which I understand is part of their charm for some people but it just doesn’t fit with my idiom although I will confess to loving the end of ‘Live & Let Die‘ when I was a ankle-biter) and whilst I enjoyed Brosnan’s first effort ‘Goldeneye’ they swiftly degenerated into absurdity. I mean invisible fucking cars? Gimme a break. Again, I know its kind of the point of the franchise that they are simply stuffed with exotic locales, cunning gadgets, cartoon villains and fit birds but my taste in espionage material leans more to the cerebral, dark and gritty double crossing type of stuff. There were elements of that nature in Daniel Craig’s first donning of the tuxedo in the pleasantly entertaining ‘Casino Royale‘ re-boot which I thought quite effectively reinvented the series for the 21st century so I thought ‘Solace‘ was worth a look at the flicks.
The plot, for what its worth, is all over the place but I didn’t really care as what also drew me to the film was to see some big mindless action sequences, a salivating prospect given the stunt and design teams are the same dudes that made the Bourne trilogy so exhilarating. Continuing almost immediately after the events of ‘Casino Royale’ the film opens with a superbly choreographed car chase which was a very promising opening, Bond is hot on the trail of a shadowy secret organisation that is destabilising third world governments in order to profit from the subsequent exploitation of their natural resources. How very contemporary. For Bond it’s personal as the sinister puppet-masters are the same as those responsible for the death of his true love Vesper Lynd in ‘Royale’ which gives impetus to his somewhat predicable going over the edge, violating instructions, ignoring the orders of his superiors (for me a somewhat unconvincing Judi Dench again as ‘M‘), using unorthodox methods to get results…well, you get the idea.
I do like Craig as Bond, he exudes a genuine aura of psychopathic coldness that I’m told is in the novels (I’ve not read any of Fleming’s work) and the best moment of the film for me was an early sequence where after ruthlessly dispatching a knife wielding goon Bond nonchalantly adjusts his clothing, distractedly mops away blood from his injuries and calmly exits a Tunisian hotel. On the plus side they throw everything in to the mix, there’s a car chase, a boat chase, a plane battle, some gnarly hand to hand combat and some ludicrous but fun computer GPS tracking super secret special agent nonsense to luxuriate in but overall I was a little bored I have to say. Even a mindless action film I think needs some sort of vaguely coherent connecting structure to keep you engaged. The film culminates in a final set piece that I’m afraid was woefully inadequate and left me exiting the cinema with a palpable sense of ‘meh’. Still, Gemma Arterton as the amusingly monikered ‘Strawberry Fields’ was pleasing on the eye and her (skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers) ‘Goldfinger’ referenced fate was a vaguely clever contemporary update.
SPOILERS ALERT – You have been warned. Anyway, I can’t bring myself to let ‘Halloween‘ pass without some reference to the chilling and macabre so here are some scenes from some of my favourite all time ghost, mystery and horror films. I suspect my warning was not enough.
Seriously NSFW links here – Further gruesome warnings for these links. When I think of how many great looking and widely praised genre films are on the way including ‘Let The Right One In‘, the controversial ‘Martyrs‘, ‘À l’intérieur‘ and ‘Midnight Meat Train‘ (which I concur has been slated but given that it’s directed by Japan’s answer to Sam Raimi it will certainly be on my viewing list) I despair at current release patterns. I shall be drafting a very strongly worded letter of complaint to the UK film council. That should rectify matters. Final warning – here is real horror, or failing that there’s always Bruce……
Minty's Menagerie 
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