Detailing the cultural background, production history, and critical reception of Herzog's Nosferatu remake, Garrett Chaffin-Quiray explains the film's complex relationship to the horror genre while providing insight into the filmmaker's "purposefully austere aspiration to beauty."
Strangeness has always been Herzog's major theme. A friend of mine once told me that she heard Herzog claim he wanted the world to appear in his films as it would to a Martian who just arrived on Earth. His method for achieving this is incongruity. [1]
A view from today
On 26 October 2002 I visited Manhattan's Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine for the "Halloween Extravaganza & Procession of Ghouls." An annual production, the conclusion of the night's program was a puppet parade. Directly preceding this exhibition, though, was a screening of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's 1922 classic Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors) with a live organ accompaniment.
Having previously seen Murnau's film, I anticipated a creaking relic of histrionic acting and anachronistic special effects. Indeed, I watched the film while listening to alternating snickers of disappointment and simultaneous thrills of wonder in a crowd several hundred strong. As a result, I was reminded of the importance of context concerning Nosferatu with some eighty years having passed between now and its original release.
Subsequently I binged on all things of unholy origin. I read reviews, fingered library books and compared images handed down through a lifetime spent consuming vampire movies. In so doing, I completed the Nosferatu trifecta.
After attending the Cathedral Church screening, but only after reading Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, I watched Werner Herzog's 1979 adaptation, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht and finished off with E Elias Merhige's insider-peek-cum-alternative-history, Shadow of the Vampire (2000). What follows, then, is the result of my dive into the subject at hand.
Frames of reference
What we recognise as das neue Kino, or the New German Cinema, was a movement born from generational conflict. Following Germany's defeat in World War II, the coherence of its national identity was split among occupying allied powers, just as the country was riven with foreign cultural products, sold piecemeal to external combines and dwarfed by memories of its former status under Adolph Hitler.
Along with the rapid Americanisation of West Germany confronting Soviet-styled East Germany, there was a coincident malaise about the unassimilated Nazi past, the "unbewÃltige Vergangenheit." Turning the war generation against its offspring, another baby boom, Germany's future was a portrait of contradiction, not least because the Holocaust prosecuted during the war led directly to the post-war Economic Miracle.
German cinema, itself a reflection of national sensibilities, exhibited these tensions on-screen. Decimated by an exhausting war effort, filmmakers in the 1940s largely produced works of narrow interest. Continental development and the popularity of television expanded the canvas just as a backlash against Hollywood's control over local movies was unleashed.
At the Oberhausen Film Festival of 1962, "an acute sense of alienation and anomie"[2] bubbled to the surface. Alexander Kluge and Norbert KÅckelmann, both filmmakers and spokesmen for the unrest, shaped the moment and lambasted the conventional system. One result was the Oberhausen Manifesto aimed at disrupting then-current cinematic practice.
Finding American dollars easy to secure for distribution and exhibition channels, though not for investment in local movie production, the Oberhausen group envisioned a way out from under their cultural colonisation. Lobbying the Budestag, or West German parliament, they successfully set up the Koratorium Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Film Board), to support funding and distribution of members' work along with establishing film schools in Munich and Berlin and an archive in Berlin. From 1965-1968, the Koratorium supported the debut of several dozen new filmmakers. Yet the fundamentally inconsistent source of film finance continued to haunt das neue Kino.
One method to solve the problem was the Film FÃrderungsanstalt (FFA), which gave money to film producers according to fairly loose standards and which led to soft-core porn and sex comedies. The second method was an FFA reform, the Filmberlad der Autoren (Author's Film-Publishing Group), a private company intended to distribute members' films with monies collected from television network subsidies and tithes, and to ensure artistic products with careful sponsorship. A fertile period resulted and the world was introduced to filmmakers like Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, although they were typically only celebrated abroad in countries like France and America.
The youngest of these prominent three, Wenders, was born on 14 August 1945. Stylistically his work tends to blend Hollywood genres while thematically exploring the Americanisation of post-war Germany in pictures like Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977) and Der Himmel Åber Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987).
Fassbinder, the middle child whose death is commonly regarded as the end of das neue Kino, was born on 31 May 1945 and overdosed on 10 June 1982. Multi-generic in scope, his movies reference 1950s Hollywood melodramas overlaid with spot-on social criticism. Detractors malign his prolific output as indistinguishable from Hollywood's conventions while admirers argue he both satisfies and subverts spectatorial expectations in films such as Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) and Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978).
Herzog, the oldest of the trio, was born Werner Stipetic on 5 September 1942. A "holy fool," [3] he possesses a legendary need to confront danger. His well-documented production difficulties forever shadow his work, in which fans admire grand landscapes and enigmatic heroes while detractors see self-indulgence, recklessness and failure of storytelling.
Though his biography is riddled with hyperbole, the general facts suggest he grew up in a remote Bavarian village, wrote his first script at 15 and made his first short film at 17. To earn money he worked blue-collar jobs. Eventually he earned a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied film and television. In 1964 he won the Carl Mayer Prize for promising screenplays, finally making his feature debut four years later with Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968).
During this period, vacillating (as the rest of his career always has) between documentary impulses, poetic grandeur and epic journeys into the souls of madmen, Herzog offered a pithy aphorism about the cinema for which he is famous: "Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates." [4] Such an idea is useful for unpacking Herzog's fascination with Murnau's silent classic.
Cognisant of his fame, with its particular focus after Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1974), Herzog recognised the shifting climate of film finance and production. Namely, "a major problem for the filmmakers of das neue Kino was distribution. While the Film Subsidies Board generously supported independent production of all sorts, the films of the New German Cinema grew too elaborate and too numerous for the exhibition outlets available to them." [5] To fill the void and continue making movies, many enterprising, even exploitive, filmmakers like Herzog cultivated international co-financing deals coupled with certain artistic concessions, especially yoked to Hollywood. As Timothy Corrigan writes,
The connection with the Hollywood circuit and the audience it controls throughout the world is...a crucial dimension not only of Herzog's work but of the entire New German Cinema. As much as its filmmakers were nurtured by their strained relation with their pre-war forefathers like Lang and Murnau, the historical and economic roots of contemporary German film were, formed during the postwar 1950s when American occupation of West Germany fostered a peculiarly displaced relation between the two cultures. [6]
![Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979)]()
Enter Nosferatu, a recognised title in the cinematic pantheon, a European co-production between Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Gaumont and ZDF, and with a fully enabled distribution channel provided by Twentieth Century Fox.
The boon was a production budget of DEM 2.5 million (USD 1.4 million), the biggest in Herzog's career to that time, [7] along with an international release to existing syndicates and a cast and crew ready to risk the remake. The sufferance, however, was a dual-language production shot simultaneously in English and German, maintenance of the irascible Klaus Kinski as star and an ongoing struggle to live up to Murnau's original upon which Herzog's picture could be pilloried.
