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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1978
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NOSFERATU BLOOD SUCKING AND WILD RATS by Harlan Kennedy The picture-pretty
Dutch town of By the same token, the
good burghers should have been prepared for him. Perhaps the leading director of the new
German cinema, Mr. Herzog is well-known for his unconventional methods. In “HEART OF GLASS,” he hypnotized his actors; in “THE
MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER,” he cast
a former mental patient in the title role; in “AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD,”
he hacked through South American jungles to film the story of a monomaniacal
conquistador. And so naturally, since
Mr. Herzog’s remake of F.W. Murnau’s classic silent
film “NOSFERATU” required rodents, the director wanted real rats – and
lots of them. The story itself dates
back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “DRACULA,” which not only spawned the current Broadway
hit but which the German expressionist filmmaker Murnau
adapted in 1922, changing the characters’ names to avoid copyright problems
and replacing Stoker’s bats and baying wolves with rats that swarm wherever Nosferatu goes. The rats are
especially evident aboard the ghostly ship in which the Count travels from But the Burgomeister of Delft, having so recently cleaned up his
city, adamantly refused permission to import 10,000 new rats – even though
the director guaranteed that they’d been sterilized. Eventually, Mr. Herzog acquiesced. His solution? Truck the rodents to a willing neighboring
town and shoot the scenes there. “The Undead – Nosferatu” is Mr. Herzog’s ninth film, and he envisions
it as a link between the new German cinema and the film glories of such
pre-Nazi directors as Murnau. “We are a generation
without fathers,” he says, “and we must therefore reach back to the true
German cultural heritage.” It may also
be his springboard into the big leagues.
Mr Herzog’s earlier movies have seen only
limited distribution in art houses; this one, which he hopes to complete in
time for a Christmas release, is a German-French-American co-production. Shot simultaneously in German and English,
it will be distributed by 20th Century Fox. There are several
Dracula films in various stages of production, but “The Undead – Nosferatu” is not likely to be just another Gothic
spine-chiller. The traditional view
of the vampire Count was unmistakably Victorian. When Stoker wrote his novel, the smooth
façade of late 19th-century English life was beginning to show signs
of wear and tear, and through the cracks came such varied masters of outrage
as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Jack the Ripper. Dracula is not so much a monster as another
fallen Victorian aristocrat, one whose story struck a sympathetic chord in
generation after post-Victorian generation. Over the years,
though, the blood-sucking Count has also become the archetypal emblem for the
evil that lurks below the surface, for the compulsion that eats away at its
victim from inside – that eats away at our belief in ourselves as free agents
in a moral universe. Whether it’s bats
and baying wolves on the moors or rats in Mr. Herzog sees his
film as a parable about the fragility of order in a staid, bourgeois
town. Though “The Undead-Nosferatu” is a film full of horrors, “it is more than a
horror film,” he says. “Nosferatu is not a monster, but an ambivalent, masterful
force of change. When the plague
threatens, people throw their property into the streets, they discard the
bourgeois trappings. A re-evaluation
of life and its meaning takes place.” Klaus Kinski, his gaunt head shaved for the role of the
vampire, agrees. “We both see Dracula
a little differently from Murnau’s film. We see him more sympathetically. He is a man without free will. He cannot cease to be. He is a kind of incarnation of evil, but he
is also a man who is suffering, suffering for love. This makes it so much more dramatic, more
double-edged.” Although Mr. Herzog
professes “I feel very close to the spirit of medieval times – I feel I am
more a craftsman than an artist,” he is working to evoke a sense of spiritual
malaise through sophisticated imagery.
One morning, early risers in That evening,
strollers saw Isabelle Adjani, the French actress who created Francois Truffaut’s “Adele H.,” sleepwalking along the edge of the
old canal toward Nosferatu’s house. With her china doll complexion and haunted
eyes, she seems just right for Lucy, the beautiful innocent heroine of
Stoker’s tale. But the filmmaker is
revising Lucy, just as he is revising the Count. Says Miss Adjani’s co-star, Mr. Kinski, “Lucy is a complete departure from previous
heroines in vampire films. There’s a
sexual element. She is gradually
attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination – as we all would,
I think. First, she hopes to save the
people of the town by sacrificing herself.
But then, there is a moment of transition. There is a scene when he is sucking her
blood – sucking and sucking like an animal – and suddenly her face takes on a
new expression, a sexual one, and she will not let him go away any more. There is a desire that has been born. A moment like this has never been seen in a
vampire picture before.” The sense of shared
enthusiasm evident when Mr. Kinski speaks is one
that is carefully nurtured by Mr. Herzog – off the set as well as on. The trappings of a major international
production have done nothing to change his unorthodoxies. For the stay in On the set, Mr.
Herzog’s share-and-share-alike theories are exemplified by an anecdote
related by Lotte Eisner, the distinguished German
film critic and historian. On
returning from a day’s shooting on the Dutch coast, buoyant with excitement,
she talked about a scene in which the ship bearing Nosferatu
and his deadly rats approaches a Delft whose shores Mr. Herzog had covered
with an eerie, wintry mantle of white plastic foam. One key shot required a shivering actor to
leap into the sea. He demurred. If 10,000 rats couldn’t deter Mr. Herzog, a
balky actor wasn’t about to; the director showed the way by jumping into the
icy water himself. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. This article appeared in the New York Times on ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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