S. S. Prawer,
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht.
London: BFI Publishing. 2004.
ISBN: 1 84457 031 2
96pp
£8.99stg (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

Bloodsuckers, nightbreed, stalkers of the human soul: no other character quite vies for the affections of western cinema like the vampire. The two seem to have been made for each other. Conceived in the popular imagination by Stoker and the Lumieres in the same historical breath of a disturbed civilisation, theirs is a special partnership, detached enough from life to track and penetrate the darkest regions of modern European experience. This intriguing relationship between cinema and vampirism is the subject of S. S. Prawer’s recent contribution to the BFI Modern Classics series, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. The primary focus of Prawer’s book is a discussion of Werner Herzog’s 1978 film adaptation of Stoker’s novel, Nosferatu. The author’s intention is to peel back the aesthetic qualities of Herzog’s film as a means to locate the cultural heritage guiding the work’s creation.

While many have taken Herzog’s Nosferatu as an enjoyable deviation from the serious redemptive national cause of New German Cinema, Prawer posits quite the opposite. For him, the 1978 version of Nosferatu is more than a naïve adaptation of a literary horror classic, to be absorbed and forgotten in isolation. Rather, he understands Herzog’s film as a multi-layered dialogue – a dialogue with Stoker’s original text, a dialogue with Murnau’s 1922 film, a dialogue with fifty-six disgraceful years of German history. From this perspective the film is both political and personal. It constitutes an attempt, one of many, by Herzog and his collaborators to engage with their German heritage – with Catholicism and Lutheranism, with film expressionism and, most problematically, with the Nazi legacy of their parents’ generation. Herzog’s film is, in a significant way, a painful and frightening argument with his own father and with all the fathers whose complicity with the fascist regime lead to a re-establishment of darkness in Germany not twenty years after the horrible destruction of the Great War. Nosferatu is, like all the important films of the New German Cinema, concerned with confronting and comprehending Germany’s recent past, even if such efforts seem absurd.

Prawer’s book is very much concerned with understanding Nosferatu as a re-valuation of Murnau’s 1922 version. His particular concern is Herzog’s re-evalution of the vampire. Herzog’s vampire is a sequel to Murnau’s, just as World War II is a sequel: the same horror only different. Played by Klaus Kinski, the count is more human than Max Schreck’s Orlok. Prawer writes:

The vampire of Murnau’s film is soulless: he is driven to sustain his physical “undead” state by ingesting the blood of the living, and by a vestige of sexuality that makes him eager to feast on a “beautiful neck”. Herzog’s vampire, however, lets us into his inner life sufficiently to know that he has retained a suffering soul through his many years of “undead” existence. (59)

With Kinski’s pathetic sadness, we experience the vampire as an impoverished soul: fragile, even harmless in his longing for death. He seems exhausted most of the time, in need of love. But there’s the rub. Just as many people in the 1930s experienced feelings of personal understanding, and even sexual desire, in response to Hitler’s unholy sermons, in Herzog’s film (as opposed to Murnau’s) we are confronted with the very real possibility that it may be in the evil of our own hearts where the source of our empathy for and fascination with the devil lies.

This is the major point that Prawer’s analysis and discussion makes. Murnau’s vampire is an alien, a sleeping demon from another shore, awoken by Jonathan Harker. But in Herzog’s film, Nosfertau is very much a part of the society he stalks and finally invades. Hideous to the eye, he nevertheless sits comfortably with his victims. He speaks of his weariness and disappointment, and though no longer familiar with social graces, displays a genuine human fondness for people. This is most powerfully represented in the erotic encounter he has with Lucy in her bedroom. Herzog’s vampire is in many ways, Prawer argues:

“a Doppelganger, a projection of Jonathan hidden self,” (60) less a fallen angel than a man, or at least the Shadow of a man. This diagnosis is supported by the crucial narrative difference between Murnau’s and Herzog’s films. Where Murnau concludes with the vampire’s destruction and the re-establishment of order and light in Weimar Germany, the younger filmmaker knows that the darkness did not die, that evil continues to live beyond its host body, floating into the next room to inhabit someone or something we once trusted to be an ally.

The BFI Modern Classics series are useful introductory guides to individual texts, certainly worth reading if one is interested in, or studying, the film discussed. Unfortunately, their length does limit the depth of discussion. In his book, Prawer seems to have ignored this condition somewhat and forsaken a more detailed discussion of the film’s style in favour of discussions considering the relevance of German existentialist, phenomenological and psychoanalytic philosophies. He makes some fascinating and poetic insights into the nature of evil in the imagination of modern Germany, but sheds only a small amount of light onto the ways in which the filmmaker manifested these ideas onto celluloid. This flaw may have something to do with Prawer not being a film scholar, but one of German and literature.

Thomas Redwood.
Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.
Created on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 | Last Updated: 20-Jul-05