EXTERIORS
Six weeks of exteriors: the Carpathians, the Baltic towns of Wismar, Rostock and Lübeck, as well as ocean vistas of Heligoland and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea. All shooting, exterior and interior, must be finished by November 1921. We begin here, in Czechoslovakia. Half the company has yet to arrive; those who have are filled with questions. Nothing of course has gone as planned. To add to the confusion there are my daily visits to foreign doctors, to say nothing of the visits of nurses to me. What time I have is often expended in elegiac dreams about H—. But already the film takes me from the soft anguish of idleness and drives me from any room where I cannot work.
7/12/21. This is intended to be for the patient readers of Der Querschnitt, the journal of a filmmaker’s progress: an ongoing chronicle, from rough notes composed day to day, of the trials and tribulations of this new project. I hereby pledge to do my utmost to prevent this diary from becoming a “melancholy school of posturing and dreary self-deception.” Frankness and clarity will be the goals. If I will not, cannot be truthful with myself here, where can I be?
With this film, I will not aim at poetry. I will try to build a table. It will be for you to eat at it, criticize it, chop it up for firewood.
It seems appropriate in this confessional form to chronicle the beginnings of my slide from the status of a young man of promise into the regrettable position of filmmaker. Late in 1913, with my career in the theatre—specifically, with Max Reinhardt’s prestigious troupe—all but assured, I drifted into a moving-picture show to see the American D.W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia. I was mesmerized by the giant figure of the wine-guzzling Holofernes, who towered over everyone. Where had they found him? In some circus, I supposed. I mentioned this to Reinhardt, who laughed and told me that the same actor had visited Germany a year earlier, and was shorter than he was. He had been made to seem huge by Griffith’s camera. Reinhardt had had no idea how. He suggested I write to Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s cameraman. I was possessed by the trick, and would have, had the war not intervened. I was twenty-five and as curious as a field dog about everything having to do with filmmaking.
In the 1914 war I served in the air corps, and came to understand aviation as a new way of seeing. (The air arm itself grew out of the reconnaissance service.) Airborne vision now escaped that Euclidian tyranny so acutely felt by the ground troops in the trenches; in this new, astounding topological field, air pilots already had their own special effects, with their own names: loops, figure-eights, falling leaf rolls. My understanding was transformed by the way the airborne observer’s hand seemed to detach itself from the body and stretch out in freedom… The aerial body, looking down from a great height… Good training for the fledgling film director.
After the war I bought a battered old view camera and tripod in a Charlottenburg junk shop and began shooting pictures of everything within range. I even attempted to develop and print the footage myself in a converted coat closet. The experiment was not a success.
Eventually I progressed in the only way possible for me, which was to make every mistake until there were no mistakes left to make, and the right way of proceeding was the only way remaining. Like many of the early filmmakers, I thought myself an urbane bohemian and outsider, eager to experiment, one of the sensitive, nervous spirits of the age, a tinkerer and a visionary with what I hoped was a keen business sense.
Even then, the film world, to my dismay, did not fall prostrate at my feet. The truth was that I would have to become a bit less gangly and awkward, at least enough to overcome the distressing habit of falling over my feet, before I could impress that world with the idea that I was a gifted artist drawing on vast resources of experience and sophistication.
Dolny Kubin, Slovakia. Grau wants the names of Stoker’s characters changed, but echoed. Harker has thus become Hutter. On the long trip here I wrote the first title from his diary, which will introduce the story: Nosferatu. Doesn’t the name sound like the midnight call of a death bird? Beware of uttering it, or the pictures of life will turn to pale shadows, nightmares will rise up from the heart and nourish themselves on your blood. [Fade in a long shot of the town.] For a long time I have been meditating on the rise and fall of the Great Death in my father’s town of Wisborg. Here is the story of it: In Wisborg there lived a man named Hutter with his young wife Ellen.
Wangenheim was a compromise choice as Hutter. I wanted Veidt, whom Grau proclaimed too old, too sinister-looking, and, he might have added, too intimately associated with me. Neither of us is happy with Wangenheim, but he was available. At the first production meeting, he looks over the room assignments and complains that the rooms have been apportioned hierarchically. The top floor, the one with the view, has been divided between art director Albin Grau, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner, scenarist Henrik Galeen, and myself. Everyone looks to me to quash this kind of petty revolt. Wangenheim offers his chin and makes a face. He’s a left-winger and an aristocrat and probably feels isolated in this crew.
There is a hierarchy, I inform him. I congratulate him for having noticed. The arrangement is so our collaboration can continue at any and all hours. Grau, handing out room keys, suggests he spend less time worrying about accommodations and more worrying about his performance. Wangenheim then wants to know why his room is below Spiess’, and why in fact Spiess has been brought along. One of those film company spats, unpleasantness tinged with subtextual insinuation. Why was there scrimping and saving on one end and splurging on the other? Spiess, I remind everyone, has lived in the East and could prove invaluable. The usual grumbling before the rebel angels retreat, quiescent for now and more trouble later.
The company, like a class of children, never understands: it’s not a matter of severity or love, but devotion to the work at hand. Behind my back, they poke fun at my unwillingness to show emotion even in disagreements. It is simple, simple, simple: by remaining master of myself, I remain master of the company. This is all I need to remember. Without that first mastery, all other authority is quickly at an end.
Persistent thoughts of H—. Lasker-Schüler claims to have no more information. Have I tried everyone else? Are there memory tricks that would release new answers?
(—Record everything; revise later with Q in mind.)
The week before we left, Der Film finally announced the founding of the Prana Film company, with a remaining capital of 20,000 Marks, the rest already having been spent. Two managers were named: Enrico Dieckmann, a merchant in Berlin-Lichterfelde, and Albin Grau, an artist/painter in Berlin. The name of the company was explained (the reference was to the Buddhist concept prana, “vital breath”) and attributed to Grau, who, we were informed, “reflects a great deal on the occult aspects of life.” Accompanying the announcement was a list of nine films (!) scheduled for production next year, each illustrated with a drawing of Grau’s. At the very bottom in small print we learned that directing Prana’s first production, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors, would be one F. W. Murnau. “Artistic direction”—apparently a separate category—would be handled by Albin Grau. “Together,” the announcement concluded with a wan and affecting flourish, “they propose to construct the film on new principles”.
We’re filming in Dolny Kubin for the scenes involving the inn in the Carpathians. A dismal, crooked little town perched like a tooth on a hill. Father would say, “What kind of work would take you to a place like this?” I imagine him, when people ask, answering only: “He’s in Slovakia.” H— would be pleased to hear me imagining Father’s thoughts, after all this estrangement.
The castle, Oravsky Zamok, is not far from town. Wagner discovered it months ago, and sent a postcard. It was built on the river Orava in the 13th century, high on a curiously hollowed-out rock. The most elevated part is a watchtower that overhangs the Orava more than one hundred meters. The watchtower, shot against the light, will form the final image of the shadow of the vampire passing from the earth.
Tomorrow we begin shooting on the dilapidated terrace, with Wangenheim, who so far has had only useless ideas as to his portrayal of Hutter.
Still awake. This preparation, most of my life since December: how much does it avail me now?
We start with Hutter discovering the marks on his neck, writing Ellen. It will be in bright sunlight, against a ruined stone wall. We must make certain the vines have been cleared from the battlement. We must counter excess shadow with lamps. We must be ready should the weather not cooperate. If the terrace scene comes off we’ll go on to Hutter’s search for the coffin. After the arch I’ll pass in and do the stairway, to the right of where he sees the bolted door leading down…
Sleepless, I wander the corridors. Napoleon said he made his battle plans from the fighting spirit of his sleeping soldiers.
Before the shooting, one must put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance. My working method is to sketch out everything and then be completely open to impulse and improvisation. Recognize the true by its efficiency and power. The film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism), but in the ineffable that those images emanate. To use prodigious, heaven-sent machines merely for belaboring something fraudulent—how would that appear, in fifty years’ time? And yet it’s from those mechanisms that emotion will be borne (born?) Think of the great pianists. (Bach, answering an admiring pupil: “It’s only a matter of striking the right notes at exactly the right moment.”) We evoke the pre-industrial world of superstition by creating an illusion that allows the viewer to forget the film’s technical base.
In the darkness and stillness there are murmurs and flickering light under Grau’s door. I knock softly, and enter.
Grau and Galeen are sitting cross-legged around a guttering candle. When they lean to make a point, shadows bend around the recesses of the room. Still uninvited, I sit. They share a bottle of Hungarian wine. We can hear mice gnawing at the walls’ interior. Grau repeats his story of the old peasant with whom he was billeted in the army. The peasant was convinced that his father, who died without receiving the sacraments, haunted the village in the form of a vampire. He showed Grau an official document about a man named Morowitch exhumed in Progatza in 1884. The body showed no signs of decomposition, and the teeth were strangely long and sharp, and protruded from the mouth. The man was proclaimed undead, known in Serbia as the Nosferatu. Grau is an ardent spiritualist. His next project, he’s informed us, will be something called Höllenträume: Dreams of Hell.
Galeen, too, has a vampire story, from a cousin who served in Austria-Hungary. Galeen is slightly off-putting, watchful and disquieting. He has a bulbous face, with lank brown hair and beautiful skin and an odd and pointless smile. He is only twenty-nine, four years younger than Grau and myself, and was born in Berlin. He reacted well to my revision of his treatment. He’s a Rosicrucian; perhaps even one of the adepts. I learned that from others.
He tells us the following, in his smooth voice: After it had been reported in a nearby village that a vampire had killed three men by sucking their blood, Galeen’s cousin was, by high decree of the local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate, along with two subordinate medical officers. This is the story they were told: only days after the funeral of a girl by the name of Stana, eighteen years old, who had died in childbirth two weeks previous, and who had announced in a fever that she had painted herself with the blood of a vampire, the family caught sight of the deceased sitting on the front steps of her house. The dead girl repeatedly appeared afterwards at night in the street, and knocked on doors. Children sickened and died. She had relations with an addled widower. When at night, like a trail of fog, she would leave a farm, she left a dead man in her wake.
Galeen’s cousin and the other officers were taken to the graveyard to open and examine the grave. When they exhumed her, she was whole and intact with blood flowing from her nose, mouth, and ears. When the girl’s mother saw her, she spat and said, “You are to disappear; don’t get up again and don’t move!” At those words, tears flowed from the corpse’s eyes. After seeing that, the villagers pulled her from the grave, cut her into pieces and tied them with cloth. The cloth they threw on a thornbush which they set on fire. Whereupon a strong wind rose and blew after them, howling, all the way back to the village.
The first day is overcast. It’s always a question of the intensity of the light. Wagner’s assistants test it with orange filter glasses. We wait. At eleven I announce we’ll set up the close-ups. For those we don’t need sunlight. No sooner are we ready than the sun is out. We go on, but now Wangenheim and Greta are squinting; Wagner and his assistants have to screen with canvas the very sun we’ve been waiting for all day, fake the half-light we’ve suffered through to this point. Flies circle everywhere. The wind shakes a background I want still. The camera develops a tremor. Wangenheim abominable.
That night, the cold sweats, trying to sort out the next day’s tasks. Confronted by the characters, I feel like an official called in to oversee a crowd of immigrants. They stand about, passive, while I regard them with growing dismay.
Day 2: More camera troubles. Drove off at nine in the morning. Spectacular trip. Stopped at a wine tavern, and then continued off the main road to show Spiess the avenue of Caspar David Friedrich trees Grau showed me earlier. Pointed out to him as well the pitched waterfall Hutter will see from his room in the castle the night of the greatest danger. Every time I view the place it’s a revelation. Spiess astounded. The grottoes and clefts and riot of overhanging branches enclosed us within the sound and force of the cataract. We could see movement flitting above in the narrow and overgrown cliff faces. We were in a world where all was wonder, delicate and secret, and beside which all our clutter looked like a farce in bad taste. On the way home by a different route, I was talking to Spiess about the second inn, where Hutter is warned against proceeding to the castle, and round a bend all at one glance I recognized, down to the smallest detail, the exact setting I had resigned myself to having to build. Here were the windows for Hutter’s view of the frightened horses, the old shutters with the carved hex signs, the doors and boxed-in bed, the stone well, the apples piled in an oaken bucket, everything! The interiors as good as the exteriors, with this quality of the luminous strangeness of the ordinary shining through the walls…
Spiess too is fascinated with the lore of vampires. He reads a number of Slavic languages, and has helped with the forbidding and disintegrating texts Galeen has pulled from the local libraries. We never have enough background material, and what we have always feels too vague. At night, sitting on my bed in my room, Spiess reports, his voice transforming the softest consonants into sounds that make my neck ache with desire. Among the Slavs it’s reported that one may strew ashes or salt around headstones in a cemetery to determine, by looking for footprints later, if any of the bodies are leaving their graves at night. If a grave is sunk in, or if a cross has taken a crooked position, the deceased has transformed himself. Often there is visible a hole in the grave from which the vampire emerges. And the gypsies believe that if dogs are barking, no vampires are in the village, but if dogs are silent, then the vampires have come.
With this sort of story, everything, Wegener wrote when he was working on his Golem, depends on a certain flow in which the fantastic world of the past rejoins the world of the present. And yet how does one make judgements about emotional truth in such situations? Authenticity is a problem that remains unresolved in this country. Transylvania, with its evocative meaning (“beyond the forest”) seems appropriate as our setting: that place which can only be imagined. Europe’s unconscious.
Remember to flag sections to be excised for Querschnitt.
One of Wagner’s assistants is spending the week filming the light at dawn (real) on the castle gates (constructed). His task is to open on a fade every morning until “morning’s dawn” becomes “morning horror”: Morgengrau becomes Morgengrauen. I have a specific effect in mind, and this stock can capture it. Then he’ll be sent home to film the dilapidated salt storehouses of Lübeck, for the long shots of the Bremen house of the vampire. All those empty window-sockets, with their uncanny, anthropomorphic quality.
Dinners with Spiess and Wagner help us clarify our ideas. The shot is not a painting, dependent only upon the expressive content of its static composition; it’s also a space negotiable in every way, open to intrusion and transformation, inviting the most unpredictable courses. It’s necessary to understand the process by which the mood and tone of such spaces can change. If only the camera could move! If the question becomes not only “what is the image?” but also “how does it change?” we exploit precisely that connection between film and dream; spaces shift with the logic and fluidity of the dream state. The geography of the film must be evocative yet elusive; the vampire’s castle and the wilderness concrete in their tone and unmappable in their contours. Reality, but with fantasy; they must dovetail.
Spiess agreed. Wagner offered in support the reminder that in Rubens’ engraving of the sheep, which Goethe showed to Eckermann, the shadow is on the same side as the sun.
If only the camera could move! Imagine if the camera could move! Wagner too is excited about the possibilities. “When and if,” he says dryly, “we have the budget to experiment accordingly.”
Second full production meeting tonight. All of us—Wagner, Grau, Spiess, Galeen, myself, Max Schreck, who will be playing the Nosferatu—crowded into my room. Some wine and sausage. Talking about the sources of horror. Grau claims our new art has an advantage over literature because the image can be clear and concrete even as it remains inconceivable. That is the paradox that causes the hair on the back of our necks to rise. Wagner adds that what people look for in film is a way to load their imagination with strong images. The fact that these images are silent is a supplementary attraction; they’re silent like dreams. I think he’s right, for as Hofmannsthal points out, we have only apparently forgotten our dreams; in fact there’s not a single dream that, reawakened, does not begin to stir: the dark corner, the breath of air, the face of an animal, the glide of an unfamiliar gait, all of it makes the presence of dreams perceptible. The blackness below the stairs to the cellar, the barrel filled with rainwater in the courtyard, the door to the granary, the door to the loft, the neighbour’s door through which the beautiful woman casts into the dark and palpitating depths of the child’s heart an unexpected thrill of desire…
We fall silent, passing the wine. Spiess says it’s like travelling through the air in the company of Asmodeus, the demon who raised roofs and laid bare all secrets.
Wagner says he imagines a future film which will be nothing on screen but beautiful creatures and transparent gestures, looks in which the entire soul is read.
Grau points out that in Mediterranean countries, children born with red hair or unusually pale complexions were watched carefully for other vampiric signs. Everyone looks at me.
Galeen has been listening to all of this, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his palm cupping his fat face. It’s necessary, he says, to correct the dictionaries. The majority of terms today no longer correspond to the ideas whose image they were intended to provide. Are love, friendship, heart and soul still the same concepts they were when the ancient dictionaries were composed? What do the old “fantastic” worlds of Grimm, Hoffmann, or Poe represent for us today? Let us, he says, consider them with modern eyes: they remain a source of inspiration, nothing more; for what we have daily before us goes beyond even Jules Verne. Douglas Fairbanks’ flying carpet already bores today’s young; they sniff out special effects and look for the artifice that made it possible. We’re no longer astonished by the technically unheard-of. We’re surprised on those days the newspaper does not trumpet new breakthroughs. So we look for the fantastic within ourselves. We notice the child or the dog who walks to the mirror, caught by the miracle of this doubled face. We wonder: if this second self, the Other, were to come out of the mirror’s frame… ?
Empty wine bottles are pyramided on their sides against the wall like artillery rounds. Grau, slightly drunk, eyes Spiess. There’s been more tension as to his presence on the payroll. Prana, as a new production company, according to Grau can afford little extravagance. This despite the fact that Agnuzzo’s delight with Lasker-Schüler caused him to pony up a check to cover “additional contingencies.”
In Berlin, Grau quarrelled to the last minute about the additional spending represented by Spiess. He stalked around the station platform gesturing with the company’s train tickets in his hands, and only gave in when I reminded him how much money I’d already saved by agreeing to cast Wangenheim instead of Veidt. Grau is ambitious, and given to wild statements intended to cow the listener. Prana is a creation of his will and rhetoric and is all he has. His painting career has not been a success. I told him Spiess was indispensable in helping me think, and dream, and important to the project in ways I could not yet articulate. Grau finally accepted my explanation. Spiess remains uncomfortable in his presence.
Wagner peers into an empty bottle. Grau is slumped to the floor, his head against the door of a low cupboard. Galeen still has his chin in his hands. Only Schreck seems unaffected by the wine, looking each of us over in turn.
The meeting has petered out. To finish, we toast the enterprise: Grau the good fortune of the company, Galeen the spirits around us who work with us, Schreck the undead, Wagner the new cameras ordered from Berlin, and myself my young collaborator Spiess and his contribution to my work. In the silence, Spiess’ eyes shy from mine. Afterwards, he’s the last to leave. He stands with his back to me, rummaging in the mess for his coat. He’s still angry that I hadn’t wanted him to come. I’m condemned not for having been unreasonable but for having come to my senses too slowly. I stand closer, still without touching him, and he eludes my hand nimbly, like a beautiful animal. I’m reminded of a title for which I can’t find a place in the film: “She stands in front of him, still drawing back but trying to attract him to her”.
This has become something unsuitable for public consumption. Where will I get the money to repay the advance?
Spiess refuses to talk about Lasker-Schüler’s claim. We quarrel about this regularly. He notes only that the savagery of her claim indicates how badly I must have hurt her. He offers no further insight on this point, either. So my detective work is solitary and intermittent. Hans is the roundtable topic of my insomnia. I work through our time together the way a limited art student toils to copy a masterpiece. And what does all that effort represent? A man, frustrated, weeping for himself.
I have always been a fugitive and a vagabond. For a thousand years none of our family has remained anywhere without growing uneasy, without being seized by wanderlust. I am at home in no house and in no country.
The Murnaus have always been aloof, have always designed their own worlds. My father left a thriving business and went his own way, bought a magnificent estate at Wilhelmshöhe, with land, hunting, a carriage, and a horse. We children were delighted. The garden had everything we could wish for—a grotto, a ruin, a secret pond, a giant stone, a trapeze. It was a miniature paradise.
Bernhard was the first to visit me in Berlin after I’d cut off communication. The first night I joked with him about Father letting his youngest son out in Sodom, and he told me he’d been strictly forbidden to move in my “circles.” When we met Spiess by accident, Bernhard took his leave, and did not meet me the next morning as planned.
I am both my father and Something Else, and remain mute before the ongoing miracle of the coexistence of the two.
Talked with Schreck about the Nosferatu. Schreck is a very strange man: narrow-shouldered, peculiarly stiff and clumsy, strikingly ugly without any makeup. At lunch he knocked over his water glass with a wooden sweep of his arm and then simply watched it, glared at me and then the water as it ran across the table. Intensely private, yet he’s begun to follow me around, trying to absorb as much as he can. His performance is absolutely crucial. He has had very little experience but when I saw him bending without pleasure over a child on the Kurfürstendamm I knew he was the Nosferatu. I have begun talking with him about his role the only way I know how: trying to articulate the sources of my own obsessions. His silences seem equal parts hostility and understanding.
I talked of the vampire’s parasitism—you must die if I am to live. I talked of the loathsomeness and the dread of his allure. I talked of the way the terrible inhumanness of him, the nightmarish repulsiveness, should move easily among the bourgeois naturalism of the costumes and acting styles of the rest of the cast—the way everyone must see him as in some ways not out of the ordinary.
More midnight work with Spiess on Galeen’s script while the rest of the company sleeps. The hotel is silent. In the distance someone is drawing a wagon up the road.
Spiess reports quietly on his readings. He lays out on the bed charcoal drawings of amulets and charms, diabolic designs. The vampire he believes first appears in a Serbian manuscript of the 13th century in which a vuklodlak is described as a creature which devours the sun and moon while chasing clouds. Among the contemporary Slavs, vampir and vuklodlak (literally, wolf’s hair) are synonymous. He reads aloud from a fragment of 15th century Turkish apocrypha: “The Force of Destruction is always near man and follows him like his shadow. For this reason man must always be restored. This restoration occurs in various forms: through the tears of the Force of Creation: water (bathing and washing); through the breath of the Force of Creation: air (ventilation of the house, and living outside); and through meeting every morning the first life-giving rays of the Force of Creation (which are sent from the sun).”
We trade ideas until the sky pales, building together an artifice superior to the work of either of our imaginations alone. We construct a new scene for Hutter’s arrival: Distant mountains. Vratna Pass. In the background the fantastic castle of the Nosferatu in the evening light. A steep road leading straight up into the sky. Hutter abandoned by his coach. Something comes racing down—a carriage? A phantasm? It moves with unearthly speed and disappears behind a groundswell. Out of nowhere, reappears. Stops dead. Two black horses, their legs invisible, covered by black funeral cloth. Their eyes like pointed stars. Steam from their mouths. The coachman, whose face we cannot see. Hutter inside. Carriage drives at top speed through a white forest! (We’ll use meters of negative, like “the land the sun travels through at night” so feared in ancient Egypt.)
If the camera could move with the coach— So that we could feel the terrifying capacities of evil—
Then the courtyard. The carriage at a halt. Almost in a faint, Hutter climbs down. As if in a whirlpool, the carriage circles round him and disappears. Then, very slowly the two wings of the gate open up…
Six days of shooting. The camera still trembles. The new one sent from Berlin is worse than the old one. I let them develop the bad takes in case the camera has performed some miracle of its own. Yet some scenes come off beautifully. The panicking horses Hutter sees from the window of the inn: on a grassy slope, the ground falling away toward the back. Night mists creep up the valley. The horses raise their heads as if frightened, and, scattering, gallop away. The white horse spun and shook perfectly, which he refused to do yesterday. The camera just got it. And one, after hours of work, backed out of the frame! The effect was marvelous. Even Wagner, for all his exhaustion, was excited by how it will look. The possibility of other people’s fatigue never occurs to me.
Spiess proposes a trip to the South Seas to collaborate on an old photoplay of his entitled The Island of the Demons. I’m insufficiently excited about the idea. A horrible fight.
I must avoid a certain kind of coldness that results from the way I work. It would be fatal.
Spiess gone to Berlin for a few days for “personal matters.” We fought again over Hans. Clumsy life going about its stupid work: even when we want to reveal ourselves we’re so poor at it that we spend most of our time in self-concealment one way or the other. My experience of him is discontinuous, my attention uneven, my judgement and understanding uncertain.
He was gone all night and announced his trip the next morning. I said nothing. I was busy the entire day. That afternoon on his pillow in his room, I left for him one of the vampire’s entreaties to Hutter:
Would you not like to wait a while with me, dearest worthy? It is not so long until the sunrise—
And during the day I sleep my best; I sleep most truly, the deepest sleep—
Long hours in the makeshift projection room last night. The coach arriving at the inn. Wangenheim crossing the little bridge to the “land of the phantoms.” The forest he views on his journey. That last setup particularly difficult because of the terrain. Extreme long shots of landscape must be shot north or south so that the crosslight provides definition. Flat, dead-on light causes shadows to fall away behind objects so that there’s no modeling, and backlighting is problematic in all but the clearest skies.
It’s irritating to see so little, because the true rhythms will be produced only in the cutting. Can’t find the take of the white horse turning with its balked jumpiness, and there’s no trace of it on the labels. Awful if that shot lost.
With some of the vistas Wagner hasn’t enough courage. He compromises and won’t take a bold enough line. The result is a softness to his work that I must overcome. It’s all too “beautiful.” Whereas I want something more harsh to contrast with the beauty, a starkness and awed sweep…
Grau has done a marvelous job of turning what’s innate in Schreck into the Nosferatu. Schreck’s been bound into a three-quarter length jacket, buttoned up tightly. His makeup (I must show his hands today) will take three hours.
Endless discoveries. Water from a spring so pure the animals take the trough to be empty. The play of shadow off it in twilight like the marble ceilings of seaside hotels. Grau, in his other hat as producer, complains that we continue to fall behind our schedule. But what shots! Today an open cart-shed full of rakes and scythes, and that grey spider on the backlit orb-web. Broken sunlight through isinglass. Wagner’s work, viewed each night, is breathtaking: in clarity, in richness of detail, in contour. One can find that same soft brilliance in certain kinds of silver polished with skins.
Greta came to me with an idea for Heligoland: her character, Ellen, waiting for Hutter’s return at a seaside graveyard—stark crosses at oblique and neglected attitudes on the dune, with the sea beyond. A wonderful idea: the natural world enlisted and compromised by the Nosferatu. The natural world operating under the shadow of the supernatural. Enormous tranquillity in the context of unease and dread: for whom is she waiting?
A discussion grows out of our enthusiasm. Endless polarities—west and east, good and evil, civilization and wilderness, reason and passion, with the contested terrain in every case the body of the woman. The obsession is not with the oppositions as much as the areas between them—the possibility that they’re not such oppositions. Hence the connections between Hutter and the Nosferatu, Ellen and the Nosferatu.
The differences between the Self and the Other start to collapse. In Stoker’s novel, the woman from the village sees Harker at the window and identifies him as the vampire: “Monster, give me my child!”
Still no Spiess. Lunched with Galeen and Greta in Poczamok. Bathed in the river. Raspberries!
The publicity assistant back in Berlin sent Grau an article from the Literarische Welt, which he passed on to me: “Murnau has become a new kind of being who thinks directly in photographs. Murnau is a kind of modern centaur: he and the camera joined to form a single body.” An image lifted from Lasker-Schüler’s image of me as “made of leaf and bark / Of early morn and centaur blood.” The article ends by announcing that “Murnau teaches us to see the modern film; others will teach us to feel it.”
Still no Spiess. The headaches back. The doctors unhappy with my kidneys. Great pain while urinating. The crew sits about and waits. At times I’m ashamed of their confidence. What have I achieved so far?
A single day left to do scenes that should take three or four, which is always the way the schedules evolve. Wagner points out that for the negative footage the vampire’s carriage must be painted white so it will remain black. In the same way Schreck must be clothed in white. Multiple disasters and new ideas make the last days on location always a nightmare of clumsiness. Everyone falls over everyone else while the light slowly disappears. Four of us splash paint over the carriage in a fever. Grau fashions a white cloak out of a bedsheet. Eight in the morning becomes five in the afternoon.
That night I dreamed of my father, the last time I saw him: on the platform of the Berlin railway station, standing amid the depressed and nondescript second-class passengers. I was leaning out the train window. For a moment we looked at each other; then the train moved off and he disappeared among the crowd. Then I was in a dead woman’s apartment, gazing at the remains of an unappetizing meal, the head and bones of some smoked fish. A sort of ghost meal.
I lay awake afterwards, and scribbled down an idea for a general shot: Hutter looks around the room which seems to him utterly changed. The damp wallpaper, the stains on the floor, the rough furniture, the depressing well of the courtyard beyond. All these things exude a rank physicality, a bleak hostility, a hostility directed at him.
INTERIORS
Spiess is gone. Frau Reger handed me his note a few minutes after I dropped my valise in the front hall. It was typed. Civilization, as I well knew, had become unbearable, and he’d decided to flee from it and build a new life in the South Seas, perhaps the Dutch East Indies.
A day off work. Unreturned calls to Lasker-Schüler and Veidt. The company puzzled. Wagner attributes it to exhaustion.
Doubts about the whole project. There is an essentially trivial quality at the heart of film’s fascination—a nervous, aggressive vulgarity.
I’m surprised, too, by the intensity of my despondency at Spiess’ departure. As he once wrote me, “Hans is your obsession. I’m just the Catamite who helps you with all your ceremonies of regret.”
Late for work the next day. Unheard of for Murnau. An inspection of the interiors built by Grau and his assistants at the Jofa studios at Berlin-Johannistal. More than a few ironies here: the largest film production studio in Europe has taken shape on the grounds of the old Albatros-Werke. I make movies now where engineers made planes for Allmenröder and me.
It’s a hard place to get used to, a huge dirigible hangar of exposed steel girders and glass that makes all sound harsh and prone to echo. First check of the set of the castle dining hall. An arrangement like a child’s playhouse in the middle of the vast space.
Grau was enraged by the way his sketches had been realized. He ranted, upbraided, drew new versions in the air, and tore down flats, while I stood by befuddled by his talent and passion. This is more often his production than mine, and he’s the glue in the face of my weakness that holds everything together.
He disagreed about the layout of the great hall. He complained the scenic space gave the impression of being cut off by accident. I told him that the compositions were intended to seem part of a larger, organic effect; he said No, banging a table so that a plate jumped: the artistic decor ought to be the perfect composition at the center of which the action took place.
Wagner mediated, suggesting we weren’t as far apart as we thought. I suggested a compromise: we do it my way. Grau left.
Wagner’s steadiness is invaluable. I work beautifully with him, usually by anticipating him. I show him an inferior composition; he looks despondently at it; then gets excited, begins fiddling, and in minutes produces exactly what we need.
When Grau returns the three of us walk the set. I eliminate the chairs (too light and too modern), allow the fireplace (which doesn’t work). Wagner shows us where he wants the second camera. We make fun of his precision. Grau gets onto his hands and knees with a slide rule, and I shout “Closer! Farther! Closer!” while he moves it incrementally this way and that. Spiess had watched us do that in Czechoslovakia and had said later that we’d seemed like a family he’d never be a part of.
Outside the studio we wait irritably for taxis. It’s raining. Schreck leans against a wall in the darkness, his arms folded. He has no hat. Grau is staying at a nearby hotel. Wagner and I are going back to Grunewald. Out of the darkness Schreck asks what we think a vampire is. Wagner says: corpses who during their lifetime had been sorcerers, werewolves, people excommunicated by the church, excommunicated from their lives: suicides, drunkards, heretics, apostates, and those cursed by their parents. Grau, after a pause, looks at me and says: demons who dwell in the corpses of men, to instruct them in vice, and lead them to wickedness.
Some conversations with Leo, Spiess’ brother, about his possible whereabouts. Leo is unsympathetic. The Spiesses were a great Baltic family. Leo is Kapomeister at the Staatsöper Berlin. There’s no guarantee he’ll even let me know if he hears anything.
I blame Spiess as often as I blame myself for Hans. Yet with who else can I share this obsession? He liked to call me the administrator of my own inhibitions. He amended Hans’ nickname and called me Bayard, the Knight Soaked in Reproach. He was impatient with the subject of Hans. He said we were both to blame, always with that air of knowing the price of everything.
The shooting begins and the wolfhound that was Galeen’s idea refuses to film. He takes his place all right but leaves as soon as the cameras begin to roll and returns when they’re finished. We attempt the simple scene of Wangenheim in his room in the castle, a tiny whitewashed room with sharp angles and a huge, crib-like bed in the period style. He is to read from The Book of Vampires (“THE NOSFERATU. From the bloody sins of mankind a creature will be born…”) and go to the window, throwing it open to look into the starless night, while beyond his door in the depths of the castle the horror gathers. He swaggers through the motions, ruining everything. Multiple takes, two or three quiet conversations with him. The film is nearly always finished before one’s had the time to get the actors to forget the bad habit of “giving a performance”.
Then, through the viewfinder, everything was too washed out. I begged Wagner to get more contrast into the shot, so we set about dramatizing the light, hanging screens to define the space and throw shadows on the far walls. Then Wangenheim began botching the simple actions, dropping the book, catching his foot in the bedclothes. I hid myself, thinking him more likely to manage with me not around. At last he made it without disaster to the window, but then it was Wagner’s turn: the camera caught on its cable and didn’t pan. Grau could stand it no longer, and left. We broke for five minutes and did it once more, with only an hour of time left, and miraculously, everything worked. Everyone relaxed. The scene fell together and even a cat wandered through as if it were at home.
At the end of each day, everything but the sets themselves is stowed away out of sight. The rights to Dracula have not been purchased and Grau has begun receiving inquisitive letters from solicitors representing Bram Stoker’s wife.
Talked to Grau about Wangenheim’s costume. Colours offer different sensibilities to light even in black and white photography. For the scenes in the castle, Wangenheim should have a blue waistcoat. This is not superstitious or fetishistic; it has to do with the value of grey that blue will provide.
Also: first day for Ruth Landshoff, who plays Ellen’s sister. The daughter of the ship-owner, not even a professional actress, but someone I noticed months ago in the Grunewald on her way to school. Beautiful and refined, she reminded me of a picture by Kaulbach, and I went to great lengths to meet her mother and ask permission for her to take part in the filming during her holidays. I’m irresistibly drawn to the idea of this woman in my film, in this infernal vision of swarming rats, of pestilential boats, of men who suck blood, of dark vaults, of black carriages pulled by phantom horses…
During a half day’s shooting she stands beside me, not sure where else to go. Wangenheim flirts with her. Wagner and I are filming Ellen’s sleep-connection to the vampire. The only sounds are the turning of the camera and Wangenheim’s whispering. It’s customary to build additional sets while shooting’s going on, a crowd of people standing nearby giving orders at the tops of their voices. But I work in silence, the silence of the film itself. A journalist from my parents’ hometown compared work on my set to a memorial service, presided over by “a tall thin gentleman in his white work coat, standing a bit out of the way, issuing directions in a very low voice”.
I don’t understand how it is that this generation has not seen the rise of a true Poet of film. For all the arts, one is able to cite great masters born to understand them exceptionally. There should come geniuses of the screen who know instinctively what it alone among the arts has the power to do. At the moment we found our stories on novels, stage plays, etc. In the future, we’ll think film and dream film.
More telephone calls to Leo Spiess. He’s taken to hanging up on me.
Wagner took me aside with doubts about Wangenheim’s performance. He said Wangenheim’s aggressive terror inhibited his own. The hero, presented to us as bold/hardy/audacious/daring/venturesome and plucky, suddenly passes from all that to convulsive terror? I thanked him and reminded him it was too late to replace Wangenheim. It was not a comment timed to fill me with confidence.
For the vampire’s arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience.
Filmed Granach, as Knock, the house agent under the sway of the Nosferatu. A relief working with an old friend. During breaks he told the crew how as students of Reinhardt’s we’d lie on the floor of the stage-box to hear and see him work with actors (he allowed no one to view his rehearsals). The scene came off perfectly. Granach reading the cabalistic letter sent by the vampire seems dropped in from another world, his spindly hunchback shifting and jerking, his ugly smile making sense of the strange symbols. A last touch was all his: raising his head upon finishing, as if greeting the evil. Wonderfully disturbing sense of the diabolism closer to home.
The happy accidents of art. As the Austrians say, “Es ist passiert”—It just happened like that.
Reminder to the labs: the lettering of the titles should be lanky and tortuous, like that of Caligari. The background, a poisonous green. A tooth is giving me great pain.
In Czechoslovakia, Spiess related to me a dream that he was Ellen in the film. He went up to the bedroom before his husband. At the side of the bed he heard the fluttering of a bird. The air was disturbed. He didn’t light the lamp or draw the curtain. The streetlight provided the only light. He couldn’t keep awake. In a park nearby, the wind moved the trees. It was as if he’d been chloroformed.
Even after his departure, he continues to provide information on the lore of the vampire. Alone in my room, unable to sleep, I go over, in his handwriting, the last three stages of the etymological history of the word: the Old Church Slavonic for fugitive, the early Common Slavic for the one who drinks in, and the later Slavic for neighbour.
First interior shooting of Schreck as the Nosferatu. Made up, he wanders the dining hall set in preparation, and the stone-work, windows, and doors come to life. It’s we, in our modern clothes, who look like intruders, ridiculous ghosts. The scene of his dinner with Hutter: the hall through the camera appearing to have gigantic dimensions. In the center a massive Renaissance table. In the distance the huge fireplace. The Nosferatu reading Hutter’s letter of introduction: sharp ratlike teeth over the lower lip. Over the top margin of the letter, his eyes, as he hears the clock strike midnight. A snake hypnotizing its victim. Wangenheim smart enough to stop acting as the drama reaches its height, understanding the audience will have already reached the required degree of tension. Afterwards some “executives” from Prana, friends of Grau’s, in for lunch. A strange meal. Schreck, still made up as the Nosferatu, set his teeth on the table like part of the place setting while he ate his soup.
The pace picks up. It must. One set is struck and another built in its place while Grau and Galeen and I confer with the actors for the day’s next scene. More kidney trouble has thrown us a week behind, and Grau called me at the Bühlershoh sanatorium to remind me that the rest of the shooting had to be finished in four weeks, by 1 November. He added that some sets I’d asked him to save had been struck, and that I had to work more sensibly and avoid unnecessary takes. Film stock already cost thirty marks a meter and there wouldn’t be any more forthcoming. Even with the help of the big banks, inflation was making it impossible to raise money. Agnuzzo was apparently tapped out.
Twelve-hour shooting days. Many of us are fighting artificial sunstroke, caused by the arcs. Crew members rub raw grated potato on their faces to combat the burn. The Nosferatu greeting Hutter as it emerges from the darkness of the castle archway. Wagner suggests we use magnesium flares with the arcs to increase the effect of moonlight. Take after take. Schreck sweats and suffers under his makeup and his forehead looks as if it’s been varnished.
Everyone thinking about future commitments: Granach going back on stage; Grau soon to begin scouting exteriors for Prana’s next film. Wagner working with Lang. Galeen to direct his own Stadt in Sicht. We’re all progressively losing the sense that we’re held within the same dream; each of us is beginning to wake up.
My trouble is naiveté. What I should do is overnumber the shots so that as we progress the script girl could note increasing numbers accomplished each day, and Grau and Dieckmann would be steadily mollified.
Tensions continue with Grau over the schedule, our plans for the film, everything. As we get closer to the end more and more of his energy goes into promotion and distribution, which is necessary but seems premature. After he’s interviewed by Der Film I have to read: “Each scene is given over to the director only when ready to be filmed; beforehand the artistic director has prepared it down to the smallest details, according to psychological and pictorial principles, and has sketched it out on paper. Each gesture, each costume (the era of 1840 approximately), each movement has been laid out with scientific rigor and calculated to produce a specific effect upon the spectator.”
The publicity material prepared has achieved a tone that verges on provocation. One of the handouts:
Nosferatu was there. In the streets. Mongrels howled it. Babies cried it. Crooked branches traced its letters in the earth. The wind swept the word and carried it away, and dead leaves from the trees read “Nosferatu.” It invaded everything. One could see it along walls, above streetlamps, in the eyes of those late to bed. It fastened to ganglia and sounded in bones. It clamored. It uttered cries like rats in a coffin. Maidens whispered it in their sleep. Above them in the darkness it formed, livid and ghastly pale, leaden and yellow, full of sulphur and fatal breath. And you? Do you still feel nothing? Nos-fer-a-tu—Nosferatu—beware.
Shot by shot I know my way through. I will not give in until I have what I want. But every morning there we are again on the set, with its dismal fraudulence, flapping wall, plaster gargoyles. Again I’ll get worked up, pull my hair, go back to my room, start over again.
Determined to do ten shots today, despite Wagner’s pace, Grau’s complaints, and the arcs, which keep fusing. Horrible quarrel. Wagner’s taken to calling me The Schoolmaster.
Fruitless check of steamship offices about Spiess. Found a gift he’d brought me at a dinner I’d arranged in my room in Czechoslovakia. An erotic drawing of two boys and a man. We’d been tense and awkward. Wangenheim had wandered by while I’d been examining the drawing. The whole thing had been a Feydeau farce. Spiess had become distracted and impatient. I’d become exhausted and short-tempered. He had left before dessert.
A telegram back from Meidner. No help about Hans. His response was full of questions.
The first stalking of Hutter. Discussions with Wangenheim beforehand. What matters is not what the actors show me but what they hide. Above all, what they don’t suspect is in them. I cite for him the Baroness in Schloss Vogelöd, who after her husband fends off her kiss and announces his renunciation of everything worldly, whispers distractedly to herself, “I’m longing for evil—seeing evil—wanting evil.”
We begin. The set deathly quiet. Hutter in his room in the castle, huddled behind the door. He opens it a crack. View deep into dining hall. By the fireplace the Nosferatu, motionless, arms down, confrontationally stark against the background. Horrible lack of movement. Hutter supports himself on the doorpost. Terrible realizations dawning. Shut the door, shut it quickly! No bolt. No lock. He rushes to the window. (View of the forest at night: undergrowth; wolves raising their heads, howling.) The contrast between Hutter’s movements and the Nosferatu’s: frenzied panic vs. the terrible evenness of the advance. Hutter on his knees by the side of the bed. Stares at the door, which opens to half its width; opens fully. Superimpositions of progressively closer shots of the vampire produce movement without movement, the figure swelling within the frame, the mechanism of nightmare. Wagner has the genius idea of having the figure penetrate a powerful light emanating from the side just as he enters the doorway. Four days of work.
Two weeks left. Hardly eating. The same woman journalist from Der Film who interviewed Grau told me today that my face was like two profiles stuck together. Ellen’s room, her decision to sacrifice herself, the final approach of the vampire are all still left to do. Two days of work on Ellen reading The Book of Vampires, until my temples are throbbing, my cheeks burning, my whole frame shivering. A few hours in my room drinking hot soup. Realizing mistakes I made by plunging on at such a pace; but besides the lack of time, I feel myself fighting to prevent any kind of indecision at this point from demoralizing the unit.
My headaches worse. My kidneys breaking down. Berliners are tactless and cruel. On a bus yesterday a young lieutenant seated me with a flourish. The spectacle of this disintegrating thirty-three year-old seems to make people laugh.
Take after take of Ellen at the window, seeing the Nosferatu. She is pure (and therefore appalled by what she has to do) and she is not pure (since she makes her bed available to the vampire.) Greta not up to it. Wagner works with the inhumanity of all cameramen; he calibrates the lights at his own pace without noticing that Greta all that time is swaying on her feet. Grau looks on, his arms folded. The nerve storm finally breaks and she collapses. Wangenheim comforts her while we wait. The shooting goes far into the night.
This fear of coming to a standstill, of not being able to go on, of having to break off—it’s connected to all of my other undertakings: loving, observing, participating. Everything, in short, that has called for perseverance.
Little sleep; endless, crushing headaches. Granite pieces breaking behind my eyes. Cold sweat, palpitations, exhaustion. A full day without working at all. Grau in a frenzy of rage and despair over this preview, in a Marxist rag: “This occultism, which has victimized thousands of shaken minds since the war, is a strategy mounted by the industrial world to deflect the worker from his own political interests. Today the occult takes the place of religions that no longer attract clients. Workers! On your guard! Don’t give your pennies to a spectacle designed to stupefy! Let the phantom “Nosferatu” be devoured by his own rats!”
Grau’s response? Ever more publicity. Prana has now spent more on publicity than on the film itself. It seems clearer and clearer to me that the whole enterprise is an enormous bluff. Where is the publicity money to come from? Grau says “the Otto Riede Bank,” but Wagner has told me that this bank does not exist, and that Otto Riede is a simple employee. Yet the madness goes on. Grau plans a party on the release date: Saturday, March 4, “Prana’s Day.” He’s secured the marble entry hall of the zoo, and commissioned a prologue by Kurt Alexander inspired by the introduction from Goethe’s Faust. He’s hired Elisabeth Grube of the national opera to perform with the ballet troupe. For musical accompaniment there will be the great harmonium “Dominator,” transported to the site at massive cost. And all of this, he announces, will be filmed!
Hobbled back to the set this morning accompanied by a nurse. Disoriented by the medication and exhaustion and worried all day by an oppressive sense that I’m out of touch with the world. Stagehands stood around in groups as if at union meetings, and eyed me. The whole film seemed moribund. Woke that night from dreams which seemed to move like dirty water forming monstrous waves. Neck hurt.
And then a late-afternoon wait in a pub across the street from the studio. Another problem with the arc lights. Wagner and I share wine, bread and butter, minced pork. I confess my fears, my inability to understand what I’m doing, or go on. Wagner tells me that I alone can do this. Seeing my face, he puts his hand to my cheek, there before the entire pub. That easily, his palm brings me a temporary peace. He tells me he’s been viewing the footage, and that it’s everything I’ve hoped for. He is such a mysterious figure, finally: cheerless and sober and intent on something outside my view.
A few hours’ sleep. A breathing spell. The final sequence to be done, the Nosferatu’s approach to Ellen.
The horror coming slowly, tensed like a predatory animal. A new idea, necessitating a new set at this late date by Grau: nothing but the shadow of Nosferatu on the wall of the stairs, mounting with dreadful slowness, then more quickly, an awful quick-footed walk, fingernails dripping, until it pauses beside the door. The hand and fingers extending elastically along the wall. In the room Ellen shrinks before the monster we still don’t see, except for the black shadow of his hand spreading across her white body like ink. She jerks her head down in anticipation of his touch, as her husband had. The shadow fist seizes her heart. And then in the darkness, on the very side of the frame, obscenely unobtrusive, the Nosferatu feeding.
The shooting done. A week’s rest. The unit comes back together one last time to view the rough projection before the final cutting begins. Grau, Wagner, Galeen, Wangenheim, Greta—all of this is now a memory to them, like a party they found puzzling and absorbing but not pleasant.
Galeen torments me with an article in the Berliner Tageblatt, reading for the group: “Of all the film directors, Murnau is the most German. A Westphalian, reserved, severe on himself, severe on others, severe for the cause. Outwardly grim, never envious, always alone, his successes and failures arising from the same source, each of his works complete, authentic, direct, logical, cold, harsh, and absolute, like Gothic art.” Much hooting. Grau suggests it sounds like an obituary.
We view what we have. Some pleasures—the opportunity to make fluid human time, so painful in its rigidity, to arrange and rearrange it, our small triumph over the inexorable. Again struck by how often the camera could see what I couldn’t feel.
Long stretches of footage so bad no one will comment. Enduring them I begin to tell myself I can still do what I set out to do; yet if there are faults in the work, they’re mine alone.
In the darkness, the absence of Spiess is more comfortable and familiar. The more he pursued me, the more I restrained my passion for him. This sense of never being at home, with anyone, I feel more and more, the older I get.
More footage. My concentration dissipates. I remember living in a series of hotels, when I was very small, before father bought the estate. One small old hotel in particular, by the sea, a little room full of sun, where you could smell the apples and the waves.
Someone yawns. Someone shifts in his chair. In the silence of a changeover in reels, I can hear us all—Grau, Wagner, Greta—murmuring with pleasure and amusement. Behind the whirring of Wagner cueing up the final leader, we can hear the sound of many voices singing in the garden below: children outside our dark little room, shouting in the sunlight.