Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/03/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor, Walter Ladengast, Dan van Husen, Jan Groth, Carsten Bodinus, Martje Grohmann. Screenplay: Werner Herzog, based on a novel by Bram Stoker and a film by F.W. Murnau. Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. Production design: Henning von Gierke. Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. Music: Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh.

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu gets a little choppy in its efforts to blend both Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. The latter was an "unofficial" version of the novel, which the producers neglected to obtain the rights to film, and it was almost suppressed. But the potency of Max Schreck's embodiment of Dracula (called "Count Orlok" in the Murnau film) remained, and it informs Klaus Kinski's makeup and manner in Herzog's version. Herzog did a lot of tinkering with the Stoker version -- Jonathan Harker's wife is Lucy, not Mina as in the novel, and Dr. Von Helsing is not the vampirologist of the book but rather an elderly scientific skeptic -- but he stayed generally faithful to it almost to the end, when he switched to the denouement of the Murnau film and then added his own shocker twist. The homage to Murnau is apparent not only in Kinski's imitation of Schreck, but also in Isabelle Adjani's performance as Lucy, which is built on silent-movie mannerisms, including effective use of her great haunted eyes. Even though it's full of images designed to shock and disgust, including a plethora of rats, Herzog's film is often quite beautiful, especially in the scenes set in the Carpathian Mountains (actually filmed in Slovakia and the Bavarian Alps) and the views of the quaint town called Wismar in the film, but actually shot in the town of Delft and several other villages in the Netherlands. The performances are all that they should be, including Bruno Ganz's determined Harker, whose character twist at the film's end seems organic to the performance, and Roland Topor's giggly Renfield, which often seems to parody Peter Lorre. Dracula is so familiar and fertile a source for movies that it probably will never receive a definitive version, but Herzog's makes a good bid for it.