The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

NO END TO NOSFERATU

by Thomas Elsaesser, 2007

This article, from A Companion to Weimar Cinema (ISBN: 0231130554), edited by Noah Isenberg for Columbia University Press (2008), is a revision of ‘Six Degrees of Nosferatu’, which originally appeared in Sight & Sound in February 2001.

Appointments in Carpathia

‘Not so fast, my young friend!’ Professor van Helsing calls after Harker in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens. [Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror.] (1922). ‘No-one outruns his destiny.’ Both the film and Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula bear a family resemblance to the ‘Appointment in Samarra’, after the W. Somerset Maugham story of the merchant who came across Death at noon in Baghdad and, panic-stricken, rode to Samarra, unaware that his real appointment with Death was not until the evening – in Samarra. Harker travels to Transylvania, thinking he is selling the mysterious Count a piece of real estate, but what the two also trade when they exchange contracts is the portrait of Harker’s fiancée Mina, giving Nosferatu access to and possession of her person – the main reason, at least in Murnau’s film, why the Count acquires real estate in the first place. And when Harker manages to escape from the Count’s castle, making his way home on horseback, little does he know that in the meantime the Count is already sailing ahead to await him in the becalmed port of Harker’s native city, ready to land his deadly cargo of plague-carrying rats. Murnau too was involved in appointments in Samarra: for instance, he seems to have undertaken what would prove his last journey from Los Angeles to Monterey in order to evade the very fate that was to lie in store for him. He died on March 11, 1931 in a freak automobile accident near Santa Barbara on his way to arrange a steamship passage to New York after having been warned by his astrologer that he should avoid travelling on land.

The making of Murnau’s last film Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), which opened nine days after his death, was similarly ill-fated. Not only did the production, which began auspiciously as a collaboration between Robert Flaherty and Murnau, break up in disarray and had to be re-arranged around Murnau alone by Bill Bambridge and Flaherty’s cameraman Floyd Crosby, but it seems that Murnau himself was proceeding at cross-purposes. According to his correspondence, he actually undertook his South Sea journey to visit not Tahiti, where the film was shot, but Bali, where a long-time friend and former associate had made his home. Tabu has often been regarded as Murnau’s intimate film diary, the ultimate home-movie: beautiful bodies diving into the deep for pearls, darting canoes, languid and yearning limbs stretched out or embracing. But in its sombre, ominous and uncanny mood in the midst of the noontime heat, its empty landscapes and restrained framing, Tabu is actually a companion film to Nosferatu. The old Hindu priest, who impartially but implacably pursues the young couple, fulfils at plot level a function similar to that of the vampire, namely to split the couple, and in the name of the father (or the feudal law of the first night) reclaim the virgin bride. And as in Nosferatu, doom in Tabu comes in the form of a ship, pushing its way gently into the perfectly framed shot of a peaceful port. In Murnau’s cinema, it seems, few boats can hope to come home to a safe harbour – but they are expected, nonetheless.

Nosferatu’s cast, crew and back-stories are reminiscent, besides the appointment in Samarra, also of the proverbial ‘Spanish inns’ so beloved by Luis Buñuel (La Voie lactée [The Milky Way] [1969], for instance), where fates cross and chance encounters give rise to unexpected chain reactions. Despite the detailed research of Michel Bouvier and Jean-Louis Leutrat, the question of how Nosferatu came to be made is still something of a mystery. Virtually the only film made by Prana – Sanskrit for ‘breath of life’ – a financial sinking ship whose owners were subsequently taken to court for copyright violations by Bram Stoker’s widow Florence and the British Society of Authors, Nosferatu owed much to the enigmatic figure of Albin Grau, who signed for the decor and costumes but also seems to have been the driving force behind the production, both financially and artistically. [1] Very little is known about Grau, though a recent article by Enno Patalas depicts him variously as a student of Eastern philosophy, a freemason and master of the ‘pansophic lodge of the light-seekers’ in Berlin, a fan of Aleister Crowley, a friend of novelist-painter Alfred Kubin and the author of a pamphlet about the use of colour in decor and lighting in black-and-white films. [2] Other, barely less mysterious figures include Greta Schroeder, the actress playing Ellen / Mina, who may have been married to Ernst Matray, a well-known actor used by Max Reinhardt, before she was briefly the wife of Paul Wegener (director of Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. [The Golem: How He Came into the World.] [1920]), and Ruth / Lucy, apparently played by a schoolgirl who Murnau had observed outside his house in Berlin-Grunewald and recruited for the role of Ruth / Lucy. More straightforward collaborators were consummate film-industry professionals: screenwriter Henrik Galeen (who also wrote Der Golem) and director of photography Fritz Arno Wagner, one of the three top cameramen at Ufa. Also well documented is the actor playing Knock / Renfield, Alexander Granach, who was to have a distinguished career in the US, both as a theatre actor in New York and in Hollywood movies. His most impressive part was undoubtedly that of the Nazi police inspector Gruber, in Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a bitter historical irony that Granach, a Jew from Galicia and refugee from Nazi Germany, had sufficient wit to relish: see his autobiography, There Goes an Actor. [3] Gustav von Wangenheim, playing Jonathan Hutter / Harker, also had to emigrate in 1933, but given that his political sympathies were with the Socialists, he went east rather than west and spent his exile in the Soviet Union, to return in 1945 to East Berlin, where he became the long-serving director of the Deutsche Schauspielhaus.

Balkan wars

Germany in 1921–1922 was recovering from the bloodletting of World War I. The spectres that haunted the new Republic included the Spartakist uprisings in Berlin and Munich, based on the Soviet model and bloodily suppressed, a bout of raging inflation that bled the economy like an internal haemorrhage, and an army of horribly disfigured war-cripples. But it was another memorable event that left its echo in Nosferatu: in the winter of 1918–1919 a Spanish flu epidemic and famine hit Germany, ravaging the country and reportedly killing more civilians than the Great War itself. So the cholera Nosferatu is supposed to record the origins of is itself doubled by several successive disasters befalling a defeated Germany, during which public opinion only too readily blamed the victors of Versailles for not coming to the country’s aid. Instead, the French, adding insult and humiliation to injury and penury, insisted on the prompt payment of war reparations and annexed the Rhineland, setting off a chain of events that gave the nationalist right its first electoral successes among the working class.

The war itself had perhaps also left less visible scars in the shape of traumas, especially on the veterans. In the run-up to the opening of Nosferatu, Grau published a piece in Bühne und Film explaining how he’d come by the story and why he had wanted to turn it into a film. [See ‘Vampires’ by Albin Grau on p. 59 of the actual MoC Nosferatu book. – Ed.] It has, perhaps unsurprisingly, to do with the war in Serbia, and his experiences as a soldier of the infantry. Dispatched to a remote village as part of what Grau called ‘a vermin-extermination commando’, he is billeted with an old peasant who tells him the story of his father who, killed in a blood feud, was buried without sacraments and haunted the village as a vampire. The peasant even shows Grau an official paper about his father’s disinterment in 1884, where the body is discovered perfectly preserved, except for two front teeth now protruding over the lower lip. The prefect ordered a stake to be driven through the heart of this ‘nosferatu’ (Romanian for ‘undead’), who expires with a sigh.

What comes into view in Bram Stoker’s original Dracula as much as in Grau’s tale and Galeen’s unauthorised adaptation for Murnau is Britain and Western Europe’s relationship with ‘Mitteleuropa’ and its eastern flank: the Slav peoples in general and those of the Balkans in particular, a world the Germanic west had for centuries studied with fascinated antipathy. And Mitteleuropa also encompassed ‘the Pale’ – the home territories of the eastern Jews whom the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 had forced to move westwards. Superimposed in the figure of Nosferatu are several contradictory and conflicting ethnic or racial ‘others’, making him at once an ‘in-between worlds’ creature and a babushka doll of ‘worlds-within-worlds’. Put differently, the story prefigures in some sense even the imperial colonisers’ bad dreams of a reverse colonisation of the mother-country through the colonised subjects. The earth he brings in his coffins, as well as the name of his ship (‘Demeter’, i.e. ‘Mother Earth’) give a clear hint of this return. That such an influx of the subjugated and exploited should be seen in terms of rats, contagion and contamination speaks volumes: about the unselfconscious racism of the educated classes during the last but one turn of the century, but also about ‘us’, hyper-self-conscious readers of literary texts and filmic discourses. Among the citizens of ‘Fortress Europe’ today, some harbour their own, or similar nightmare visions of history’s undead heading west from the ‘land beyond the trees’ (Transylvania) and even further east.

Six degrees of Murnau

Nosferatu is a film about networks of contagion and contamination that are also networks of secret and subversive communication. The lines of attraction and repulsion that link Nosferatu and Harker, Nosferatu and Mina weave a subtle web of interaction and dependency, of transfer and substitution. These different levels of making contact charge the film with the kind of energy that alone gives vampirism its extended metaphoric significance, reverberating, for instance, in the film-within-the-film (a spoof on Ufa’s recently inaugurated Kulturfilm documentaries, also spoofed by French filmmaker Jean Painlevé, paying homage to Nosferatu in Le Vampire [The Vampire] [1945]) about nature’s own vampires and predators. A mutually sustaining symbiosis mingles passion and revulsion with petrified fascination and drifting abandonment: it takes over the ship, her unfortunate crew and then the burgers of Wisborg, but it is also the subject of Professor van Helsing’s natural-history lesson, when he traces a malevolent genealogy from plant life to animal existence, from carnivorous orchids, polyps, spiders and flies, rats (which Murnau’s editing links back to hyenas and horses), all the way to the beginning and Mina’s playfulness with the cat and her kitten. But a similarly fatal chain of eating or being eaten goes from Mina’s anxious possessiveness as Harker sets off, to the servility of the Transylvanian peasants, the dangerous hospitality of Nosferatu, the craven submission of Renfield, the sadistic exploitation of the ship’s crew by its master, until it returns full circle with Mina’s sacrifice, offering herself to Nosferatu’s terrible visitation.

The idea of unpredictable patterns of propagation is perhaps not so dissimilar from what in more recent times has been studied by mathematicians and statisticians under the name of small-worlds syndrome. Small-worlds scientists are trying to understand the dynamics of groups and open systems and the patterns of their interaction, which tend to oscillate between total randomness and total organisation. Small-worlds syndrome is a key issue for biologists (how do thousands of crickets manage to chirp in unison within seconds of starting up, or how do glow-worms synchronise their light emissions?), and its mathematics are used by economists when predicting global stock-exchange movements or the effects of a particular market’s collapse. Small-worlds syndrome is of interest to preventive medicine when looking at the spread of viruses and devising methods of disease control, and it helps designers of mobile communications networks trying to determine the shortest route between two long-distance parties, connecting them by piggy-backing on local data traffic.

To the rest of us, the small-worlds syndrome is better known as ‘six degrees of separation’, according to which everyone knows someone famous across the overlap between one’s own circle of friends, acquaintances and associates and the circles of friends of these friends. If we use Nosferatu as a template, then the six degrees of Murnau open up intriguing connections.

Born in Bielefeld in 1888 as the son of a textile manufacturer, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe adopted the name Murnau as a young adult. The fact that he did so in order to disguise an unflattering surname and in homage to an artists’ colony south of Munich already leads to Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and other members of the Expressionist group Der blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] who used to spend time in Murnau. Murnau the place joins Murnau the man up with the circle around Expressionist poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele and connects him to other important avant-garde artists in 1920s Berlin including the charismatic poetess Else Lasker-Schüler and the sculptress Renée Sintenis, both outstanding women in a world of men.

Grau may have connected Murnau to Alfred Kubin and such Prague Gothic writers as Gustav Meyrink, Gustav Janouch and Franz Kafka, but he was an outsider to the film industry, while Galeen and Wagner belonged to several of the production units that existed at Ufa under Erich Pommer. What is called Expressionist film mainly reflected common tastes and preferences among this remarkably tightly knit community of professionals – no more than two dozen names – operating as teams and skills networks, many of them first brought together by Pommer and subsequently dominating the creative input (and output) at Ufa. With the exception of Lang, Murnau and a few others, the directors were no more than first among equals, with their set designers probably leaving the most lasting impression on the look of the films. By the mid 1920s, male stars, above all Emil Jannings, had considerable power, and it was as Jannings’ preferred director that Murnau was put in charge of some of Ufa’s most market-oriented, ‘international’ projects, such as Der letzte Mann [The Last Man, aka The Last Laugh] (1924), Herr Tartüff [_aka _Tartuffe] (1926) and Faust, eine deutsche Volkssage. [Faust: A German Folktale.] (1926), aimed at establishing the Ufa brand-name worldwide and maintaining the studio’s reputation for special effects and other technical innovations. And it was Jannings who helped promote the director’s post-Nosferatu, international career.

Murnau’s reputation is that of the German cinema’s most exquisite Romantic poet, in contrast to the technophile Lang who had astounded the film-world with trick effects since Die Spinnen [The Spiders] (1919) and Der müde Tod [Weary Death, aka Destiny] (1921). In 1915 Murnau was called up and served in the infantry in East Prussia – he hated it and was bored to distraction. The following year he managed to get transferred to the Luftwaffe, where he flew combat missions over France until after an emergency landing during fog he came to spend the remainder of the war as an internee in neutral Switzerland. Murnau’s time as pilot suggests that the tender soul had nonetheless shown a remarkable appetite for the storms of steel, blending his high-Romantic sensibility with a taste for ‘top-gun’ technology typical of the aristocratic German dandy in the von Richthofen mould. Murnau’s obsession with gliding camera movements and intricate spatial set-ups associated with the unfettered camera of Der letzte Mann and with cameraman Karl Freund’s ingenious contraptions, suggests analogies with the perception of pliable space and horizonless, unbounded vistas as experienced by a fighter-pilot.

Nosferatu in love

Most cultural-studies approaches to Nosferatu (or indeed to Bram Stoker’s Dracula) have little trouble relating the myth of the vampire to a historically new and politically troubling awareness of female sexuality. The Lucy figure in the novel and the somnambulist Ellen in the film have been compared to the hysterical females treated by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris at the Salpêtrière, where they were photographed by Albert Londe, thanks to his newly developed chronophotographic camera, while two young doctors from Germany and Austria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, looked on. Stoker is in fact quite explicit when he introduces Dr. Seward and Dr. van Helsing. These two suggest different treatments for Lucy’s symptoms, with the Dutchman van Helsing supporting his diagnosis by a pointed reference to having studied in Paris under Charcot.

But Nosferatu is open to another reading of its sexual pathology. Vampires in the movies are usually bisexual, often letting ambiguity hover over the question of whether, say, Dracula’s brides are for the Count ends in themselves, or merely means to an end (as Venus-traps, to attract young men to their rescue who then become the juicier victims). But Murnau’s Nosferatu would seem to be the prototype of another gender, not least because of the vampire’s many animal features, from his pointed ears and bird-like claws to his rodent-teeth, rather than the more usual fangs suddenly bared on an otherwise impeccably gentleman-dandy face and physique (Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee).

The French surrealists admired Nosferatu mainly for its eroticism, contrasting the anodyne puppy love of Mina and Harker with Nosferatu’s necrophiliac lust, musty and potent at once, exuding the aroma of dank crypts and leathery flesh. According to Robin Wood, on the other hand, sexuality is branded in Murnau’s films as the source of evil. Nosferatu stands for raw carnal desire, which must be kept in check, if not altogether suppressed, in the interest of higher, spiritual values, and so Mina, expressing that mixture of desire, curiosity and horror typical of patriarchal culture when depicting female sexuality, must die along with Nosferatu. But the love triangles in the film also lend themselves to an interpretation that brings out a more layered structure of sexual attraction and ambivalence. For instance, underlying the secret heterosexual bond between Nosferatu and Mina is the relation Renfield-Jonathan-Nosferatu. It is similar to depictions of homosexuality in German films from the immediate postwar period, of which the best known is Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Anderen [Different from the Others] (1919) in which a young Conradt Veidt is seduced by an older man, played by Reinhold Schünzel, after being introduced to him by a fellow-student. The initial situation in Nosferatu suggests that the film superimposes two plot-lines, one heterosexual, the other developed around the homosexual relationship between Nosferatu and Renfield, doubled by the homosocial story of Harker being befriended by Renfield, whereupon the older man introduces his younger friend to a very experienced ‘queen’. Likewise the protagonists of Murnau’s Faust – Mephisto and the rejuvenated Faust – could be called a queer couple, especially on their extravagant travel adventures to that celebrated destination of homoerotic desire, the Mediterranean, their romance thinly disguised by the excessively heterosexual story of Faust and Gretchen.

Siegfried Kracauer had argued that Weimar cinema tended to stage anxieties about male self-images and male sexuality: his From Caligari to Hitler [4] even ties the theme of damaged masculinity to the vanishing of paternal authority after a lost war. Certainly the preferred stories of Expressionist cinema focus on male identity crises, often signalled by the appearance of a double, and they toy with bisexuality by featuring love triangles in which the two males are usually ‘best friends’ or business associates who show an obvious, sometimes fatal, but rarely openly acknowledged attraction to each other. In this respect Murnau’s films are neither an exception nor unusually explicit. Doubles abound in Murnau as they do in other directors, whether by way of disguise (Herr Tartüff) or across a split male character (the eponymous protagonist of Faust both old and young, the porter of Der letzte Mann at the hotel and at home, the hero of Phantom [1922] timid by day, a criminal at night). Likewise there are several crucial films where a pure, almost asexual love is threatened or destroyed by the intrusion of another male’s predatory attentions – to the man (Nosferatu / Harker, Wigottschinski / Lubota in Phantom, Mephisto / Faust, Tartuffe / Orgon, Hitu / Matahi in Tabu). These depictions, in turn, can be ranged side by side with the troubled male-male relations to be found in, for instance, Varieté [Variety] (E. A. Dupont, 1925), Danton (Dimitri Buchowetzki, 1921), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), all the way to Die 3 Groschenoper [The 3 Penny Opera] (G. W. Pabst, 1931) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (Piel Jutzi, 1931).

For a novelist like Jim Shepard, on the other hand, Murnau’s homosexuality is crucial to both his films and his life; sorrow and secrecy become the wellsprings of his creative drive, the motives behind a tale of love, longing, guilt and self-abjection. In his fictionalised biography of Murnau, Nosferatu in Love, [5] Shepard makes the twin poles of self-deprecating humour and self-lacerating grief the protective armour behind which the director feeds on lascivious thoughts furtively indulged. For Shepard, the deepest wound the war inflicted on Murnau was the death on the Eastern Front of his intimate friend Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, on whom he once recklessly cheated. Baffled and hurt, Hans voluntarily enlists and soon gets himself killed, to the undying shame and mortification of Murnau, at least according to Shepard.

It is true that Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele (1889–1915) was an Expressionist poet who with Else Lasker-Schüler, Ludwig Meidner, Robert R. Schmidt and Paul Zech wrote and edited the magazine Das neue Pathos. He was the son of a Jewish banker and art-collector, whose mother Mary, a concert singer, virtually adopted Murnau after his return from Zurich at the end of the war. It is also true that the Ehrenbaum-Degele villa in Berlin-Grunewald remained Murnau’s home from 1919 until he left for America in June 1926. But Shepard’s fictional diary spins its tale around a number of characters, situations and incidents for which there is no evidence in the historical records.

There are two other ‘degrees of separation’ – one that might underpin and the other undermine Shepard’s speculations. The first is a suggestion, already made obliquely in the press reports after the opening night, that Nosferatu is something of a spoof, the camp interpretation and insiders’ tale of characters and antics at home in another castle from that of Count Orlok – the private retreat (a castle in Austria) and very public court (the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Berlin) presided over by the reigning monarch of Berlin’s artistic circles and theatre worlds, Max Reinhardt (from 1911–1914 Murnau was a pupil of Reinhardt’s in Berlin, working as an actor and assistant director). In his brief study of Murnau published in 1977, Stan Brakhage first reads Nosferatu as a primal-scene fantasy of Murnau himself, linking it to a homosexual childhood fantasy and the wish to do away with his parents and at the same time play father to his mother. But he, too, links the film to Reinhardt (‘Max Schreck’, the enigmatic actor playing Nosferatu would thus be an insider joke about Reinhardt, i.e. ‘Max the terror’) and to his circle, where homosexual eccentricity and extravagance was tolerated, if not encouraged. [6] Although impeccably hetero himself, Reinhardt offered homosexuals with talent, flair and panache a safe haven and congenial company, amid the strict anti-homosexual legislation of the otherwise broadminded Weimar Republic.

Shepard describes these excesses with some gusto by introducing a character called Spiess, who plays the role of seducer, Mephisto and evil genius to the hesitant Murnau-Faust. Both the orgy and the careless betrayal of Hans that follows appear as the work of Spiess, and in the end Shepard’s novelised biography stands and falls by the credibility one is prepared to give to this figure and his influence on Murnau’s life. As it happens, a Walter Spies did in fact exist, [7] and was present – another ‘degree of separation’ – during the shooting of Nosferatu, though he never appeared on any list of credits. But he was not the figure depicted by Shepard, and his subsequent life is too important, both in Murnau’s life and in many other histories of dance, music, the movies and photography, to leave Shepard’s account unchallenged.

Although definitely an intimate of Murnau’s in the early 1920s – Murnau invited Spies to live with him and asked him to decorate his villa – Spies left Germany soon after the making of Nosferatu, disenchanted by the empty frivolity of the film world and its hangers-on. Spies was a painter and musician, born in Moscow in 1895 – another Slav – whose family fled west to Berlin in 1909 and who sent their son to study in Dresden with Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix. In the ethnological museums of Berlin and Amsterdam he discovered the visual and musical culture of what was then the Dutch East Indies. In 1923 he boarded a ship for Java and settled in Yogyakarta, where he stayed for four years before moving on to Bali. His letters to his mother, as well as the few to Murnau, make it clear that Murnau remained his sponsor (he bought several of Spies’ paintings) and close friend. A visit of Spies in Bali was on Murnau’s mind when, disappointed with his work in Hollywood, he bought a yacht, called it ‘Bali’ and set off on a voyage on the high seas in the direction of the South Sea Islands and East Indies. If he was indeed haunted, and if the prematurely ruptured, unfulfilled relationship with Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele made Murnau into something of an undead, a ‘Nosferatu in love’, then it certainly was not due to Walter Spies. On the contrary, Spies’ invisible presence during the shooting of Nosferatu makes him a more likely candidate for the haunter, giving another twist to the mystery surrounding the real identity of the central figure.

The vampire as method actor

The suggestion (found also in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire [2000]) that Nosferatu is not played by an actor but by a real vampire was first made by Ado Kyrou in Le Surréalisme au cinéma [Surrealism in the Cinema]: ‘In the role of the vampire the credits name the music-hall actor Max Schreck, but it is well-known that this attribution is a deliberate cover-up… No-one has ever been willing to reveal the identity of the extraordinary actor whom brilliant make-up renders absolutely unrecognisable. There have been several guesses, some even mentioning Murnau.… Who hides behind the character of Nosferatu? Maybe Nosferau himself?’ [8]

The actor-as-star-as-vampire, needing fresh blood and being paid in unsuspecting victims, is in the film business not such a far-fetched metaphor. Many a great star has been known to terrorise the cast with his caprice or turn the set into a bloody battlefield of violated egos and raped reputations. But an even more archetypal movie situation is that of the scientist harnessing the dangerous powers of nature or the unconscious in order to realise his vision at whatever cost to himself and others: every Dr. Jekyll trying the serum on himself is a stand-in for the artist-director as sorcerer, no longer in control of the apprentices he has summoned. It is Faust calling on Mephisto, selling his shadow or his soul (elaborated in Shadow of the Vampire where the director’s ruthlessness in sacrificing his leading lady to his vampire-actor for heightened artistic effect is depicted as equal to the vampire’s thirst for blood). But the conflation of actor and vampire only appropriates what lies ready-made in the filmographies not only of Murnau but of German Expressionist cinema in general, with its ubiquitous ventriloquists’ dummies, waxworks coming to life, warning shadows, Golems – all caught in the confusion between art and life, or rather of art as more truthful, more youthful and more authentic than life.

Why is – with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) or Shadow of the Vampire – this standard trope of movie lore making a comeback? Perhaps it is the old problem of realism, mimesis and art that needs to be revived in the digital age, where the fake looks more real than the real thing, but where we have also become deeply suspicious of authenticity? Are the image worlds we inhabit of such universal duplicity that it is axiomatic we only have ‘faith in fakes’?

Some of the most intriguing questions at the heart of many of the Weimar films we still value today – and this includes Nosferatu as well as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] (Robert Wiene, 1920) – are philosophical, and thus perennially relevant: the (epistemological) problem of ‘other minds’ for instance, and the (ontological) problem of ‘other worlds’. In the first case, what would it mean to ‘know’ what goes on in someone else’s mind, and what proof do I have that others actually exist? And in the second, if the world I live in is merely someone else’s fiction, where would the ‘outside’ be, from which I could ever see that I am trapped ‘inside’ – if not inside someone else’s inside? These are problems to which the answers are versions of Pascal’s wager: the leap into faith (which may be the void) remains the sole cure for such radical scepticism. The vampire movies, as suggested, are more in the line of a Faustian pact than a Pascalian wager, whether entered into out of world-weary longing for youth, love and eternal life, or out of a quest for truth, beauty and the perfection of artifice by ambitious artists or mad scientists. Chances are that in either case they get more than they bargained for, either dying in horrible agony like Dorian Gray or suffering the apparently inverse but in truth complementary fate, namely becoming one of the undead and wishing for mortality: in both cases, ending up as monsters, excluded from the community of ordinary humans and carrying with them an unredeemed or irredeemable surplus.

Eternal repetition of mechanical inscription

What is this surplus energy or meaning that brings forth these figures of excessive but also inextinguishable desire? Excess there is, yet is it actually a matter of desire? ‘We bring them the plague, and they don’t even know it,’ Freud is supposed to have said to Jung the day the two of them disembarked in New York harbour in 1908. [9] Whether spoken in jest or not, some would agree, given the strange history of psychoanalysis in the US.

The theories of female sexuality woven around Dracula / Nosferatu all suggest that these attractive / repulsive monsters embody the vagaries of desire. But psychoanalysts, especially the Lacanians, might well argue that vampires are drive creatures, not desire creatures, meaning that it is the death drive, the repetition compulsion, the entropic principle of life that animates them, not desire, based on (and sustained by) lack, renewing itself around the perception and disavowal of difference. Yet there may be another way of describing both the elements of excess, surplus and residue in these figures and the sense that they are creatures driven not by (human) desire but by some other force and energy – that of our technical revolution, as it has impacted on the domains of information and communication. Dracula may be the only original myth the age of mechanical reproduction has produced. This, at any rate, is the notion Friedrich Kittler harbours about the figure’s attraction. For him, Dracula stands for the eternal repetition of mechanical inscription, [10] which entered the western world with the typewriter, the gramophone / phonograph and the cinema. But what the myth tells us about these new media is still a moot point.

Kittler, for instance, argues that Dracula is the story of how women themselves become media, how their susceptibility and sensitivity is discovered in the middle of the 19th century as a resource and raw material. Charcot, Breuer, Freud – for Kittler they all line up as men who ‘harvest’ the mediatic powers of women, and it is Bram Stoker who calls their bluff, who both exposes the patriarchal mechanisms and offers – like all good myths – the imaginary solution that allows Victorian society to live with this shocking realisation and its real contradictions. In the contrasting and complementary figures of Mina and Lucy, and in the descriptions of their symptoms, Stoker makes hysteria and somnambulism appear as the human equivalents of wireless transmission (invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1886). On their journey in pursuit of Dracula back to Transylvania, Mina serves the men as both medium and messenger – thanks to her vampiric contact with Dracula, she is able to track his global position through the transmissions emanating from him, but also, being familiar with the technically advanced, instant and universal transcription device of the typewriter, she records and fixes the ‘messages’ he unwittingly still sends across the ether, while the posse of pursuers travel towards their appointment in Samarra / Carpathia. As Kittler dryly remarks, women around 1890 had only two choices: to become hysterics or typists. Mina, after the demise of Lucy, is both.

Freud, by contrast, was a notorious technophobe. (According to his son, he hated both the radio and the telephone.) The only piece of technology he ever pronounced on – and which Jacques Derrida has famously commented on [11] – is the mystic writing pad, basically a child’s toy and more akin to the wax tablets of the Romans or the palimpsests of the medieval monks than to Edison’s, the Lumières’ or Marconi’s inventions (although as RAM or ROM on a CD or chip, the mystic writing pad has had something of a comeback). Freud’s obdurate refusal to have anything to do with cinema, notably his utter lack of co-operation in the making of G. W. Pabst’s Geheimnisse einer Seele [Secrets of a Soul] (1926), is also well documented. [12]

Psychoanalysis and the cinema – born together, but on a collision course ever since. Freud was right: they are antagonists, but they came together when realising they had a common enemy which it now seems it was their historical mission to kill: literature and the literary author. [13] For the first one hundred years, the technological media and psychoanalysis competed around literature’s prime task and near-monopoly: ‘representing’ – that is, recording, storing, repeating – individual human experience. Cinema and psychoanalysis translated experience into images and sounds, text and traces, embodied or imagined, manifest as physical symptoms or as phantom sensations. Where the cinema does it mechanically, using a synthetic support, psychoanalysis retained the (female) body and the (human) voice as material support. It, too, however, tried to automate the recording process as much as possible through free association as ‘automatic writing’ and through the analyst as passive recording device. In the process, both media produced that famous ‘excess’ which in various generic formulas (from musical and melodrama to special effects and body-horror) feminism and film studies in the last thirty years have been trying to come to grips with.

In the new century, it is psychoanalysis that is in full retreat, a mere ghost haunting the hermeneutic mills of the humanities. And yet, Nosferatu is still with us: the excess energy of the undead is now readable as belonging to the cinema and its eccentric patterns of propagation and proliferation across the culture at large. Not only in the way films have deposited their coffins in galleries, museums, schools and libraries, but also thanks to the Renfields – cinephiles turned necrophiles – at home in archives, lovingly restoring perished prints and reviving the ‘originals’ at Sunday matinees or special retrospectives. Less fancifully perhaps, remakes of the cinema’s own classics and restorations of the cinematic patrimony are also efforts to banish and ‘contain’ the mysterious forces or life-forms that the sound-image media have brought into (human) existence. •

REFERENCES

1. Michel Bouvier and Jean-Louis Leutrat (1981) Nosferatu, pp. 230–233.
2. See Enno Patalas (1999) ‘Drei Schattenfiguren. Arthur Robison – Albin Grau – Ernst Moritz Engert’, FilmGeschichte 13 (June), pp. 49–53.
3. Alexander Granach (1945) There Goes an Actor.
4. Siegfried Kracauer (1947) From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.
5. Jim Shepard (1998) Nosferatu in Love.
6. Stan Brakhage (1977) ‘F. W. Murnau’ in Film Biographies, pp. 245–270.
7. See Hans Rhodius (ed.) (1964) Schönheit und Reichtum des Lebens: Walter Spies, Maler und Musiker auf Bali, 1895–1942
8. See Ado Kyrou (1963) Le Surréalisme au cinema.
9. Another six degrees of separation? According to Elisabeth Roudinesco, it was Carl G. Jung who related Freud’s remark to Jacques Lacan, who was fond of quoting it to his students. See Elizabeth Roudinesco (1997) Jacques Lacan, and also quoted in Octave Mannoni (1971) Freud (translation by R. Belice), p.168.
10. Friedrich A. Kittler (1993) Draculas Vermächnis – Technische Schriften, p. 12. Also in English as (1989) ‘Dracula’s Legacy’ (translation by William Stephen Davis), Stanford Humanities Review 1.1, pp. 143–173.
11. See Jacques Derrida (1978) ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ (translation by Alan Bass), Writing and Difference, pp. 196–231.
12. I have attempted a more positive interpretation of Freud’s technophobia in (2008) ‘Freud and the Technical Media’ in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (eds) Archaeologies of Media.
13. See Kittler (1993), p. 96, who in this respect contradicts but also complements Stephen Heath (1999) ‘Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories’ in Janet Bergstrom (ed.) Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, p. 46.

©2007 by Thomas Elsaesser, reprinted by kind permission.