"Nosferatu" (1922)

"Here begins the land of phantoms."

And, with F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), so also begins the effective history of the vampire in cinema.

Most of my exposure to Nosferatu was in film history and aesthetic/style classes, which always pointed to the film as an example of influential German Expressionism. Though I'd seen many a clip from the film, tonight was the first time I sat down to watch it in its entirety.

As Nosferatu suggests, vampires have been present in cinema from a remarkably early period, but for my generation, it's difficult to approach the topic without making reference to Twilight (2008). I know; even after all this time, there's still a lot of Twilight hate. Even if the portrayal of vampires in Twilight infuriated about as many people as it infatuated, the fact is that it has been a major influence for subsequent films, shows, and novels, and, I suspect, will probably always be the most relevant example of the vampire trend for my generation.

Coming from that background, as well as having a history of doting upon Joel Schumacher's deliciously outrageous vampire tale, The Lost Boys (1985), the idea of the vampire in cinema has always been of interest to me.

Nosferatu is, as promised, just haunting as all my professors claimed. The film has a romance with death and all of its imagery. Phantoms, shadows, coffins, rats, the plague - what more could you ask for from a German Expressionist film?

The story tells of a young German man, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), who goes to visit Count Orlock (Max Schrek) in Transylvania to sell him an estate in Germany. Hutter leaves his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder), at home. While Hutter is at the Count's castle, he begins to suspect that Count Orlock is a nosferatu, a blood-sucking vampire with hidden plans for his guest.

Throughout the film, many of the characters fall into trances or fevers, making the film, itself, rather a feverish piece. Hutter falls into a fever dream and wakes up shouting, "Coffins... coffins filled with earth!" His wife, Ellen, seems to dream of the very things that are happening to her husband, as if she can see him in visions while he is away. These visions make her sleepwalk, often into dangerous situations like nearly jumping off the balcony. The film leaves you with the images of eyes, often wide with laughter, surprise, or, most often, horror. The film is delirious with a pure otherworldliness from which you cannot look away.

When I first made a point to watch Nosferatu, I didn't know if or how the film was related to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Though the similarities in story are now apparent, I wasn't sure how one could have gone from Dracula to Nosferatu, name-wise, until I looked into the word's complicated history. Apparently, the word "nosferatu" is an archaic Romanian term for "vampire".

Which makes a whole lot more sense.

The production history of Nosferatu also sounded complicated. Murnau's film was an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's novel, which is why all of the names are different from the names in Stoker's Dracula story. Unfortunately, changing the names doesn't sound like it helped Murnau and his crew very much, since Stoker's widow later sued the production company for rights infringement anyway. The idea of an unauthorized adaptation of a novel in today's industry would cause so much legal trouble that I fail to even imagine it.

Speaking of books, I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the book Jonathan reads in the film, called The Book of the Vampires. The knowledge inside is always cryptic and leaves you wondering.

Nosferatu also presents a lot of interesting ideas about what constitutes a vampire and how they behave. The film suggests that the plague in Germany in 1938 was actually caused by a single vampire biting and killing people. Count Orlock does not create more vampires the way that Dracula does; instead, Orlock simply kills them, which appears to the people to be some sort of quickly-spreading plague. When I started to wonder why the Count was hauling a lot of coffins filled with dirt around, the film used this interesting intertitle to suggest a rule for the nosferatu vampire:

Nosferatu purports that vampires cannot leave the ground they were buried in behind them because they must sleep in this same ground by day, a detail which has definitely gone out of vogue for subsequent film adaptations.

Summary: For me, the most interesting parts of Nosferatu were understanding the how Count Orlock was different from other vampire characters and the unearthly haunting quality of this simple - and agelessly powerful - dark romance. The magic of doors which open and close themselves, the spookiness of the long spindly fingers of Count Orlock the nosferatu, and the steam of a vampire in the sunrise will stay with me for a long time.

"The Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954)

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void..."

These words are an interesting choice to bring us into the world of Jack Arnold's The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a B-movie produced by Universal which has, of course, reached cult status in the ensuing years.

Released three years after John Huston's The African Queen (1951), Creature, in all of its black and white glory, might seem far removed from Huston's star-studded, Technicolor production, but for me, it's hard to ignore The African Queen when watching Creature.

For one thing, some of the footage in Creature looks like it could have been spare or reused footage from African Queen. But, more broadly, both films make it impossible to ignore the popularity of the 1950's jungle theme trend.

It makes perfect sense that Universal would finance a B-movie that makes use of the fad. After all, The African Queen had been the 11th most popular film released in 1951 (thanks, IMDb!), and was so popular, in fact, that Walt Disney would use the film as inspiration for a certain attraction at the new theme park he was opening a few years later in southern California (The Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland is still a popular attraction today).

All that was left for Universal to do was to figure out how to make a quick buck off of African Queen's success.

Of course, that isn't to say that Creature doesn't have a lot to offer in its own right.

Creature portends to be a film which deals with science; both of its main characters are scientists, and the voyage to the Black Lagoon to discover what marine life lurks in the unexplored waters is, of course, all for the purposes of scientific discovery (for everyone except for Mark, the third scientist, whose only goal seems to be to kill the Creature).

David, the main character, is the familiar "dedicated scientist" and much of the dialogue throws its lot in with clinical language, hoping that if it sounds the part, no one will question it (welcome to science fiction!).

The film's commitment to science portrays the field as both ground-breaking and flawed. While these are the people who are making the discoveries that are helping us understand the world we live in, our efforts are inevitably human and incomplete.

The Creature's only real monstrosity in the film is his otherness. Though the film is quick to have the Creature needlessly murder two innocent men at the start of the film in the Amazonian jungle, it seems to be in the film purely to have something to blame the creature for. It's unclear whether the Creature has any true understanding of what he is doing or why he would carry out these murders. In fact, many of the murders seem to be self defense.

What makes Creature terrifying is not necessarily the Creature. Watching the fish-man, I couldn't help but think of Marilyn Monroe's line in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Sure, the Creature was "scary-looking, but he wasn't really all bad. He just craved a little affection.... a sense of being loved and needed and wanted."

Maybe I'm sentimental, but really... couldn't the Creature just have felt hunted, felt he had to protect himself? I suppose that excuse would cover over a lot of sins. But surely this Creature, which, as far as we know, had lived for thousands of years in the waters of the Black Lagoon would only have continued living there peacefully if humanity had not interfered.

Whatever the Creature's motives, there's no denying that the film leaves the viewer with an omnious feeling, though not of the typical monster variety. There's no escaping the awareness that the Creature is a man in a suit, so this film does not lead to the simple fear that the Creature will pop out from under your bed. The real fear behind Creature is the way the film suggests unknown terrors that are yet to come.

Maybe this Creature is harmless (when not preyed upon), but what about all of the other creatures that science has not yet discovered?

For me, David's monologue to Mark is the moment of the film that has stayed with me the most:

"We’ve only just begin to learn about the water and its secrets,

just as we’ve only touched on outer space. We don’t entirely rule

out the possibility that there might be some form of life on another

planet. Then why not some entirely different form of life in a world

we already know is inhabited by millions of living creatures?"

This monologue is a refreshingly disturbing moment. Most of the film's writing is not too out of place for a B-movie (which I don't say pejoratively; I think the B-movie's writing tradition is just as valid as any other kind of film's classic form). There's a lot of the beginning writer's mistakes, most noticably the heavy use of character names in dialogue. But these things are not blemishes; they are part of what makes the film great.

The B-movie, in itself, is the bare bones of cinema, the back-to-basics, the appeal to the essential thrill we seek from stories. Like many other kinds of films which embrace the fundamental - from simplistic to raw to outrageously unapologetic - these are the kinds of films which reveal our ridiculous capacity to invent and imagine, even when it doesn't make sense.

The fact that Creature was so popular that it spawned two sequels, Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), also puts the concept of the B-movie franchise on the table. Now that we live in a culture which is overpopulated with big-budget sequels, prequels and the like (see my post on this topic here), it's a completely foreign idea to make a series of films for as little money as possible.

Creature seems to be written to allow for sequel possibilities. The fate of the Creature is left uncertain at the end. At one point, David's girlfriend and fellow scientist, Kay, asks "Do you suppose it remembers Mark's attack and seeks revenge?" This line seems to be the inspiration for the second film in the series, Revenge of the Creature.

The B-movie could deliver a series for cheap and in as little time as one decided was necessary. The decline of Universal's monster pictures, like Creature, as well as the other studio B films would logically come with the advent of television, where viewers could get more (or less) complex stories in a wider variety from the comfort of their own home.

And though it is obvious, Creature demonstrates that what was expected from sequels and studio-funded films has drastically changed in sixty years. Though television didn't put the movies out of business, as they originally feared it would, watching B-movies really reminds me of the major ways that studio practices had to (and have to) adapt, and how films like Creature would eventually lose their power and proliferation at the box office because of this.

Summary: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) shares similarities in theme with The African Queen (1951), but offers its own considerations of science, monstrosity, and the changing idea of the franchise.

Some thoughts on Eisenstein

Reading: Sergei Eisenstein, "The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form)"

The idea at the heart of Eisenstein is simple: conflict creates meaning. Because conflict creates meaning, and meaning has power, the root of cinema is within montage.

Simple, right?

There is no theory writing (that I've seen yet, anyway) quite like Eisenstein's. If I thought Vertov was manic, Eisenstein must have been his teacher. The reading says they were colleagues. That makes sense.

The layout of this piece is essentially montage itself. He is heavy-handed; he writes each phrase (albeit excitedly) with the intention of creating methodological building blocks. He communicates such a simple principle in a completely convoluted, conflicting way (which, of course, is the root of the principle itself).

My impression of Eisenstein is one of a mad scientist, a man in a laboratory that has somehow been converted into a place where film can be studied, looking as he does at a shot as "molecule" which "explodes" out of division into meaning (269). His language is scientific and haughty, but frenzied. I find his style stressful, which makes me question if I'll ever be able to fully engage with his writings, though the conclusions he draws about the nature of cinema hold impressively true today.