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Rating:  -
For sheer technological artistry, it's difficult to see how the Kino remastering of "Nosferatu" could be surpassed. Visual quality is excellent and the original 1922 Hans Erdmann score is (at long last) made available. Supplementing the digitalized film is an hour-long documentary on the making of "Nosferatu," as well as clips from director F.W. Murnau's other films. All in all, Ausgeseichnet!
"Nosferatu" really is an amazing film (and I say this as someone not particularly fond of the vampire genre). Murnau's expressionist cinematography creates an eeriness that's never been matched. The long, lean Count Orlok (Max Schreck), his fingers unnaturally talon-like, arms stiffly at his side like a corpse's, eyes wide open but somehow dead, can frighten even modern audiences who've been trained by special effects artists to demand much from spooky movies. The shipboard scene of Nosferatu rising from his coffin is uncanny. Murnau also speeds up the camera when he films Nosferatu in motion, thereby suggesting that what the viewer is seeing is unnatural, other-worldly.
For the most part, Gustav von Wangenheim's Hutter (parallel to Stoker's Jonathan Harker) is competent, although there are a few of those overdone melodramatic moments one associates with silent film. At one point, for example, Hutter slams a book about vampires on the floor to express his amused contempt for such superstitions. But the scene is so over-acted that it comes across as more funny than anything else. Greta Schroeder's Ellen (Stoker's Lucy) is a flop. Schroeder seems incapable of not overacting in the grand style of silent movie queens satirized in "Sunset Boulevard." Alexander Granach's Knock (Stoker's Renfield) is, in my judgment, the real star of the film. Granach perfectly captures the creepy madness of Knock/Renfield. His performance is stellar.
The libidinal tension implicit in all vampire stories also comes through in "Nosferatu." In one scene in which Nosferatu is preying on Ellen, she cups one of her breasts and Nosferatu's shadow cups the other. A gripping, masterful image, and one that's not been bested by the thousand and one Dracula re-makes since "Nosferatu."
Rating: -
This is of the double Kino DVD. There are a few improvements in this edition, making it worth getting, particularly as you can find it reasonably priced. First the improvement of the frames per second makes the acting more realistic and modern if still more than touched by Wagnerian over-emoting. Note: there are tiny frame displacements that in this digital computer age could easily be fixed by fabricating the tiny image loss between the two surrounding frames and it is hoped in the future Kino, Criterion and other labels will stop being reticent to do this. Creating the missing frames in such things as Harpo Marx's run across a couch with an ice block in one of their Paramount comedies will benefit from this too. It's no different than removing noise from the soundtrack or dirt from the print.
The images are almost pristine, and the tinting lovely. There are a few sequences that should be tinted and either Murnau neglected to do them or the surviving materials are missing them - for instance Orloc crosses to his house in full daylight carrying his coffin of dirt. Obviously Orloc dies in the morning sunlight later, so this sequence should be tinted blue for night. It would be no crime to fix this. Ditto when Orloc dies, there is no tinting as the sun hits him, yet when the film cuts back to the dying woman the room is tinted gold. It seems obvious this is some kind of technical oversight at the time. Preserving such an error isn't film scholarship, it's stuffy academy-itis, like the insistence that Shakespeare's son's name was Hamnet (not Hamlet) though it's certainly just poor penmanship by the local Stratford official.
The music is by far the best of the many film soundtracks over the years, most of which are too clever, too modern, or contemptuous of the original film, treating it as camp. This is just right, a reconstruction of the original classical score, deeply romantic and gothic, Wagner Lite. "Nosferatu" is a love story, in fact two love stories that intersect tragically. This score completely expresses that. The complaints about it are inexplicable to me. If you want a jagged atonal score, buy Kino's previous issue. This version is what Murnau obviously intended musically.
Murnau and Gance and Cocteau are the great surreal artists of the cinema, and no one has touched them via modern computer work to date; Tim Burton should study Murnau for a couple of years before he tries to make another film, his "Sweeney Todd" was childish compared to this. Given the technical limitations he had to deal with of the period, Murnau may have been the greatest of all, though Gance was more innovative. This is the edition for anyone who hasn't seen this film before, or anyone who has seen it many times and loves it. There will be a better issue in some decade to come, but it will be built on this. The German disk is actually unnecessary, but probably allows Kino to pay for the issue by charging for a double disk; given the results they are entitled.
PS If you want to dig deep enough, there are anti-Semitic and homophobic strains in the depiction of the title character - the anti-Semitic patina remarked upon when the 1922 actor's name was used for the villain in the Tim Burton Batman film - but frankly there are very few horror films then or now that don't in some way. It's certainly less homophobic than "Silence of the Lambs".
Rating: -
I have been in love with this film since I first saw it when I was 11 in 1982......I can't even count how many versions I have bought on VHS and DVD thru the last 20 years. However, looking at this version is like actually going to see it in the movies back when it came out!! SUPERB JOB!!! The original score fits so well with the story, and, for once, its nice to see the most complete version of this film available - its just over 90 minutes. So many other versions are between 54 and 81 minutes. BUY THIS! If you even remotely like this film, BUY IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd give it more than 5 stars if I could!
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Kino has once again done a magnificent job of restoring a classic. I've seen may other editions of Nosferatu over the years with quality ranking from good to horrible. This version is the best yet. The extras that are now so often seen on DVD versions are a nice bonus. If you love silent movies like I do, or are looking for the penultimate vampire movie, look no further.
Rating:  -
"The Bremen Incident" proved a touchstone in Nazi History. Moored in New York harbor in 1933 the German Cruise Ship The Bremen flew both the Traditional National flag of Germany as well as the flag of the newly elected Nazi administration; the centerpiece of the Nazi flag being the ancient occultic symbol The Swastika. Angered by Hitler's anti-Semitism a mob of communists and Jewish intellectuals stormed the ship and destroyed the crimson, white and twisted black flag. In the aftermath of "The Bremen Incident", Hitler rallied the country to adopt the Swastika as the national symbol of a united Germany. The Nazi Party flag, with its occult symbol in the center of an iris-like circle became the sole image of the German people.
above information paraphrased from the following site:
http//:www.holocaust-trc.org/wmp14.htm
"When your candle burns low, you've got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness"
Blanche DuBois in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE by Tennessee Williams
Dirge-like, deliberate, ominous and foreboding- a harbinger of impending doom, the vampire Count Orlock marches up the cobblestone streets of Bremen carrying his coffin. Director FW Murnau's 1922 occult masterpiece NOSFERATU uses the medium of film to capture the steady dark progress of not only a plague, but also eerily foreshadow the destructive rise of the German Nationalist Socialist Party. As Count Orlock transforms the bright and sunny sea harbor of Bremen-Town into a funeral procession of endless black coated shadows, so would Hitler leave Germany (and Western Europe) as a rubble strewn corpse, cloaked in darkness.
Murnau communicates this steady progress of darkness through a wide variety of film techniques, perhaps none more so than the iris wipe. As a transition device the iris wipe brings either light to a darkening screen or dark to a bright screen. Like the candle illuminating only a small circle of light so does the iris wipe photograph (the word itself meaning "light writing") a limited image. During the iris wipe, the central image-lit in a circle (like the iris of an eye) may be lit while the rest of the screen vibrates with progressing darkness. The darkness continues to advance on the circle of light until in completely swallows the image.
While Murnau does employ the lapse dissolve to bridge his sequences and scenes, the iris wipe dominates. This re-enforces the theme coursing throughout the film- the steady progress of invited evil methodically poisoning a healthy organism.
Count Orlock communicating to his disciple, the real-estate agent Knock through occultic ancient Sanskrit and Celtic-derived runes asks to purchase an abandoned estate adjacent to the unwitting Hutter and his virgin fiancé Ellen. The legal purchasing of property represents an invitation. Orlock does not invade in a blitzkrieg of dark force. He infects methodically. He is a dark disease descending upon and devouring the forces of light (the dressed in white and pure of heart and body Ellen). The iris wipe serves as visual metaphor for Orlock's power.
Like both the vampire and the steady iris-wipe, Hitler's diseased message of hate descended upon Germany and the world laden with occultic symbols. Legally elected to office, and frequently invited to "annex" unwitting neighboring nations, Hitler poisoned and plundered; fed off the riches of the land, the people and the culture-leaving a wake of cemeteries, rubble and black smoke.
Perhaps Murnau's off-screen interest in the occult and prophecy yielded a means of divining the future for Germany; perhaps not. Regardless, his eerie 1922 horror film NOSFERATU through its use of staging and film transitions foreshadows the blight of Nazism and the progression of darkness it cast over the light of the world.
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