“Nosferatu” by Robert Egger takes up a forgotten chapter in film history

Now in the cinema: The vampire film by Robert Eggers Nosferatu might be the strangest Christmas release ever. Behind the ambitious remake and IMAX presentation lies a rich and complicated history that has defined the film medium, and it’s not pretty. Nosferatu marked the rise of the imitator, but strangely also heralded the arrival of a worthy counterweight to Hollywood’s dominance of cinema. The German Expressionist movement destroyed itself as quickly as it flourished, and continues to haunt filmmakers to this day. The glory days and demoralizing downfall are a horror story all their own.

Torn between creating personal art and paying the bills, German directors produced several stunning films in just a dozen years. As with most great works of art, the bigger the obstacle, the better the final product. They specialized in macabre stories about madness, venality and excess. The societal dysfunction is accompanied by characters plagued by crippling self-doubt, suggesting an inevitable collapse into social decay and cruelty. Supervillains run amok in underground societies and pull the strings in a cold, mechanized world. The thematic and visual appeal that can still be seen in films a century later, be it Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Tim Burton or Ridley Scott. For example, Fritz Lang’s crowning achievement has been reimagined in Queen music videos, Superbowl commercials and anime.

One studio, UFA, dominated the others, its heyday and fall coinciding with the decadent Weimar Republic, the two forever linked. The diaspora was unstoppable, but before Germany’s best and brightest withdrew from Dodge, it had already had a major impact on the young medium’s search for an identity. The artistic impact is so profound that modern viewers who have never seen these silent films are unaware of it Batman The film borrows a bit of the darkness of Nosferatueach noir reflects the disillusionment and perversity of Mand every dystopian film imitates it to this day metropolis‘ Themes and art design.

Britain’s most popular director, Alfred Hitchcock, was taught by FW Murnau in the 1920s before his career took off, and many of Hollywood’s character actors once headlined in Berlin. The movement may have died out in an instant, but it never really stopped, embedded in film culture.

Germany, the masters of horror

Robert Wiene’s surreal horror classic from 1920, The cabinet of Dr. Caligariis generally considered the first groundbreaking film of the German Expressionist phase, the film that made Germany famous in the film industry. At least we diagnose this film as patient zero of the emo outbreak.

Gothic fashion aside, this strange little film established a familiar tone and political stance that would shape German cinema for the next 15 years or so, for better or worse. The film was made almost immediately after the traumatic humiliation of World War I and was conceived by the writers as a bitter anti-war jeremiad. In its final form, it was transformed into a dreamlike fantasy story about a puppet-like man, played by Conrad Veidt, who is forced to kill against his will by a hypnotist. As examined in Modernity and its mediathis subtext has been deleted. To avoid any backlash, historian Siegfried Kracauer claims that Wiene was forced to conceal the inflammatory intent:

According to the pacifist-minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dark intention of portraying the common man drilled to kill and be killed under the pressure of conscription.

The real message in 1920 was an urgent warning and became even more ominous in the decades to come. However, the vast majority of German films were never intended for normal Germans, but rather for foreigners, and UFA’s films were ridiculed by German critics. Nobody in Germany could afford tickets, and inflation made exports much more lucrative. Wiene’s performance in the late 1920s never reached its peak. However, others would follow in his footsteps, especially in the horror genre.

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The production value would improve with the inclusion of special effects and real locations. Wiene’s frequent collaborator Veidt found a niche by starring in films like “Freaks.” The man who laughs (1928) and The hands of Orlac (1924). Of all these masterpieces, FW Murnau Nosferatu (1922) stands out as a highlight, a film destroyed by Bram Stoker’s estate due to copyright infringement and almost entirely lost. A Nosferatu The remake was released in 1979, directed by Werner Herzog, followed by a pseudo-meta remake in 2000. Rob Eggers is just the latest in a long line to pay their respects to Murnau’s bald vampire.

Why the greatest German film was a curse

There is no shortage of brilliant minds from Germanyand one only has to look at later films to find the DNA of German Expressionism. Roger Ebert praised GW Pabst as “the master of psychosexual melodrama,” pointing to dark romances like… Blue velvet, Mulholland DriveAnd Fatal attraction. Hollywood monster films and film noir, which achieved low status as “B movies” in the mid-1930s, share a common origin in the Gothic aesthetic.

Bigger budget American films have ironically inherited the spooky appeal of their German predecessors, which only looked that way because they were extremely cheap. Crews disguised their shabby sets and low lighting with stylized sets and other desperate tricks, painting shadows and lights into the shaky scenery and creating films that had nothing at all to do with reality:

As film historian Andrew Spicer noted, “The most direct influence of German Expressionism was felt on a series of horror films produced by Universal in the early 1930s. Universal, led by German-born Carl Laemmle, had a tradition of hiring Weimar talent.” So did Universal’s monster movies Dracula (and the countless remakes and sequels) owe a small debt to Murnau’s illegality Nosferatuforbidden, but obviously not forgotten by German expats.

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Of all the fertile minds that emerged from Central Europe during the silent film era, Fritz Lang is the one who casts the longest shadow. Crossing genres, his carefully edited spy blockbuster, spyalso known as Spies (1928) laid the foundation for the James Bond novels. He was not afraid to explore new things and dabbled in epic crime novels such as: M, with a then unknown Peter Lorre and the pulp Dr. Mabuse: The player (1922).

metropolis (1927), despite its ever-growing appreciation among artists and critics, was the turning point of the entire film movement, and not in the way you think. It’s a cult classic in every sense of the word. metropolis was such an expensive idiot that producer and UFA boss Erich Pommer was forced out of the film before the thing even hit theaters for tolerating such irresponsible budgets. The new management cut costs and constantly clashed with its employees, losing talent such as Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich.

The party is coming to an end

When the National Socialists came to power, the glamor ended and all films that questioned authority or conventional morality were banned as “degenerate art”. It also didn’t help that many of the key filmmakers and actors were of Jewish descent, married to Jews, or otherwise loathed Hitler. Within a year, Lang was divorced (his wife/co-author turned out to be a secret Nazi) and left the country. He picked up where he left off in Los Angeles. Legend has it that the German propaganda minister and his mustachioed boss were so impressed by Lang’s contributions to the German film industry that he offered Lang to run the nationalized UFA studios, although historians have debunked Lang’s account. Hitler was much more interested in Mickey Mouse cartoons. Unfortunately, Walt Disney was too busy to take the job.

By 1934, the golden era of German filmmaking was finally over, and those in charge who remained were intent on ruining other countries’ films as well, even going so far as to hire a special representative in Los Angeles to sabotage studios that were planning a film. who denigrated Germany’s reputation in the world.

Murnau, Lang, Lorre and Veidt were all gone, as were all the notable stars except Emil Jannings and Pabst, who were among the very few world-famous people who continued to work in Germany during World War II. Remakes and sequels followed – sometimes from the same writers and directors who made the originals – but never quite hit the same high notes. What began as the most promising cinema center in the world had turned into a miserable shell of its former self with the advent of “talkies.” German film never fully recovered.

On the bright side, Murnau, Lang and Wiene are not forgotten in the hearts of film geeks, as the recent revival of Eggers shows. You can watch its updated version of Nosferatu now in the cinema. But maybe don’t bring the kids.