Nature vs nurture… Alraune (1928), Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray

 

The photo play ALRAUNE could easily become a sensation were only its name: BRIGITTE HELM! ¹

Santa delivered and this release is one of the finest of this or any year – if you haven’t already voted in Silent London’s annual poll, please do so now and come back to my ramblings when you have. We have restored and remastered versions of two films directed by Henrik Galeen, The Student of Prague (1926), now running at 133 minutes, and Alraune from the same year and clocking in at a wonderfully clear and tinted 131 minutes (I’ve previously only seen a 98-minute version). For both it’s their first time on Blu-ray and in these restored to within a gnat’s crochet of their original running time.

Born on 17^th March 1908 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, Brigitte Helm was astonishingly still only 19 when this film was released having started her ten-year career at 17 years old on Lang’s Metropolis after which she was offered a UFA contract. But it’s not just her youth but also her lack of formal training that is notable. According to filmportal.de she had featured in school plays and been interested in acting – presumably dancing too – from an early age none of which would have recommended her so much as her poise and presence to Fritz Lang when casting her in his epic.

After the success came the contract which defined and delimited her career, she retired in 1935 after transitioning to the talkies and left Nazi Germany for Switzerland where she raised four children and, until her death aged 88 in 1996, refusing to discuss her film career as far as I can tell? She came she saw, performed like few others and left on her terms as society took an horrific twist. I recall GW Pabst talking about her playing a blind person in The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) in the British Close Up film magazine:

“Do you know the scene when she walks with Jeanne Ney in the streets of Paris, she was almost killed. The actor driving the taxi was not a driver really but had had to learn. He was not very sure of his steering. Brigitte Helm walked right in front of him. I had to run before the camera to save her. Do you know why? She was blind. She simply did not see it.”²

Brigitte Helm

Helm was the daughter of a merchant father who sadly passed away when she was just five, so who can tell what influence this had on the course of her interests. She attended the Johanna-Stift Gymnasium in Werftpfuhl secondary school which focused on the arts and, according to its Wikipedia page, it was here that Fritz Lang saw her perform in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Other sources claim that her mother sent her photograph to the director and pushed her case, maybe both are true but there’s no denying her magnificence and instinct.

The same skills are in evidence in Galeen’s film with the director dwelling on her face and sinewy, almost balletic expressiveness – her hunched shadow contorted against the walls, her hands twisted with murderous hate hovering over her “father” and tormentor’s throat as he sleeps, her huge eyes drooping as the innate furies fill her mind, freezing all compassion and flushing stone cold across her face. It’s an exercise in meaningful movement that you would normally see only through dance.

The story is based on the outrageous 1911 novel of the same name by actor, poet and all-round oddball, Hanns Heinz Ewers which took the medieval myth of the human-shaped mandrake root which was believed to be the result of the semen of hanged criminals somehow impregnating the plant underneath the gallows. Modern science would disagree but who trusts the experts… other than the educated? Anyway, it makes for a ripping yarn in which the new techniques of artificial insemination are used to enable an examination of innate evil versus the nurture of responsible upbringing.

A scientist, Professor Jakob ten Brinken, conducts an experiment using the root, a (dead) hanged murderer and a prostitute to produce a baby girl whom he christens Mandrake/Alraune and attempts to civilise. In the novel the inherent evil is dialled up to the max with Alraune capable of all kinds of perverse behaviour but whilst this no doubt led to the success of the book, it couldn’t be reproduced directly in a feature film, even in Weimar Germany.

The book was the second part of a trilogy featuring one Franz Braun, a cipher for the author, who encounters the supernatural and arcane in books entitled: The Sorcerer's Apprentice or the Devil Hunters, Alraune and Vampire: A Wild Story in Scrap and Colours encourages the Professor to conduct the experiment whereas in the film, he (played by Iván Petrovich) is the one calling for the scientist (Paul Wegener) to think again. The Professor is not for turning though and is determined to play God and put his theories to the practical test with the mystical promise that the resulting child has strange qualities that cause people to love her and that leads them to destruction. She may bring luck but also ruin…

Alraune ten Brinken (Brigitte Helm) is the fully grown results of his experiment, and we find her at boarding school and is first seen toying with fly as it attempts to escape from a glass of water, she reaches out, not to rescue but to push it back, not the behaviour of a well-educated young woman. There is more to come as she leads her classmates into acts of rebellion, she dances, wears cologne and plants a stag beetle on the mother superior’s robes. All of this is but a hint of the novel’s decadence with Baum describing her as the “wild, sinful sister of my hot nights”, her “wild soul stretches forth, glad of all shame, full of all poison…”³

Alraune has out-grown school and to facilitate her escape has lured a young man, Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer) into loving her: getting him to steal money from his family so they can run away. Once on their train to freedom she quickly proves faithless, ordering champagne and flirting with a likely lad who spies her from the corridor. Then a troop of circus performers join the train and Alraune is immediately impressed by the magician’s sleight of hand especially when in one sexually obvious moment he lets a mouse run up her skirt; she leans back and looks him straight in the eye when even Bad Maria might think twice.

At the circus things move on and Alraune is seen sharing a cigarette with the lion tamer (Louis Ralph) standing so close that she can light his fire with her own as it were. Chided for her wanton troublesome-ness Alraune walks into the lions’ cage challenging the beasts to come and have a go if they think they’re feline enough. The animals don’t move until the tamer rushes in with his whip…

The Professor finally catches up on his “daughter” after years of searching and whisks her off to polite society where she plays tennis with Der Vicomte (handsome Britisher John Loder out of The First Born) who soon proposes… But he’s not the only man to have fallen for Alraune and the Professor blackmails her into staying under his “care” as his mind is lost to passion for his subject and scientific rigour is relaced by the need for sexual ownership…

I’ve seen the film on screen before but this restoration adds so much to a story that is still missing a few sections, most notably Valeska Gert dancing in front of a den of iniquity – this is represented by a still and a descriptive intertitle. This digital restoration was made by the Filmmuseum München, supervised by Stefan Drössler and was made from a number of sources which still leaves the film some 12 minutes short of the original German release which no longer exists. Distribution elements from the Danish Film Institute and Russian archive were merged with the censor’s report and the director’s script for the second half of the film helping to recreate the running order and intertitles.

 

One wonders again and again how it is possible that a girl so young as Brigitte Helm is able to play her part with such highly subtle artistry the character of the leading part needing such spiritual and inner comprehension.⁴

The film was a sensation at the time and further cemented Helm’s position as a European star with reviews seeing the emergence of a star of similar sexual magnitude to Garbo and others who played the “vamp” role so popular in America. To the vampire gallery, which runs from Theda Bara to Greta Garbo, let me add the German Brigitte… wrote C. Hooper Trask breathlessly in The New York Times whilst "Trask" in Variety noted that Galeen "squeezes all the horror juice out of [Ewer’s story], and Brigitte Helm, the vamp, is at least 200 percent… When will some American director take a look at this extraordinary fascinating girl. She has an individuality of her own."

Well, Brigitte had a mind of her own and when the time came she would walk away aged just 27… TWENTY SEVEN! Probably thinking like Norma Talmadge that the movies didn’t need her anymore and she, certainly didn’t need them, at least the films that Hitler’s Germany was offering.

Both films are available on DVD from EditionFilmuseum and these Blu-rays are from the Deaf Crocodile imprint in the UDS which include some excellent extras:

•       Excerpt from AUF GEFÄHRLICHEN SPUREN (DANGEROUS PATHS), 1924, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, 15 min. This clip from the 1924 crime film is a rare opportunity to see Galeen’s work as both writer and actor, alongside frequent collaborator, director Harry Piel.

•       New video interview with Stefan Drössler of the Filmmuseum München about the preservation of Galeen’s films, moderated by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile (90 min., in English).

•       New audio commentaries by film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, former director of the UCLA Film & TV Archive and the Filmmuseum München.

•       Reversible Wrap Art by Beth Morris

 

Sadly, there wasn’t space to include Helm’s 1930 talkie remake as directed by Richard Oswald, I’ve only seen it on grimy YouTube and Brigitte is quite different… singing and acting like she’s working in Der blaue Engel… things were moving fast!

There’s more on the Limited Edition including a booklet and Dave McKean cover but you’ll have to look on eBay as it’s sold out!

 

Details on the Deaf Crocodile site and all good online retailers.

The EditionFilmuseum DVD set is available on their site.

 

 

1.  Erich Hellmund-Waldow, Close Up March 1928
2. Close Up, December 1928
3.  Two films by Henrik Galeen: Der Student vonPrag (1926) and Alraune (1928), translated from the original German by Paul Cuff*, on therealmofsilence.com 
4. Erich Hellmund-Waldow, Close Up March 1928

 

*Paul Cuff also has a book on Brigitte Helm in the works and I am positive that I am not alone in awaiting the results enthusiastically!

 

The root of all evil? Alraune (1928) with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, Barbican

So good to be back at the Barbican for a rare silent screening and with expertly inspired accompaniment from the two-man band of Horne and Pyne: four hands, ten instruments?

Directed with sure-footed competence more than style by Henrik Galeen, Alraune doesn’t rank with the best of Weimar cinema but it is still a very interesting film and one I’ve always wanted to see projected with live accompaniment. There are long passages when little happens but human interactions and the music sustained the film in these quieter moments. Variously known as Unholy Love, Mandrake, or A Daughter of Destiny, Alraune is missing a few key segments and again the accompaniment stepped in to offer thematic uplifts as well as emotional context throughout.

The music was eloquently varied, featuring more than just the duo’s prime instruments of drum and piano. Martin’s vibraphone, played with bow as well as soft mallets, lead the line in plaintive and eerie interplay with Stephen’s piano and as the two switched instruments they worked superbly well in support of the events on screen. There was magic in the air on and off.

On screen the magic stemmed from the Germanic Middle Age legend of the Mandrake root (the Alraune of the title), which – and listen carefully here - if left to absorb a hanged man’s “essence” in the ground under his execution, was capable of giving life either by enabling pregnancies or helping witches produce children without the aid of a living sperm donor. Such progeny were said to have no souls and sound far more trouble than they’re worth but, you know, there’s always someone ready to give it a go: to mess with Nature.

First of all, find a hanging man.

Step forward our mad scientist for the day, former Golem of this parish, Paul Wegener who plays Professor Jakob ten Brinken who has become interested in the nature versus nurture debate and this has somehow led him onto the legend of the root. By using the mandrake, he hopes to engineer a human being in order to establish “whether the parents’ genetic make-up, has a purely random effect on the offspring.” Can he create something pure and free from hereditary conditioning? I think you know where this is heading.

The professor grows the Mandrake as required and gets his nephew Franz Braun (Iván Petrovich) to help him find a lady of the “lowest order” - Die Dirne (The Whore) played by Mia Pankau - to act as the incubation chamber for the new being. Just as the woman arrives at the Professor’s apartments, turning in shock to see him emerge in white coat, the film jumps forward almost two decades… some sense lost through censoring perhaps?

Oh, mother... Mia Pankau

Alraune ten Brinken (Brigitte Helm) is the fully grown experiment, now at boarding school and is first seen toying with fly as it attempts to escape from a glass of water, she reaches out, not to rescue but to push it back; not the behaviour of a well-educated young woman. There is more to come as she leads her classmates into acts of rebellion, she dances, wears cologne and plants a stage beetle on the mother superior’s robes.

Clearly Alraune has out-grown school and to facilitate her escape has lured a young man, Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer) into loving her: he is to steal money from his family and they are to run away. Once on their train to freedom she orders champagne and starts flirting with a likely lad who spies her from the corridor. Wölfchen tries to fight him off but there’s to be no respite as a troop of circus performers join the train. Alraune is immediately impressed by the magician’s sleight of hand especially when in one sexually obvious moment he lets a mouse run up her skirt; she leans back and looks him straight in the eye when even Bad Maria might think twice.

Paul Wegener and Brigitte Helm

At the circus things move on and Alraune is seen sharing a cigarette with the lion tamer (Louis Ralph) standing so close that she can light his fire with her own as it were. Chided for her wanton troublesome-ness Alraune walks into the lions’ cage challenging the beasts to come and have a go if they think they’re cat enough. The animals don’t move until the Tamer rushes in with his whip.

So, a heartbreaker with nerves of steel and a twisted sado-masochistic streak… is this what the Professor wanted to find out? How would a woman born from the human stew of a prostitute, a murderer and the mysterious root vegetable work out?

He’ll soon be able to find out as he finally catches up on his “daughter” after years of searching. He whisks her off to polite society where she plays tennis with Der Vicomte (handsome John Loder out of The First Born) who soon proposes… But, he’s not the only man to have fallen for Alraune and the Professor blackmails her into staying under his “care”.

He's behind you... 

From this point one it’s a battle between the scientist and his creation and we all know how those usually turn out or do we? The film has more than a few tricks and turns up its sleeve … there’s an irony in the impact of the Professor’s own true “nature” on the “nurture” of his subject perhaps?

 Alraune is worth watching purely for Brigitte Helm’s performance alone. I love her physicality and dancer’s contortions: she seems almost too frail to be an evil thing and yet there’s considerable strength behind her movement as the Professor will find out. She has the range too and whilst it’s fun to watch her evil contortions we also see hints of a growing humanity… or do we? Paul Wegener is pretty good too, mad science-ing with consummate abandon and obsessing intensely about his creation, Frankenstein with a mid-life crisis and unrealistic expectations.

But, as with all the very best silent film screenings, it was the mix of film, music – excellent audience! – and, of course this wonderful venue! There’s more to come at the Barbican in the New Year and here’s to more screenings like this!!

Details on the Barbican website!

The first Avenger… The Golem (1920), BFI with Cyrus Gabrysch

Alan Moore, perhaps the greatest comic writer since Stan Lee, once described superheroes as revenge fantasies for the impotent… among other things. Moore knows the score and has written Superman, Batman and many other mainstream men in capes. One of his major works is Miracleman – a radical reimagining of the British version of Captain Marvel (or Shazam! as he is now known) in which the powerful man without peer declares peace on a warring World which enters a “golden age”.

The quasi-religious elements in Moore’s superhero writing stems form the source, Seigel and Shuster’s Superman was the product of two Jewish emigres looking for a break and calling on their heritage in the creation of an Übermensch who was all powerful and able to right the wrongs they could see ruining the World.

The legend of The Golem goes back a long way in Jewish history: a mystically evoked super-human who is immune to the weapons of mere mortals and who will protect the weak against oppression and serve the cause of the just. Only those who play by the rules can benefit from this hulk though and the very powers which give him birth may end up being turned against his creators… That’s pretty much the plot of Batman vs Superman right there not to mention Captain America Civil War.

Destiny amongst the stars...

There’s a connection or two with The Student of Prague … Paul Wegener co-wrote with Henrik Galeen who was later to direct the 1926 version and, it was during the filming of the 1913 original that Wegener studied the legend of Rabbi Loew who was reputed to have constructed a golem to protect the Jews from oppression in sixteenth century. Leow’s body is still buried in the cemetery in which they filmed part of Student.

Wegener became so fascinated with the story that this 1920 film, full title, The Golem - How He Came to the World, was his third film on the subject after the 1915 dry-run and the 1917 comedy, The Golem and the Dancing Girl. This, surely his most fully realised effort, was directed by himself and Carl Boese, featured delicious cinematography from Karl Freund and a cast of thousands led by himself as a platform-shoed protector, worked to life from clay (just like Wonder Woman…).

The sets were designed by Hans Poelzig and were described by Wegener as "a poem of a city", sixteenth century Germany as it might have looked in a split reality with later fairy tales, lovely organics lines and not a straight line in sight: a city which has grown around its citizens as comfort and protection: the whole set reflects the feelings of those huddled behind the city walls.

"a poem of a city"

Wegener always denied any deliberate attempt to make an “expressionist” film but… The Golem certainly has many of the hallmarks in terms of this design as well as the settings and camerawork. None of the classification matters though as this is one of the best of early Weimar films and with a satisfying story arc which the “impotent” could easily relate to.

It begins with a mix of magic and magnification as Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) scans the stars for portends. He’s a science-priest who mixes the arcane with astronomy to look after his people and to track their destiny. He sees catastrophe ahead and is busy making plans, moulding a golem from clay who will, with the right incantations and calls to the necessary demons, become a living super being able to defend the Jews from all threats.

He has an apprentice, the slightly fey Famulus (Ernst Deutsch) who has eyes for his daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova who, fact fans, was married to Mr Wegener on two separate occasions) and he might get lucky as she seems game. But events are about to take the turn Loew feared as Emperor Luhois (Otto Gebühr) issue an edict to banish the Jews (usual reasons!?) and tasks the flamboyant Knight Florian (Lothar Müthel) to deliver the message. The ultimatum is delivered to the Jewish leader, Rabbi Jehuda (Hans Stürm) who immediately confers with Loew: what can they do? Meanwhile the mischievous Miriam has caught the eye of the young Florian and he has seen her too... things are going to get breathlessly complicated with these two you can tell.

Loew asks for an audience with the Emperor and he heads off to complete his moulding of his Golem, plastering clay over an unformed face as hard as he can. Then comes the moment when he must bring his creation to life… He draws a smoking circle around himself and summons up the demon Astaroth who utters the word he must use to complete the magic by writing it on a slip of parchment and enclosing it in a star which, when attached to the Golem’s chest will animate the clay. But if removed, the life will drain away and the Golem reduced back to mere clay… every superhero needs his kryptonite.

Wegener is suitably imposing as the hunk of clay and yet there’s a child-like surprise at this new life he’s woken up to. He’s a towering but almost timid presence and when he is presented to the Emperor and his chamber all are swiftly convinced of his good nature. But things go awry as the Rabbi magically projects images of the exodus and the Wandering Jew on the walls of the throne room and when the court get the giggles the figures start to move towards them and the ceiling starts to crumble…

Loew gets Golem to hold up the roof, thereby saving the royal family and earning his people a pardon. Mission accomplished… but not quite as Florian and Miriam had used this occasion to meet in secret and the camera cuts back to what looks suspiciously like post-coital bliss in Miriam’s room… will there be a price to pay? ‘Course there will!

Florian and Miriam after, you know...

Loew has discovered that a change in the alignment of the stars will bring about an unpleasant shift in the creature’s personality and that he will start to do the bidding of the evil Astaroth. Loew just about grabs the star in time to de-activate the Golem… and, that would be that, were it not for the imperfections of the human heart as Famulus re-animates the Golem and orders him to remove Florian. All heck breaks lose.

Cyrus Gabrysch accompanied with super powered piano and ran some impressive lines as the city began to burn and the tension rose and fell. Cyrus is probably one of those who has accompanied this film more times than he can count and yet his improvisations were fresh and let the drama breath.

Wednesday night watching Weimar film… we should do this every week!

The BFI Weimar Cinema series continues through May and June, further details are on their website.

The Veidt Stuff… The Student of Prague (1926), BFI with Stephen Horne, Weimar Cinema

“In many respects, the second film is much superior to the first… a powerful work (that) … proves for the second time that in film, pure art can have great success.” Hans Heinz Ewer, 1930

In her insightful and entertaining introduction, Weimar expert, Miranda Gower-Qian, described this film as essentially a “doppelgänger” of itself, it being a broad “remake” of the 1913 version with Paul Wegener. The film re-doubles the force of Hans Heinz Ewer’s 1913 story with this re-telling and uses that as a launching point for a dramatic enhancement of the ideas drawn principally from Edgar Allen Poe’s William Wilson with a smattering of Faust; as Miranda said, pulling in German Romanticism along with contemporary ideas of individuality and ambition.

For Conrad Veidt’s Balduin to succeed, it’s not just that his friends must fail but that he also must be sacrificed. Balduin’s doppelgänger represents the darker side of his ambition and desires… he ends up ignoring the pure love of a flower-girl, Lyduschka (Elizza La Porta), casting away her pauper’s posy, in his frustrated pursuit of rich girl, Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes Esterhazy) and he’ll cheat at all costs to get what he wants.

Veidt, Krauss and Veidt

In this way the film tapped into the Weimar zeitgeist and what Siegfried Kracauer later called “a deep and fearful concern with the foundations of the self. So, forget expressionist cinema this could rightly be termed existential cinema which incorporated elements of the former and added much else besides.

Henrik Galeen directed and co-scripted with Ewer and he was, as Miranda said, chiefly known as one of Weimar’s best scripters, with work on both Golems, Nosferatu and Waxworks amongst others. The result is a sumptuous mix of stunning framing, lighting and fluid camerawork from Günther Krampf and an uncredited Erich Nitzschmann, that capture magnificent rural settings as characters ponder by lakes, dramatic action as Balduin tries to save Margit on her horse and add haunting atmospherics to the tale. Selling your soul to the Devil is one thing but selling it to yourself is altogether more unsettling.

Conrad and Krauss

There’s a far more bucolic set up for Balduin’s fateful deal than in 1913, not surprisingly perhaps, although that version does have some excellent exterior shots. Veidt gives Balduin far more mystery and depth than Wegener and manages to unsettle the audience through changes in physicality and expression. Make no mistake, Der Student is “concentrated Connie” and it established him at a higher level internationally with what Pat Wilks Battle described as his greatest starring role of the silent era.

His student maybe the finest swordsman in Prague but he is also one of the most impoverished. He broods while the others mess about, drunkenly pawing at Lyduschka in the tavern and challenging each other to duals. Many of the students carry duelling scars and whether this was down to casting or make-up, there’s no denying that duelling and the scars that went with it were very popular among the military schools of this period. Balduin carries no scars and shows just why as he runs rings around an objectionable colleague he challenges to protect Lyduschka’s honour.

But Balduin is broke and susceptible to the enticements of soul-loan-shark Scapinelli (Werner Krauss, without whom, no supernatural Weimar film is complete) who offers him 600,000 gold coins in exchange for just one thing from Balduin’s bare lodgings. Laughing, the student signs off on the deal only for Scapinelli to take his reflection from the mirror… who needs a reflection, you ask yourself? Well, it’s more than a shadow…

Scapinelli also helps set up Balduin with Margit as he rescues her from her bolting horse following a stampede engineered by the old man with a wave of his arms and an evil grin: our hero is playing with fire and doesn’t know it yet; ambition and material success come first.

Agnes Esterhazy

Naturally there’ll be a reckoning but the film is so well paced and engaging we almost forget its coming. I wasn’t disappointed with Der Student and it is indeed one of Weimar’s finest.

Accompaniment was provided by Stephen Horne who made light of the two-hour running time and maintained atmospherics and tension throughout with emotionally literate improvisations that lent so much weight to the uncanny drama on screen. Perhaps the soul of Balduin/Connie was on hand to guide him… he sees and he hears dead people and is our musical medium connecting the modern day to the mood and mystique on 1926 film.

We saw a projection of the excellent reconstruction by Filmuseum München and it was a fine copy with clarity and excellent tinted detail... enough to see right into the Veidt!

Plague songs… Nosferatu (1922), Barbican with Paul Robinson’s HarmonieBand

Well, show me the way to the next vampiric count, no don’t ask why…

Long ago I resolved to try and write about the cream of the silent cannon only after screenings with live music: these being singular occasions in themselves, musical theatre that is unique to this branch of cinematic evolution. There’s pretty much nothing new to say about films like Nosferatu (so, stop typing then… as my friend Scouse Phil might say) except for afternoons like this one when eine Symphonie des Grauens plays out alongside a new and distinctive score.

Paul Robinson’s HarmonieBand specialise in silent film accompaniment and their mixture of Weimar style and modern, minimalist composition is naturally perfect for Murnau’s Dracula Prime. This music is the rooted in the sounds of a society coming to terms with the plague of devastation brought about by war and economic collapse. A Germany creeping warily through the early twenties waiting for the next damn thing to go wrong…

Dead flowers...Greta Schröder

The band featured Walter Fabeck on piano, Kim Mackrell cello, Julia Butterworth clarinets and sax, Dai Pritchard saxophones and flute, Martin Pyne on vibraphone and percussion and Paul Robinson conducting whilst also playing electronic keyboards and accordion. Together they produced a relentlessly interesting score that moved with the narrative in sympathetic unison for the full film: driving along with the emotion and never over-playing its hand.

This was the 2013 restoration which, as Paul explained in his introduction, was only made possible by copies of the film from outside Germany. Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen had hoped that by changing a name here and there they would be able to tell the tale of Dracula without troubling the estate of Bram Stoker but it was not that simple and they had to destroy all copies in distribution.

This restoration is slightly longer than previous versions and is complete with the original tints: it felt richer on screen than my memory of the DVD.

The sinister sky and haunted hills

The cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf – so important to this film of shadows and extraordinary vistas – is better appreciated by the screening’s scale. They capture the unsettling darkness in the tumbledown buildings of Wisborg and enable Murnau to make even the Carpathian Mountains gloriously sinister.

Lotte Eisner (in The Haunted Screen naturlich!) observes that Murnau was one of the few German film-makers to have an innate love of landscape more typical of the Swedes. She notes his origins in Westphalia : “a region of vast pastures where enormous peasants breed heavy-boned plough-horses…”.  Murnau was 6 ft 11 inches tall.

These unusual location shots apart, Murnau does his best work up close with his horror derived from action and reaction as characters and cameras interact to create emotional shocks. Ellen recoils on seeing Count Orlok gazing out from his gothic windows; at first we can only sense his presence but the camera deliberately forces our gaze and we see him and feel his unrelenting hunger…

There are many such moments when Murnau uses Max Schreck’s extraordinary visuals with low angles and impossible trajectories enhancing his alien essence. It’s hard to believe that after each day’s wrap, Max would just wash up and head down to the bierkeller for a schnapps and a laugh.

Alexander Granach is more conventionally weird as Knock, a man in a constant state of agitation, his own mind so submerged by the Count’s will ahe pathetically-mimmicks his blood lust, insects his prey. Gustav von Wangenheim as our nervy hero Thomas Hutter – the man sent out to meet the Count – was clearly the inspiration for Roman Polanski in The Fearless Vampire Hunters and Greta Schröder’s Ellen seems struck by the certainty of fate even as she learns that her husband must travel out to Transylvania…

The story is ultimately all about the Count and Ellen, his journey to find her and the many who must die in service of his needs on the way… on the boat and in the town sad coffins carried in mute procession as the plague ravages.

Your wife has a beautiful neck...

Nosferatu remains one of the most genuinely unsettling films of all time and I’m sorry, People in the Row Behind Me, if you found some parts chuckle-some but this was made in 1922 and maybe you were expecting some CGI and severed heads? This film spooked audiences that had lived through the Great War: they deserve consideration…

I also hadn’t appreciated that writer Galeen had already worked on The Student of Prague (1913) – no, finally, available in restored form on the EditionFilmuseum DVD set! – as well as Der Golem (1920). This film has more in common with the former film, with very humanised horror: Count Orlok is a threatening presence but it’s the reactions of his victims that make the story from the sailors bravely tying themselves to their ship in futile defiance to Ellen’s willingness to sacrifice all to save her love and her city.

This is what elevates the story about mere shock horror: these are ordinary folk fighting against an immutable foe and nearly impossible odds. Orlok is mass murder and as the crosses are chalked on so many doors in the town, we know the cause is no romantic, sexualised, vampire but a relentless predator killing his prey and not converting them into the stylishly undead.

As Roger Ebert said writing in 2010: “Is Murnau's "Nosferatu" scary in the modern sense? Not for me. I admire it more for its artistry and ideas, its atmosphere and images... It knows none of the later tricks of the trade... But "Nosferatu" remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us.”

Consider me haunted too by both the images and by Paul Robinson’s smashing score.

The 2013 restoration is available from MovieMail as part of the Masters of Cinema series although it won’t have the score. You probably already have it but if the HarmonieBand play this again please don’t miss it!

More details of Paul Robinson’s HarmonieBand can be found on their website here.