"Shadow of the Vampire" and comic German fanatics

Shadow of a prejudice

19/3/2018

The Herr Doktor will see you now - John Malkovitch, Heinz Bennent

Watching Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000) will undoubtedly have led some viewers to seek out and relish F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) for the first time. Good. Travellers in the reverse direction are likely to find some delights, but also some significant disappointments.

The premise of Merhige’s film is that Max Schreck, the actor who played Count Orlok (the Dracula figure) in Murnau’s film was in fact a real vampire, recruited by Murnau in secret and unbeknown to anyone else in the cast or crew. Having invented this amusing notion, the filmmakers spend the duration of the running time ensuring that it becomes progressively less amusing. The fundamental problem of the tension between the historical facts and the premise of the film generates a blizzard of contrivance and exposition, much of it delivered through occasionally laborious dialogue, including an explanation of how slow motion is achieved in a hand-cranked camera.

To accommodate the comedic conceit that Max Schreck was a vampire, we can of course expect to be asked to disregard some of what we may know about Murnau’s film – the fact that Nosferatu’s night scenes were shot day-for-night, for example, or that actors Greta Schröder and Gustav von Wangenheim survived the shoot unharmed and continued their careers – what is insurmountable is the preposterous characterisation of Murnau, played by John Malkovich, which does no service to the film, even in its own terms, and almost derails it for anyone with more than the most superficial notion of Murnau and his work. There is no doubt that Murnau was an exacting perfectionist who was determined to get what he wanted, but he was not an Otto Preminger bully on steroids.

The film is in English and adopts the quaint British war film convention, long moribund, of having Germans converse among themselves in English but with German accents, although most of the principal cast are either native or fluent English speakers.

Pursuing his art ruthlessly in the face of any and every disaster, and there are many, Shadow of the Vampire’s Murnau alternates furious yelling and ranting with sotto voce off-camera instructions and encouragement to his increasingly terrified cast. He wears a white lab coat and dark glasses on set and is addressed as “Herr Doktor” by his crew. This last may be authentic, but adds to the overall effect of referencing, if not actually evoking, the stereotypical cinematic figure of the mad Nazi doctor. Indeed at times Malkovich’s performance eerily recalls another lab coat wearer - Hans Vergerus, the demonic proto Josef Mengele character played by Heinz Bennent in Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977).

It is left to Udo Kier (an actual German) playing Nosferatu’s producer Albin Grau (an actual occultist - though the film neglects to exploit this) to provide a sense that Merhige’s enterprise is a little more than a lifespan distant from Murnau’s. In his review of Shadow of the Vampire, the critic Peter Bradshaw comments that “[Udo Kier] would have made a more plausible, and a more compelling, Murnau” (Guardian 2.2.2001).

Equally, Willem Defoe, who plays Schreck, would probably have made a considerably more plausible Murnau. In fact, in an ideal scenario he might have played both parts, which would have also made psychological sense, his Murnau pitched about a third of the way along a spectrum between his Pasolini and his Jesus.

Max Schreck certainly existed, his height and striking features marking him out as a character actor. He worked with Berthold Brecht as well as with Max Reinhardt, appearing in the Brecht-scripted short “Mysteries of a Barber’s Shop”, which can be found on YouTube. The Internet Movie Database lists 46 film credits for him, including one other Murnau film, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Finances of the Grand Duke, 1924).

Defoe’s performance, make-up, and costuming builds cannily on Max Schreck’s original, not without an occasional knowing glance towards the Klaus Kinski/Werner Herzog incarnation, particularly its animalistic tics and noises. An unconvinced Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard described Defoe’s performance as “a hammy caricature of the cinematic Schreck”. A degree of hammyness, it could be argued, is both inevitable and desirable in this context, and Eddie Izzard’s comic turn as the unlucky Gustav von Wangenheim is built on a successful calibration of the appropriate degree of ham in his Gustav and in his Gustav-as-Hutter manifestations.

Rather than a caricature of Schreck, what Merhige, writer Steven Katz, and Defoe have created is a new entity - Orlok’s more mischievous younger cousin - provided with a voice and addicted to practical jokes as well as to throat chewing. Given the unsympathetic portrayal of Murnau, the audience should have little difficulty siding with Schreck when, in a key scene in Schreck’s crepuscular lair, the two of them engage at close quarters in a trial of physical strength, Murnau hastily fleeing in defeat. As Murnau disappears into the night, Schreck, alone in his den, turns towards us in a fit of triumphant eye rolling which culminates in a direct glance to camera, shattering the fourth wall and both implicating and threatening the audience.

Here's looking at you - Willem Defoe

In an earlier scene, after the cast and crew have abandoned shooting for the night following a vampiric outrage, Schreck explores the improvised studio and in a dark corner discovers a hand-cranked projector which he examines and coaxes into life.

What he sees on screen are not the fresh, crisp, perfectly exposed frames that would have actually comprised Murnau’s 1922 rushes but fragmented land or seascapes, beautiful in their fragility and as elusive and as resonant as dreams. Schreck has not stumbled into Murnau’s cutting room, but into the subconscious of a twenty-first century film restorer. The brief scene is outstanding, both in its eloquent tribute to the power and the fragility of film, and in its value in establishing the underlying nobility and pain of Nosferatu, a creature deprived of delight and wonder as well as companionship, for eternity. It’s a lost opportunity that the film offers a characterisation of Murnau so absurd that it is unable to similarly touch on the real Murnau’s personal demons.