Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  Empty wine bottles are pyramided on their sides against the wall like artillery rounds. Grau, slightly drunk, eyes Spiess. There’s been further tension due to his presence on the payroll. Prana, as a new production company, can afford little extravagance, according to Grau. This despite the fact that Agnuzzo’s delight with Lasker-Schüler caused him to pony up a check to cover “additional contingencies.”

  In Berlin, Grau quarreled to the last minute about the additional spending represented by Spiess. He stalked around the station platform gesturing with the company’s train tickets in his hands, and gave in only when I reminded him how much money I’d already saved by agreeing to cast Wangenheim instead of Veidt. Grau is ambitious, and given to wild statements intended to cow the listener. Prana is a creation of his will and rhetoric and is all he has. His painting career has not been a success. I told him Spiess was indispensable to my thinking, and my dreaming, and important to the project in ways I could not yet articulate. Grau finally accepted my explanation. Spiess remains uncomfortable in his presence.

  Wagner peers into an empty bottle. Grau is slumped to the floor, his head against the door of a low cupboard. Galeen still has his chin in his hands. Only Schreck seems unaffected by the wine, looking each of us over in turn.

  The meeting has petered out. To finish, we toast the enterprise: Grau the good fortune of the company, Galeen the spirits around us who work with us, Schreck the Undead, Wagner the new cameras ordered from Berlin, and myself my young collaborator Spiess and his contribution to my work. In the silence, Spiess’s eyes shy from mine. Afterwards, he’s the last to leave. He stands with his back to me, rummaging in the mess for his coat. He’s still angry that I hadn’t wanted him to come. I’m condemned not for having been unreasonable but for having come to my senses too slowly. I stand closer, still without touching him, and he eludes my hand nimbly, like a beautiful animal. I’m reminded of a title for which I can’t find a place in the film: She stands in front of him, still drawing back but trying to attract him to her.

  This has become something unsuitable for public consumption. Where will I get the $ to repay the advance?

  Spiess refuses to talk about Lasker-Schüler’s claim. We quarrel about this regularly. He notes only that its savagery indicates how badly I must have hurt her. He offers no further insight on this point, either. So my detective work is solitary and intermittent. Hans is the roundtable topic of my insomnia. I work through our time together the way a limited art student toils to copy a masterpiece. And what does all that effort represent? A man, frustrated, weeping for himself.

  I have always been a fugitive and a vagabond. For a thousand years none of our family has remained anywhere without growing uneasy, without being seized by wanderlust. I am at home in no house and in no country.

  The Plumpes have always been aloof, have always designed their own worlds. My father left a thriving business and went his own way, bought a magnificent estate at Wilhelmshöhe, with land, hunting, a carriage, and a horse. We children were delighted. The garden had everything we could wish for—a grotto, a ruin, a secret pond, a giant stone, a trapeze. It was a miniature paradise.

  Bernhard was the first to visit me in Berlin after I’d cut off communication. The first night I joked with him about Father letting his youngest son out in Sodom, and he told me he’d been strictly forbidden to move in my “circles.” When we met Spiess by accident, Bernhard took his leave, and did not meet me as planned the next morning.

  I am both my father and Something Else, and remain mute before the ongoing miracle of the coexistence of the two.

  Talked with Schreck about the Nosferatu. Schreck is a very strange man: narrow-shouldered, peculiarly stiff and clumsy, strikingly ugly without any makeup. At lunch he knocked over his water glass with a wooden sweep of his arm and then simply watched it, glared at me and then the water as it ran across the table. Intensely private, yet he’s begun to follow me around, trying to absorb as much as he can. His performance is absolutely crucial. He has had very little experience, but when I saw him bending without pleasure over a child on the Kurfürstendamm I knew he was the Nosferatu. I have begun talking with him about his role the only way I know how: trying to articulate the sources of my own obsessions. His silences seem equal parts hostility and understanding.

  I talked of the vampire’s parasitism—you must die if I am to live. I talked of the loathsomeness and the dread of his allure. I talked of how the terrible inhumanness of him, the nightmarish repulsiveness, should move easily among the bourgeois naturalism of the costumes and acting styles of the rest of the cast—how everyone must see him as in some ways not out of the ordinary.

  More midnight work with Spiess on Galeen’s script while the rest of the company sleeps. The hotel is silent. In the distance someone is drawing a wagon up the road.

  Spiess reports quietly on his readings. He lays out on the bed charcoal drawings of amulets and charms, diabolic designs. The vampire, he believes, first appears in a Serbian manuscript of the thirteenth century in which a vuklodlak is described as a creature which devours the sun and moon while chasing clouds. Among the contemporary Slavs, vampir and vuklodlak (literally, wolf’s hair) are synonymous. He reads aloud from a fragment of fifteenth-century Turkish apocrypha: “The Force of Destruction is always near man and follows him like his shadow. For this reason man must always be restored. This restoration occurs in various forms: through the tears of the Force of Creation: water (bathing and washing); through the breath of the Force of Creation: air (ventilation of the house, and living outside); and through meeting every morning the first life-giving rays of the Force of Creation (which are sent from the sun).”

  We trade ideas until the sky pales, building together an artifice superior to the work of either of our imaginations alone. We construct a new scene for Hutter’s arrival: Distant mountains. Vratna Pass. In the background the fantastic castle of the Nosferatu in the evening light. A steep road leading straight up into the sky. Hutter abandoned by his coach. Something comes racing down—a carriage? A phantasm?—with unearthly speed and disappears behind a groundswell. Out of nowhere, reappears. Stops dead. Two black horses, their legs invisible, covered by black funeral cloth. Their eyes like pointed stars. Steam from their mouths. The coachman, whose face we cannot see. Hutter inside. Carriage drives at top speed through a white forest! (We’ll use meters of negative, like “the land the sun travels through at night” so feared in ancient Egypt.)

  If the camera could move with the coach, so we could feel the terrifying capacities of evil.…

  Then the courtyard. The carriage at a halt. Almost in a faint, Hutter climbs down. As if in a whirlpool, the carriage circles round him and disappears. Then, very slowly, the two wings of the gate open up.…

  Six days of shooting. The camera still trembles. The new one sent from Berlin is even worse. I let them develop the bad takes in case the camera has performed some miracle of its own. Yet some scenes come off beautifully. The panicking horses Hutter sees from the window of the inn. On a grassy slope, the ground falling away toward the back. Night mists creep up the valley. The horses raise their heads as if frightened and, scattering, gallop away. The white horse spun and shook perfectly, which he refused to do yesterday. The camera just got it. And one, after hours of work, backed out of the frame! The effect was marvelous. Even Wagner, for all his exhaustion, was excited by how it will look. The possibility of other people’s fatigue never occurs to me.

  Spiess proposes a trip to the South Seas to collaborate on an old photoplay of his entitled The Island of the Demons. I’m insufficiently excited about the idea. A horrible fight.

  I must avoid a certain kind of coldness that results from the way I work. It would be fatal.

  Spiess gone to Berlin for a few days for “personal matters.” We fought again over Hans. Clumsy life going about its stupid work: even when we want to reveal ourselves we’re so poor at it that we spend most of our time in self-concealment of one sort or another. My exp
erience of him is discontinuous, my attention uneven, my judgment and understanding uncertain.

  He was gone all night and announced his trip the next morning. I said nothing, and was busy the entire day. That afternoon on his pillow in his room, I left for him one of the vampire’s entreaties to Hutter:

  Would you not like to wait awhile with me, dearest worthy? It is not so long until the sunrise—

  And during the day I sleep my best; I sleep most truly, the deepest sleep—

  Long hours in the makeshift projection room last night. The coach arriving at the inn. Wangenheim crossing the little bridge to the “land of the phantoms.” The forest he views on his journey. That last setup particularly difficult because of the terrain. Extreme long shots of landscape must be shot north or south so that the crosslight provides definition. Flat, dead-on light causes shadows to fall away behind objects so that there’s no modeling, and backlighting is problematic in all but the clearest skies.

  It’s irritating to see so little, because the true rhythms will be produced only in the cutting. Can’t find the take of the white horse turning with its balked jumpiness, and there’s no trace of it on the labels. Awful if that shot lost.

  With some of the vistas Wagner hasn’t enough courage. He compromises and won’t take a bold enough line. The result is a softness to his work that I must overcome. It’s all too “beautiful.” Whereas I want something more harsh to contrast with the beauty, a starkness and awed sweep.…

  Grau has done a marvelous job of turning what’s innate in Schreck into the Nosferatu. Schreck’s been bound into a three-quarter-length jacket, buttoned up tightly. His makeup (I must show his hands today) will take three hours.

  Endless discoveries. Water from a spring so pure the animals take the trough to be empty. The play of shadow off it in twilight like the marble ceilings of seaside hotels. Grau, in his other hat as producer, complains that we continue to fall behind our schedule. But what shots! Today an open cart-shed full of rakes and scythes, and that gray spider on the backlit orb-web. Broken sunlight through isinglass. Wagner’s work, viewed each night, is breathtaking: in clarity, in richness of detail, in contour. One can find that same soft brilliance in certain kinds of silver polished with skins.

  Greta came to me with an idea for Heligoland: her character, Ellen, waiting for Hutter’s return at a seaside graveyard—stark crosses at oblique and neglected attitudes on the dune, with the sea beyond. A wonderful idea: the natural world enlisted and compromised by the Nosferatu. The natural world operating under the shadow of the supernatural. Enormous tranquillity in the context of unease and dread: for whom is she waiting?

  A discussion grows out of our enthusiasm. Endless polarities—west and east, good and evil, civilization and wilderness, reason and passion, with the contested terrain in every case the body of the woman. The obsession is not with the oppositions as much as the areas between them—the possibility that they’re not such oppositions. Hence the connections between Hutter and the Nosferatu, Ellen and the Nosferatu.

  The differences between the Self and the Other start to collapse. In Stoker’s novel, the woman from the village sees Harker at the window and identifies him as the vampire: “Monster, give me my child!”

  Still no Spiess. Lunched with Galeen and Greta in Poczamok. Bathed in the river. Raspberries!

  The publicity assistant back in Berlin sent Grau an article from the Literarische Welt, which he passed on to me: “Murnau has become a new kind of being who thinks directly in photographs. Murnau is a kind of modern centaur: he and the camera joined to form a single body.” An image lifted from Lasker-Schüler’s image of me as “made of leaf and bark / Of early morn and centaur blood.” The article ends by announcing that “Murnau teaches us to see the modern film; others will teach us to feel it.”

  Still no Spiess. The headaches back. The doctors unhappy with my kidneys. Great pain while urinating. The crew sits about and waits. At times I’m ashamed of their confidence. What have I achieved so far?

  A single day left to do scenes that should take three or four, which is always how schedules evolve. Wagner points out that for the negative footage the vampire’s carriage must be painted white so it will remain black. In the same way, Schreck must be clothed in white. Multiple disasters and new ideas make the last days on location a constant nightmare of clumsiness. Everyone falls over everyone else while the light slowly disappears. Four of us splash paint over the carriage in a fever. Grau fashions a white cloak out of a bedsheet. Eight in the morning becomes five in the afternoon.

  In the night I dreamed of my father, the last time I saw him: on the platform of the Berlin railway station, standing amid the depressed and nondescript second-class passengers. I was leaning out the train window. For a moment we looked at each other; then the train moved off and he disappeared among the crowd. Then I was in a dead woman’s apartment, gazing at the remains of an unappetizing meal, the head and bones of some smoked fish. A sort of ghost meal.

  I lay awake afterwards, and scribbled down an idea for a general shot: Hutter looks around the room, which seems to him utterly changed. The damp wallpaper, the stains on the floor, the rough furniture, the depressing well of the courtyard beyond. All these things exude a rank physicality, a bleak reality, a hostility directed at him.

  INTERIORS

  Spiess is gone. Frau Reger handed me his note a few minutes after I dropped my valise in the front hall. It was typed. Civilization, as I well knew, had become unbearable, and he’d decided to flee from it and build a new life in the South Seas, perhaps the Dutch East Indies.

  A day off work. Unreturned calls to Lasker-Schüler and Veidt. The company puzzled. Wagner attributes it to exhaustion.

  Doubts about the whole project. There is an essentially trivial quality at the heart of film’s fascination—a nervous, aggressive vulgarity.

  I’m surprised, too, by the intensity of my despondency at Spiess’s departure. As he once wrote me, Hans is your obsession. I’m just the Catamite who assists you in all your ceremonies of regret.

  Late for work the next day. Unheard of for Murnau. An inspection of the interiors built by Grau and his assistants at the Jofa studios at Berlin-Johannisthal. More than a few ironies here: the largest film-production studio in Europe has taken shape on the grounds of the old Albatros-Werke. I make movies now where engineers made planes for Allmenröder and me.

  It’s a hard place to get used to, a huge dirigible-hangar of exposed steel girders and glass that makes all sound harsh and prone to echo. First check of the set of the castle dining hall. An arrangement like a child’s playhouse in the middle of the vast space.

  Grau was enraged by the way his sketches had been realized. He ranted, upbraided, drew new versions in the air, and tore down flats, while I stood by befuddled by his talent and passion. This is more often his production than mine, and in the face of my weakness he’s the glue that holds everything together.

  He disagreed about the layout of the great hall. He complained the scenic space gave the impression of being cut off by accident. I told him that the compositions were intended to seem part of a larger, organic effect; he said No, banging a table so that a plate jumped: the artistic decor ought to be the perfect composition at the center of which the action took place.

  Wagner mediated, suggesting we weren’t as far apart as we thought. I suggested a compromise: we do it my way. Grau left.

  Wagner’s steadiness is invaluable. I work beautifully with him, usually by anticipating him. I show him an inferior composition; he studies it despondently, then gets excited, begins fiddling, and in minutes produces exactly what we need.

  When Grau returns, the three of us walk the set. I eliminate the chairs (too light and too modern) and allow the fireplace (which doesn’t work). Wagner shows us where he wants the second camera. We make fun of his precision. Grau gets onto his hands and knees with a slide rule, and I shout “Closer! Farther! Closer!” while he moves it incrementally this way and that. Spiess
had watched us do that in Czechoslovakia, and later said that we’d seemed a family he’d never be a part of.

  Outside the studio we wait irritably for taxis in the rain. Schreck leans against a wall in the darkness, his arms folded. He has no hat. Grau is staying at a nearby hotel. Wagner and I are going back to the Grunewald. Out of the darkness Schreck asks what we think a vampire is. Wagner says: Corpses who during their lifetime had been sorcerers, werewolves, people excommunicated by the Church, excommunicated from their lives: suicides, drunkards, heretics, apostates, and those cursed by their parents. Grau, after a pause, looks at me and says: Demons who dwell in the corpses of men, to instruct them in vice, and lead them to wickedness.

  Some Conversations with Leo, Spiess’s brother, about his possible whereabouts. Leo is unsympathetic. The Spiesses were a great Baltic family. Leo is Kapomeister at the Staatsoper Berlin. There’s no guarantee he’ll even let me know if he hears anything.

  I blame Spiess as often as I blame myself for Hans. Yet with who else can I share this obsession? He liked to call me the administrator of my own inhibitions. He amended Hans’s nickname and called me Bayard, the Knight Soaked in Reproach. He said we were both to blame, always with that air of knowing the price of everything.