Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

After lunch the script boy has mislaid the master notebook. Nothing can happen until he finds it. In its columns we register the date, scene number, characters, action, lighting, effects, camera stop number, and the amount of footage. Though he finds it again almost immediately, Freund dismisses him at the end of the day.

  Ninety percent of my work consists of the secondary chores I perform in order to get to the other ten percent. Something always comes up. Everywhere an argument about who should run out to the café for sweets. The most relentless idiocies filter through. Today I received a bill for a goose that someone ordered in January.

  Each night, the same miseries, re-rehearsed in bed. Will the camera problems be worked out? Is it all too slow? Too ponderous? Trivial? Each morning, back in the car, exhausted by having been at odds with myself all night. Insufficient time to consider the best solutions to the problems at hand. Our work is an illustration of Zeno’s paradox: since at each instant an arrow shot from a bow is stationary at some point in space, the succession of instants cannot constitute motion.

  The mobility of the camera is even more crucial now that Mayer and I are firm on the revolutionary notion that Der Letzte Mann will have no titles. (!) We want the world of the story to proceed unimpeded, for the action to progress by visual means, the expressivity of the moving camera allowing us to dispense with the explanatory interruption. We want to make the audience a mass of common visionaries, obeying a law they did not know but recited in their dreams. For what we want—the camera swinging great distances through space—some means of stabilizing it is crucial. We need to hang it on a kind of sliding suspension bridge; we need it to follow the doorman through crowds, and up flights of stairs; we need it to drop from one balcony to another. So far, our unchained camera has been liberated only from its ability to provide a comprehensible image. The movements have been too complex and minute to allow the camera operator to adequately correct for stability. Our most recent solution was a metal dish-within-a-dish of ball bearings, which allowed the camera to swing freely. Too freely. The images we got looked like the chronicles of an earthquake.

  Each day after principal shooting, we convene at Freund’s makeshift laboratory to watch him wrestle with the problem. We toss out our own ideas, as well. So much metalworking is going on that the place looks like a foundry. Cellini and his assistants must have sweated and cursed before their ovens in the same way. A miserable summer on top of everything else. Freund had great holes torn into the walls for ventilation, to no avail.

  An idea. Sketch it up. Work it out in steel and leather, cable and springs, whatever else you can find. Try it. Fix it, once it breaks. Try it again. After one disastrous block-and-cable affair, Freund lifted the whole apparatus over his head to destroy it before his assistants prevailed upon him to lower it safely to the ground. Day after day the problem torments him. He walks around bathed in the various oils he’s using to produce a smooth rotation in the tilting mechanism. I’m reminded of Vischer’s phrase about the perfidy of the object, which gloats upon our efforts to dominate it: that Schadenfreude, with its overtones of diabolical persistence.

  We keep telling ourselves that anything that can be imagined can be done, as Méliés has already demonstrated. When in despair, all we can do is act as if we believe, and faith may come afterwards. Meanwhile, off in the corner, Freund’s fourth assistant sits, his mouth still ajar, before his assigned repair work, stuffing matchsticks into the stripped wooden threads of a tripod base.

  One night I have dreams that I’m trying to master some sort of optical instrument by focusing on a flashing pinprick of light through an eyepiece. I wake to an electrical storm.

  The next morning, no progress. Freund has been in the lab overnight. This is conveyed to us in low tones by his first assistant, whom we call the Kestrel because of his way of jerking his head toward the object of his attention.

  There’s also been a catastrophe with the courtyard set: the walls are bowing inward from the weight of the suspension cables. What will happen when we add the weight of both the camera and Freund? Röhrig’s crew seems to have followed a set of earlier instructions with the kind of subconscious bitterness that develops in those accustomed to doing exactly what they’re told. In the military this usually results in acts of heroism costing ninety-percent casualties.

  Anticipating their mistake would have called for the kind of calm foresight of which I’m presently incapable. Lately I’ve been given more to panic than foresight. While what I can only glimpse slips away even as I try to prepare to film it.

  Another week lost. August! The year 1924 was supposed to bring bad luck: “Saturn complications.” This we well believe.

  Late afternoons feature a stream of visiting strangers, as if on an incoming tide. Arranged by Pommer in hopes that the society pages might provide coverage. A baron, two bankers, a large Pole whom no one can place, a conductor from a provincial orchestra, and a dancing countess—all visit as if stranded with no intention of leaving. They’re all fascinated with Mayer, and frightened of Freund. The conductor is eager to discuss his theory of music-numerology with me because of certain structural patterns in my earlier films. Ufa executives also parade through to show their wives and mistresses how a big-time production is run. As if we needed any additional chaos. Still: “Keep smiling!” said the bird to the worm.… One of the visitors turns out to be the long-lost Lasker-Schüler, unsurprisingly in need of money. As far as my concerns go, money is no problem, but time is, and naturally she needs to explain in detail why she finds herself in such a state. She recounts a hectic series of recent affairs and claims that because of them, God has cured her with “the icy calm of not loving.” Mayer, in the room for this announcement, sighs like a steam-hoist and leaves.

  She’s decked out in a fez and what looks like a chain-mail bustier. I ask about Paul. She answers that she’s putting art aside for a while, to devote herself more fully to human matters.

  Paul, it turns out, has developed tuberculosis. She was forced to sell what little they had to pay for his rest cures. Meanwhile he announced that he wants nothing to do with her; in the spring, once he’s twenty-one, he wants to clear out and go round preaching with the Anabaptists or the vegetarians. She’s unsure which.

  Her problem, she says, has always been that her heart has played the leading role in her life. She reminds me that as a very little girl she alarmed her mother one night by seeing her pulsing heart hanging dark red on the doorpost of her playroom.

  I keep her feet moving toward the door. I’ll have my banker call her, I insist. He’ll arrange for whatever’s necessary. At the moment, though, an unavoidable bit of business—a crucial meeting, for which I’m already late—and she’s out the door. My assistant appears, ready to show her out.

  I make my goodbyes. Will she be around once all of this monstrousness has ended, in the late fall? She will, she says, and leaves it at that.

  Back in my office, with the door shut between us, I hear her dismiss my assistant: she can find her own way out. Once his footsteps recede, she asks herself: “What am I going to do?” There’s a pause. “What am I going to do?”

  I open the door to call her back in, but she’s gone.

  One of Freund’s cameras on a trial run down the cable smashes itself to bits on the opposite wall below.

  Sandri day by day seems more disturbed. I find apple cores arranged to form a triangle under my pillow. Violent scribbles deface whatever’s left lying about. Frau Reger terrified of him. She’s caught him going through my drawers. To avoid him, she’s taken to coming in late at night to clean. This all seems to be taking place in someone else’s house. Usually I come back so late that she’s gone and he’s asleep, in various places.

  The house seems uninhabited. My study looks like the last encampment of the nomad. At night I wander the halls, peering into other rooms.

  This idiotic compulsion to put up an act in front of the world, pretending everything is fine: that’s what consumes so much of my energ
y.

  In the early morning, my thoughts turn to other failures. Why is it only after people have gone that I’m able to take them into myself, the more deeply the farther away they are?

  Filmmaking offers shelter for a failure to live. The essence it transfers to the medium is stolen from life. Without my notebooks I’m ignorant, an absent curator for myself.

  I tell myself, Write what comes, catch what you can as best you can. Once the notebook is filled, the spirit has calmed.

  The next morning, in the carpenters’ shop, I stand dazed beneath a yellow snowfall of sawdust. Neuralgia, sneezing fits, the beginnings of a bad cold. A fever coming. Röhrig suggests rum. “Röhrig always suggests rum,” says Herlth. “Have you seen his nose?”

  The electricians and carpenters are unhappy with their coffee-and-sweets cart. The motto for this production, Jannings says, is “Somebody Should Do Something.” I suggest it should be “We All Whine Together.”

  Mayer informs me at lunch that our decision to present the film without titles is considered by the crew to be the ultimate evidence of my haughtiness.

  The latest tilting mechanism swung too rapidly in its housing and crushed the fingers of the fourth assistant. In terms of the calendar, we’re rapidly reaching the point at which the film will have to be reconceived. With increasing frequency I find notes from Pommer on my desk about the cost of our experiments. In my one note back, I quoted Goethe: Nothing injures the treasury more than the endeavor to save in essential matters.

  We’re satisfied, at least, with the sling/basket arrangement in which Freund will sit. It hangs from its suspension bridge like a reinforced swing for an unbelievably heavy child. Freund sits with both feet splayed in the direction the apparatus will travel.

  Finally, one day he sends down word of an announcement. We all gather round, down to the lowest stagehand. Pal worms his way forward, sniffing. The shops are quiet. Freund and the Kestrel work within a circle of spectators. Some of the female extras, chorus girls, push forward from the back, tittering and shoving. Pommer murmurs, “A little more virginity, ladies.” Then all is quiet.

  In a low voice as he works, Freund explains a new version of a gyroscope that’s electronically controlled. The mechanism operates off a carpenter’s level with triggers on both ends: as the bubble moves off center, electrical impulses send more or less power, as needed, to the small balancing motors.

  A test: we all hold our breath. The housing still jiggles. Wait—one trigger not working. An adjustment. Freund climbs into his basket, and the mechanism is lowered onto his lap. Together they’re hoisted to the top of the suspension bridge, everyone taking a turn on the ropes.

  The stagehands wait for his signal.

  Down he swings, his eye to the eyepiece.

  Herlth, Röhrig, Mayer, Pommer, myself—everyone surges forward, waiting. At the end of the cable, the basket sways back and forth, tipping slightly. Freund’s face is still screwed to the eyepiece.

  “Here it is,” he says quietly.

  The Kestrel laughs, his laugh on the order of a seizure. It’s the only sound anyone makes before a roar goes up from everyone.

  Freund’s Verdict has to be confirmed by the rushes. It is, that night.

  After that, our giddiness sends him and his camera everywhere: up a swaying fireman’s ladder. Down an open lift. Around on a bicycle. Across great expanses on a rubber-wheeled trolley. There’s so much cheering and laughter on the set that visitors believe us to be drunk.

  And finally we propose as another vehicle Freund’s stomach, with the batteries on his back as a counterweight. “It’s too heavy,” he protests. “I’ll hurt my back.” Nonsense, we tell him. We strap it on and he sets about the lot, weaving and tripping. He follows Jannings like a shadow, bending, twisting, and leaning. Within a quarter of an hour, he’s hurt his back.

  Time at the studio increases. Some nights I go home at four and return at six. We work as long as our energy holds. Every midnight, Mayer and I repair to the projection room to run the day’s footage and marvel at what we’ve done. Two projectionists divide the work between them. There we sit, hour after hour, studying the images. How best to use them and improve their effect? Late into the night, we muse aloud: If we took the last of number 3 and the first of number 6 … Hours spent organizing these new miracles of movement. And then I’m driven home, the car floating past darkened houses where everyone is asleep. I close my eyes in my bedroom, still uncertain whether the last temporary decision was the right one.

  Throughout all of this I come to understand that the horrible days of exhaustion and powerlessness may be part of my work method.

  I lie in bed, unable to sleep: happy, happy, happy. Sandri agitated by my new emotional state.

  What I see in advance is the beauty of the entire film coming together.

  The rainstorm of the opening sequence. Surfaces streaming with rain and light as the camera plays along them.

  The view through the lift-window as it descends, and the camera’s ride through the lobby.

  The noise of the horn reaching the doorman’s ears: the sound moving visually from the horn’s mouth to Jannings, three stories above.

  His Exposure. The Maliciousness of the Hens—of the Beehive. The Glee of the Secret Revealed. The Truth spread like a contagion. The camera swinging from balcony to balcony, from mouth to ear. Humiliation. Ruin. The superimposition of overlapping mouths.

  And the newest footage: Jannings in the lavatory’s darkness, caught by the night watchman’s torch. The camera’s kindness, as it too moves to stroke the crown of his head.

  Terror at home. Sandri inexplicably terrified and enraged at the sight of Mayer.

  I try not to shout. Sandri seems to fear for his life. He upends furniture to keep me back. He barricades himself into Frau Reger’s room, and resists efforts to push open the door.

  Mortified, I apologize to Mayer and arrange to have us driven back to the studio. Mayer is silent all the way back. I’m stomachsick with fear.

  At the studio, all is quiet. Mayer heads off to his workspace.

  In my office, the telephone’s ringing off the hook. When I answer, it’s the police. Sandri has run amok. He’s bludgeoned Frau Reger and pitched her body into the street. The police have the house cordoned off and surrounded.

  The house is stormed. They find him in my bedroom. He fractures one policeman’s skull before he’s shot to death.

  Der Letzte Mann premieres at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, which boasts 2,165 seats and, since its opening in 1919 with Lubitsch’s Passion, has been the uncontested flagship of Ufa’s theaters. Ventilation is supplied by a miniature electric zeppelin three feet long which drifts through the house during intermissions and sprays eau de cologne about with an atomizer. There are standing ovations even before the final curtain. Jannings pulls me up out of the audience. The adulation washes over us in waves.

  There’s hardly time, that week, for Frau Reger’s funeral. Sandri is buried in a field for transients. Late at night, when the schedule permits, my chauffeur drives me there. On each visit, I’m reminded of a moment from the premiere: the solitary figure of Jannings, which became Sandri, which became Hans, and then, finally, only a dumb image, which quivered for a moment on the screen and then disappeared.

  TABU

  ****14/15 June 1929 (Midnight). No sleep. All afternoon, the trace odor of land, unmistakable after eight weeks of open sea. Toward sunset we began to notice the scent of flowers. Cassi, David informed us: a low, bushlike plant that carpets the Marquesas.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, filmmaker in the Republic of Germany from 1919 to 1925, and in the United States of America from 1926 to 1929, was spending May and June of 1929 in a ketch halfway between Mexico and New Zealand. For three straight nights he had slept only one or two hours. He was writing on deck. The cockpit bench was rigged like a divan with throw-pillows. Pal was curled at his feet. The dog’s tongue lolled about. The sea air made the poor animal endlessly thirsty.

&n
bsp; The moon went all the way down. Before he lit the lamp, he could see his hand in the starlight.

  They had traveled southwest by west from Mazatlán to Nukahiva, in the Marquesas. It was one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the direct course was also the fastest.

  Sometime the next day he would get his first view of the South Seas. Sitting there on the deck, every so often he would write: The South Seas! He had constructed a little column of such exclamations. From there to Papeete, some 400 miles, would be about four days.

  Anxiety piled up behind his excitement the way a wake surge overtook smaller waves. All those lives transformed to suit his purposes: seventeen intelligent men who’d never been far from pavement were about to be marooned across those isolated islands. Their average age was twenty-three.

  He fretted constantly that this project, in ways none of the group could fully understand, was bigger than any studio-made film. With a studio, the world was built to suit the filmmaker. But here! Eighteen thousand dollars had already been forwarded not for sets and mysterious union “overheads,” but to natives for food, transport, shelter, carpenters, carriers, divers, fishermen, and brush-clearers. This was the first time he’d seen brush-clearing listed as an expense.

  And to all that he had to add the for-him-unprecedented difficulties of collaboration. One of the world’s great geniuses of romantic illusion, at least if his American press clippings were to be believed, had thrown in with the pre-eminent cinematic practitioner of the real. NOSFERATU MEETS NANOOK, Variety had teased. In this case, both maestros were wary. Murnau had never worked with a partner, however collaborative his early experience in Germany had been; and Robert Flaherty’s only partner had been his wife. Occasionally he’d take a suggestion from his long-suffering cameraman.

  They had agreed on the concept of an epic shot in spectacular natural locations, which was, after all, the Grail of nearly every national cinema. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, they further agreed, was the closest anyone had come to date. So they wanted to transport their audience, and involve it in an exotic and endangered way of life. But after that?