Gestures that say more than a thousand words: Max Schreck in the title role of “Nosferatu”.
Image: Picture Alliance
One hundred years ago on this Friday, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s “Nosferatu” premiered in Berlin: it’s worth watching the silent film classic again.
Graf Dracula is the most portrayed character in film history. Possibly because a lot can be interpreted into the combination of migrants from the East, not being able to die, the ability to transform into animals, an excuse for girls who wake up exhausted in the morning and with bite marks on their necks, and dying nobility. In any case, it all began one hundred years ago today with the premiere of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s “Nosferatu” (derived from Romanian for “the unbearable”, “the devil”) in the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Garden. A Hungarian silent film made a year earlier but not shown until 1923, which starred an inmate claiming to be Dracula, is missing.
In Murnau’s strip, the Transylvanian vampire is called Count Orlok and other characters from Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” from 1897 (German 1908) are also renamed. But that was only out of prudence, because Murnau and his screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, used the novel extensively without first acquiring the film rights. They shifted the story of the vampire’s arrival to western Europe from the late nineteenth century to 1838 and from England to a fictional northern German port city called Wisborg. The premiere guests at the Berlin Zoo were asked to come in Biedermeier costumes.
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