‘Vampire’ Does F.W. Murnau an Injustice

E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire” is a curious film, indeed. By turns whimsical and pitiful, it dramatizes the making of director F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror” (1922) and in the process becomes a kind of New Age “Sunset Boulevard.” “Shadow” explores the exotic, albeit forgotten era of Murnau, actor Max Schreck and the German cinema of the 1920s. Under Merhige’s direction, Steven Katz’s screenplay presents an odd tableau of preening intellectuals, opera buffa thespians and one peevish vampire-for-hire.

Whether Merhige’s film succeeds in re-creating this era is debatable. Due to progress in our technology and regress in our psychology, it is difficult to recapture the power of such early masterpieces as Murnau’s “Nosferatu” or “Faust” (1926). Merhige and his collaborators seem aware of this, and consequently bathe their subject in a nostalgic glow. Murnau’s elevated, somewhat windy dialogues with his cast and crew sound as if they were ripped from the pages of Cahiers du Cinema.

Yet if the film imperfectly captures the spirit of the Weimar era, it does capture--perhaps inadvertently--the attitude of the contemporary indie filmmakers toward their own art.

In 1979, Werner Herzog made a more conventional homage to Murnau’s film, titled “Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht.” Herzog’s movie was a serious attempt to imagine what Murnau’s film might have been like if made with a palette of color, stereophonic sound and the neuroses of a modern actor (Klaus Kinski). Francis Ford Coppola followed this up in 1992 with the vivid and bombastic “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” a film that experimented liberally with Murnau’s visual style.

Merhige’s film offers something quite different. “Shadow’s” clever conceit is to have Murnau hire an actual vampire, whose bizarre appearance and behavior are passed off to the unsuspecting as affectations of Stanislavskian training.

The in-joke here is obvious. Murnau (John Malkovich) must tame the ultimate moody actor--a “Method” devotee channeling powers of the occult. This joke is the indication that “Shadow’s” context is that of the present, rather than of the silent era. Decades after Brando’s heyday, Merhige and Katz have distilled horror to its purest essence: the abusive, self-absorbed “Method” performer who will not get with the program.

As amusing as this setup is, it takes us far afield from what Murnau would have recognized as the real stuff of cinema. Silent-era masters like Murnau, Fritz Lang or Robert Wiene were essentially myth makers, whose ambition was to establish a German national cinema on an equal footing with German theater, literature and music. Spectacles such as Lang’s “Nibelungen” films (1922-24), Murnau’s “Faust” or Paul Wegener’s “The Golem” (1920) are only weakly understood otherwise.

Merhige and indie auteurs like him appear to have a different agenda. The driving force behind “Shadow” is Murnau-Malkovich’s desire to create transgressive art, or art that travels into the realm of the taboo. The taboo in this case is that of the unclean, occultic vampire, and Murnau-Malkovich will stop at nothing in bringing this taboo to light. He allows the vampire to decimate the cast and crew, all in the service of an artistic agenda.

“Shadow’s” final scene--in which Murnau-Malkovich records the demise of his cinematographer, vampire and leading lady--is a kind of retroactive pastiche on all exploitational cinema. Only the “visionary” director remains standing, taboos having safely been shattered by someone else. “Nosferatu” becomes, by Merhige’s interpretation, history’s first snuff film.

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It is difficult to imagine the real Murnau adopting this attitude toward his own work. Neither the poignancy of “Sunrise” (1927) nor the pathos of “The Last Laugh” (1924) seem reconcilable with the directorial egomania on display in Merhige’s film.

Indeed, Merhige’s Murnau resembles nobody so much as another artist-egomaniac from this year’s slate of indie releases: the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) in Philip Kaufman’s “Quills.” Both characters conceive their artistic mission as transgressive, except that it is typically someone else who pays the dearest price for the artist’s transgression.

In “Quills,” for example, the consequences of the Marquis’ impish extravagance are suffered chiefly by his one ally (Joaquin Phoenix) and by a lowly chambermaid (Kate Winslet). While one character descends into madness, and the other is brutally murdered, the Marquis remains curiously unmoved. Kaufman’s strange film implies that such suffering--namely, somebody else’s--is merely gravel on the road to human progress.

Could it be that today’s indie auteurs--pampered with bigger stars and bigger budgets--have nothing left to do but thumb their noses at other people’s taboos, and then blithely dance away from the mess they’ve created? Is such impudent, egocentric posturing all that remains of “independent” cinema, as that cinema grows increasingly fond of mass marketing and studio distribution? Clearly there is something driving indie filmmakers to make heroes of such monsters as the new Murnau and the Marquis.

The old Murnau, were he alive today, would probably suffer the same fate as the poor old Count in Merhige’s film. Forgotten, disrespected, perhaps even loathed, he too might gamely shuffle onto the set of an independent film--where he would promptly be exploited as a freak by some brave new auteur. A symphony of horror, indeed.