Nosferatu at the Slab
Posted by ben on 15 Oct 2007 at 01:39 pm | Tagged as: upcoming events
Those of you not going to Arts & Eats on Thursday, November 1 should check out Slab Cinema’s season finale, the 1922 version of Nosferatu, with live musical accompaniment by Mombasa Code. As always, the film starts when it gets dark (around 8 pm or so), and takes place on the slab across the street from La Tuna.
Here’s the Allmovie.com review of the film:
The film that brought one of German cinema’s masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of Dracula, even if the Bram Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck’s Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck’s deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu’s air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau’s combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock’s horror of the everyday and familiar.
I am not a fucking film.