S.S Prawer, April 2004
1844570312 £8.99
Werner Herzog's Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (1979) is sometimes called a minor work, despite the towering central performance by Klaus Kinski. But it is one of the masterpieces of the 'New German Cinema' of the 1960s and 70s, a film that exhibits all of Herzog's melancholy and pessimistic Romanticism, his spirituality and his technical flair. Adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and mindful too of an earlier German version of that same novel - F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1921) - Herzog's film, with its terrifying coda in which the reincarnated fiend rides out into the world, is perhaps the most compelling screen treatment of the vampire myth.
Beginning with Stoker's book and the nineteenth-century obsession with vampires, S. S. Prawer goes on to explore Herzog's formation as well as the evolution of his career. To complete a comprehensive account of Nosferatu, Prawer gives an account of the production history as well as the cultural and aesthetic components that combine to such powerful effect: the skill of the actors, the debts to Romanticism and to Murnau, the use of music by Wagner, Gounod and Florian Fricke, and the film's many extraordinary, haunting images.
S. S. Prawer is Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a study of The Blue Angel in the BFI Film Classics series and is preparing a monograph on the Jewish presence in Weimar cinema.
Other titles in the series .. ' Three Colours' Trilogy, The
Amores Perros
Blade Runner
Caravaggio
City of Sadness, A
Crash
Crying Game, The
Dead Man
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
Do the Right Thing
Don't Look Now
Eyes Wide Shut
Groundhog Day
Heat
Idiots, The
Jaws
L'Argent
L.A. Confidential
Pulp Fiction
Right Stuff, The
Salò or The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
Seven
Silence of the Lambs, The
Terminator, The
The Exorcist (Revised 2nd Edition)
The Matrix
The Shawshank Redemption
The Thin Red Line
Thelma and Louise
Titanic
Trainspotting
Unforgiven
Usual Suspects, The
Wings of the Dove, The
Withnail and I
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
WR - Mysteries of the Organism
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