132-396: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (German: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens ) is a 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok , a vampire who preys on the wife ( Greta Schröder ) of his estate agent ( Gustav von Wangenheim ) and brings the plague to their town. Nosferatu was produced by Prana Film and
264-445: A 16 fps projection of the same reel would take 16 minutes and 40 seconds, or 304 millimetres (12.0 in) per second. In the 1950s, many telecine conversions of silent films at grossly incorrect frame rates for broadcast television may have alienated viewers. Film speed is often a vexed issue among scholars and film buffs in the presentation of silents today, especially when it comes to DVD releases of restored films , such as
396-496: A defense against copyright infringement, the original German intertitles acknowledged Dracula as the source. Film historian David Kalat states in his commentary track that since the film was "a low-budget film made by Germans for German audiences... setting it in Germany with German-named characters makes the story more tangible and immediate for German-speaking viewers". Even with several details altered, Stoker's heirs sued over
528-507: A film editor and lab chemist. The name of director F. W. Murnau is no longer mentioned in the credits. This version, lasting approximately 80 minutes, was presented on 5 June 1981 at the Cinémathèque Française . Nosferatu brought Murnau into the public eye, especially when his film Der brennende Acker ( The Burning Soil ) was released a few days later. The press reported extensively on Nosferatu and its premiere. With
660-413: A key professional in silent film and was often separate from the scenario writer who created the story. Inter-titles (or titles as they were generally called at the time) "often were graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decorations that commented on the action". Showings of silent films almost always featured live music starting with the first public projection of movies by
792-469: A low budget salute to sentimental silent comedies, particularly Charlie Chaplin 's The Kid . The German film Tuvalu (1999) is mostly silent; the small amount of dialog is an odd mix of European languages, increasing the film's universality. Guy Maddin won awards for his homage to Soviet-era silent films with his short The Heart of the World after which he made a feature-length silent, Brand Upon
924-645: A much longer time for color to be adopted by the industry and an effective process to be developed. Blue represented night scenes, yellow or amber meant day. Red represented fire and green represented a mysterious atmosphere. Similarly, toning of film (such as the common silent film generalization of sepia -toning) with special solutions replaced the silver particles in the film stock with salts or dyes of various colors. A combination of tinting and toning could be used as an effect that could be striking. Some films were hand-tinted, such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894), from Edison Studios . In it, Annabelle Whitford ,
1056-503: A race to design, implement, and market several rival sound-on-disc and sound-on-film sound formats, such as Photokinema (1921), Phonofilm (1923), Vitaphone (1926), Fox Movietone (1927) and RCA Photophone (1928). Warner Bros. was the first studio to accept sound as an element in film production and utilize the Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc technology, to do so. The studio then released The Jazz Singer in 1927, which marked
1188-404: A setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of inter- title cards . The term "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as these films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era, which existed from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a pianist , theater organist —or even, in larger cities, an orchestra —would play music to accompany
1320-419: A small circular frame. Admiring the portrait, the count remarks that she has a "lovely neck." Reading a book about vampires that he took from the inn, Hutter begins to suspect that Orlok is indeed a vampire. With no way to bar the door to his bedroom, Hutter desperately tries to hide as midnight approaches. Suddenly, the door begins to slowly open by itself; and, as Orlok enters, a terrified Hutter hides under
1452-498: A special effect in many of his films. His 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation used a number of colors, including amber, blue, lavender, and a striking red tint for scenes such as the "burning of Atlanta" and the ride of the Ku Klux Klan at the climax of the picture. Griffith later invented a color system in which colored lights flashed on areas of the screen to achieve a color. With the development of sound-on-film technology and
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#17327908089661584-1075: A summary, scene and work photographs, production reports, and essays, including a treatment on vampirism by Albin Grau . Nosferatu opened in the Netherlands on 16 February 1922 at the Hague Flora and Olympia cinemas. Nosferatu premiered in Germany on 4 March 1922 in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Garden . This was planned as a large society evening entitled Das Fest des Nosferatu (Festival of Nosferatu), and guests were asked to arrive dressed in Biedermeier costume. The German cinema premiere itself took place on 15 March 1922 at Berlin's Primus-Palast . The 1930s sound version Die zwölfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens ( The Twelfth Hour: A Night of Horror ), which
1716-408: A wall or screen. After the advent of photography in the 19th century, still photographs were sometimes used. Narration of the showman was important in spectacular entertainment screenings and vital in the lecturing circuit. The principle of stroboscopic animation was well-known since the introduction of the phenakistiscope in 1833, a popular optical toy , but the development of cinematography
1848-494: A young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change colors as she dances. This technique was designed to capture the effect of the live performances of Loie Fuller , beginning in 1891, in which stage lights with colored gels turned her white flowing dresses and sleeves into artistic movement. Hand coloring was often used in the early "trick" and fantasy films of Europe, especially those by Georges Méliès . Méliès began hand-tinting his work as early as 1897 and
1980-440: Is a homage to Nosferatu, and also depicts the theft of Murnau's skull from his family tomb in 2015. Nosferatu only entered the public domain worldwide by the end of 2019. Despite this, the film had already been subject to widespread circulation via a sped-up, unrestored black and white bootleg copy. Beginning in 1981, the film has had various different official restorations, several of which have been issued on home video in
2112-464: Is also associated with pestilence, with Orlok in film being the very manifestation of contagion, rats pouring out of his coffins onto the streets of Wisborg, spreading Black Death . Orlok's link to Belial is also highly significant because Belial is "one of the demons traditionally summoned by Goetic magicians" – making Orlok someone who practiced dark sorcery before becoming a vampire. Orlok and his servant Knock are communicating in occult language –
2244-401: Is an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker 's 1897 novel Dracula . Various names and other details were changed from the novel, including Count Dracula being renamed Count Orlok then finally Nosferatu , an archaic Romanian word with a suggested etymology of Nesuferitu` , meaning "the offensive one" or "the insufferable one". Although those changes are often represented as
2376-413: Is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away. Hutter wakes up the morning after to find fresh punctures on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house and notices on the table a miniature portrait of Hutter's wife, Ellen, an image that the young man carries with him in
2508-486: Is later shown destroyed. Making uncredited appearances are Karl Etlinger as one of Bulwer's students, Hardy von Francois [ de ] as a doctor at a mental hospital, Guido Herzfeld as an innkeeper, and Fanny Schreck as a hospital nurse. Nosferatu has been noted for its themes regarding fear of the Other , as well as for possible antisemitic undertones, both of which may have been partially derived from
2640-468: Is less commonly known, was a completely unauthorized and re-edited version of the film. It was released in Vienna, Austria on 16 May 1930 with sound-on-disc accompaniment and a recomposition of Hans Erdmann 's original score by Georg Fiebiger, a German production manager and composer of film music. It had an alternative ending lighter than the original and the characters were renamed again; Count Orlok's name
2772-495: Is sent to Transylvania by his employer, estate agent Herr Knock, to visit a new client, Count Orlok , who is planning on buying a house across from Hutter's own residence. While embarking on his journey, Hutter stops at an inn in which the locals are frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name. Hutter rides on a coach to Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains , where he is welcomed by Orlok himself. When he
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#17327908089662904-451: Is silent during its middle third, complete with intertitles; Stanley Tucci 's The Impostors has an opening silent sequence in the style of early silent comedies. Brazilian filmmaker Renato Falcão's Margarette's Feast (2003) is silent. Writer/director Michael Pleckaitis puts his own twist on the genre with Silent (2007). While not silent, the Mr. Bean television series and movies have used
3036-544: The benshi , a live narrator who provided commentary and character voices. The benshi became a central element in Japanese film, as well as providing translation for foreign (mostly American) movies. The popularity of the benshi was one reason why silent films persisted well into the 1930s in Japan. Conversely, as benshi -narrated films often lacked intertitles, modern-day audiences may sometimes find it difficult to follow
3168-438: The "talkies", "sound films", or "talking pictures" . The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is older than film (it was suggested almost immediately after Edison introduced the phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had the projectionist manually adjusting the frame rate to fit the sound, but because of the technical challenges involved, the introduction of synchronized dialogue became practical only in
3300-512: The Biedermeier town of Wisborg. There were other views – writer Kevin Jackson has noted that director F. W. Murnau "was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women" throughout his life, including Jewish actor Alexander Granach , who plays Knock in Nosferatu . Additionally, Magistrale wrote that Murnau, being a homosexual , would have been "presumably more sensitive to
3432-511: The Bram Stoker novel Dracula , upon which the film was based. The physical appearance of Count Orlok, with his hooked nose, long claw-like fingernails, and large bald head, has been compared to stereotypical caricatures of Jewish people from the time in which Nosferatu was produced. His features have also been compared to those of a rat or a mouse, the former of which Jews were often equated with. Orlok's interest in acquiring property in
3564-800: The Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? featured a "special" screening of Nosferatu. After the screening, Count Orlok emerges from the screen into the real world and begins stalking victims in the theater. The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire , directed by E. Elias Merhige , is a fictionalized take on the making of Nosferatu . In 2022 an exhibition Phantoms of the Night. 100 Years of "Nosferatu" opens in Berlin. The short movie F.W.M. Symphony , directed by Thomas Hörl , released in late 2022
3696-475: The Vossische Zeitung of 7 March 1922, Nosferatu was praised for its visual style. Nosferatu was also the first film to show a vampire dying from exposure to sunlight. Previous vampire novels such as Dracula had shown them being uncomfortable with sunlight, but not undeath-threateningly so. The film has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes ,
3828-421: The audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen. Much silent film acting is apt to strike modern-day audiences as simplistic or campy . The melodramatic acting style was in some cases a habit actors transferred from their former stage experience. Vaudeville was an especially popular origin for many American silent film actors. The pervading presence of stage actors in film
3960-556: The nitrate filmstock used in that era was extremely unstable and flammable. Additionally, many films were deliberately destroyed, because they had negligible remaining immediate financial value in that era. It has often been claimed that around 75 percent of silent films produced in the US have been lost, though these estimates are inaccurate due to a lack of numerical data. Film projection mostly evolved from magic lantern shows, in which images from handpainted glass slides were projected onto
4092-526: The 1899 Cendrillion (Cinderella) and 1900 Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) provide early examples of hand-tinted films in which the color was a critical part of the scenography or mise-en-scène ; such precise tinting used the workshop of Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris, with teams of female artists adding layers of color to each frame by hand rather than using a more common (and less expensive) process of stenciling. A newly restored version of Méliès' A Trip to
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4224-464: The Brain! (2006), incorporating live Foley artists , narration and orchestra at select showings. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a highly fictionalized depiction of the filming of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau 's classic silent vampire movie Nosferatu (1922). Werner Herzog honored the same film in his own version, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). Some films draw a direct contrast between
4356-646: The Devil (1927). Israel has worked mainly in silent comedy, scoring the films of Harold Lloyd , Buster Keaton , Charley Chase , and others. Timothy Brock has restored many of Charlie Chaplin 's scores, in addition to composing new scores. Contemporary music ensembles are helping to introduce classic silent films to a wider audience through a broad range of musical styles and approaches. Some performers create new compositions using traditional musical instruments, while others add electronic sounds, modern harmonies, rhythms, improvisation, and sound design elements to enhance
4488-588: The Emagine Theater in Novi . It was later released on video on demand via Amazon Prime Video in September 2024 and on streaming though Apple TV+ on 18 October 2024. In July 2015, a remake was announced with Robert Eggers writing and directing. The film was intended to be produced by Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen for Studio 8. In November 2016, Eggers expressed surprise that the Nosferatu remake
4620-457: The German army. Little is known of his war-time experience, but there are some signs he may have dealt with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Colleagues commented that he preferred to keep to himself. He was known to take long walks in the forest alone, often times disappearing for hours at a time. He once stated that he lived in "a remote and incorporeal world". Thus it is considered that
4752-578: The German town of Wisborg, a shift in locale from the Stoker novel's London , has also been analyzed as preying on the fears and anxieties of the German public at the time. Professor Tony Magistrale opined that the film's depiction of an "invasion of the German homeland by an outside force [...] poses disquieting parallels to the anti-Semitic atmosphere festering in Northern Europe in 1922." When
4884-698: The Lumière brothers on December 28, 1895, in Paris. This was furthered in 1896 by the first motion-picture exhibition in the United States at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. At this event, Edison set the precedent that all exhibitions should be accompanied by an orchestra. From the beginning, music was recognized as essential, contributing atmosphere, and giving the audience vital emotional cues. Musicians sometimes played on film sets during shooting for similar reasons. However, depending on
5016-540: The Moon , originally released in 1902, shows an exuberant use of color designed to add texture and interest to the image. Comments by an American distributor in a 1908 film-supply catalog further underscore France's continuing dominance in the field of hand-coloring films during the early silent era. The distributor offers for sale at varying prices "High-Class" motion pictures by Pathé , Urban-Eclipse , Gaumont , Kalem , Itala Film , Ambrosio Film , and Selig . Several of
5148-563: The Pazo de Meirás becomes the vampire's castle. All Murnau's characters find equivalence in the political actors of the Spanish transition to democracy. A 1979 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula by director Werner Herzog , Nosferatu the Vampyre , starred Klaus Kinski (as Count Dracula, not Count Orlok). The film is a remake of the 1922 film with character names that are faithful to
5280-515: The Sahara desert and a British cricket pitch. War scenes were shot on the plains of Grasmere, Staten Island . The Perils of Pauline and its even more popular sequel The Exploits of Elaine were filmed largely on the island. So was the 1906 blockbuster Life of a Cowboy , by Edwin S. Porter Company , and filming moved to the West Coast around 1912. The following are American films from
5412-495: The U.S., Europe and Australia. These versions, which are all tinted , speed-corrected and have specially recorded scores, are separately copyrighted with respect to new copyrightable elements. The most recent restoration, completed in 2005/2006, has been released on DVD and Blu-ray throughout the world, and features a reconstruction of Hans Erdmann's original score by Berndt Heller. In 1977, Spanish amateur filmmaker José Ernesto Díaz Noriega added humorous and iconoclastic dialogues to
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5544-455: The United States. In view of the enormous amount of labor involved which calls for individual hand painting of every one of sixteen pictures to the foot or 16,000 separate pictures for each 1,000 feet of film very few American colorists will undertake the work at any price. As film coloring has progressed much more rapidly in France than in any other country, all of our coloring is done for us by
5676-547: The action—particularly for comedies and action films. Slow projection of a cellulose nitrate base film carried a risk of fire, as each frame was exposed for a longer time to the intense heat of the projection lamp; but there were other reasons to project a film at a greater pace. Often projectionists received general instructions from the distributors on the musical director's cue sheet as to how fast particular reels or scenes should be projected. In rare instances, usually for larger productions, cue sheets produced specifically for
5808-687: The actual song being performed. Films in this category include Griffith's Lady of the Pavements with Lupe Vélez , Edwin Carewe 's Evangeline with Dolores del Río , and Rupert Julian 's The Phantom of the Opera with Mary Philbin and Virginia Pearson . The Silent Film Sound and Music Archive digitizes music and cue sheets written for silent films and makes them available for use by performers, scholars, and enthusiasts. Silent-film actors emphasized body language and facial expression so that
5940-403: The adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed . However, several prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema and the horror genre. Critic and historian Kim Newman declared it as a film that set the template for the genre of horror film. In 1838, in the fictional German town of Wisborg, Thomas Hutter
6072-412: The adoption of sound-on-film technology. Traditional film colorization, all of which involved the use of dyes in some form, interfered with the high resolution required for built-in recorded sound, and were therefore abandoned. The innovative three-strip technicolor process introduced in the mid-1930s was costly and fraught with limitations, and color would not have the same prevalence in film as it did in
6204-473: The bedcovers and falls unconscious. Meanwhile, back in Wisborg, Ellen arises from her own bed and sleepwalks to the railing of her bedroom's balcony. She starts walking on top of the railing, which gets the attention of her friend Harding in the adjacent room. When the doctor arrives, Ellen shouts Hutter's name and envisions Orlok in his castle threatening her unconscious husband. The next day, Hutter explores
6336-562: The beginning of film and 1928. The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent. Several filmmakers have paid homage to the comedies of the silent era, including Charlie Chaplin , with Modern Times (1936), Orson Welles with Too Much Johnson (1938), Jacques Tati with Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Pierre Etaix with The Suitor (1962), and Mel Brooks with Silent Movie (1976). Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien 's acclaimed drama Three Times (2005)
6468-458: The best coloring establishment in Paris and we have found that we obtain better quality, cheaper prices and quicker deliveries, even in coloring American made films, than if the work were done elsewhere. By the beginning of the 1910s, with the onset of feature-length films, tinting was used as another mood setter, just as commonplace as music. The director D. W. Griffith displayed a constant interest and concern about color, and used tinting as
6600-476: The biggest-budgeted films to arrive at the exhibiting theater with original, specially composed scores. However, the first designated full-blown scores had in fact been composed in 1908, by Camille Saint-Saëns for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise , and by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov for Stenka Razin . When organists or pianists used sheet music, they still might add improvisational flourishes to heighten
6732-634: The blood sacrifice of a woman, thus destroying forever the dark being responsible for this catastrophic situation. The idea for making this vampire film saw its genesis in the war-time experience of producer Albin Grau. Grau served in the German army during the World War I , known as the Great War, on the Serbian front . While in Serbia Grau encountered a local farmer who told him of his father, who
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#17327908089666864-461: The case of the 2002 restoration of Metropolis . With the lack of natural color processing available, films of the silent era were frequently dipped in dyestuffs and dyed various shades and hues to signal a mood or represent a time of day. Hand tinting dates back to 1895 in the United States with Edison's release of selected hand-tinted prints of Butterfly Dance . Additionally, experiments in color film started as early as in 1909, although it took
6996-423: The cast. The film wrapped principal photography on 19 May 2023. The film's first teaser trailer was released on 24 June 2024, and it confirmed that the film will be released on 25 December 2024. Silent film A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue ). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as
7128-413: The castle, only to retreat back into his room after he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant in the crypt. Hours later, Orlok piles up coffins on a coach and climbs into the last one before the coach departs; Hutter rushes home after learning of this. The coffins are taken aboard a schooner , where the sailors discover rats in the coffins. All of the crewmen later die, and Orlok takes control of
7260-533: The course of 90 minutes," he said, culminating in "dense, slow death metal." A new score for full orchestra and piano was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra from its former composer-in-residence Sebastian Chang. It premiered, played live with the film in October 2023. [1] Shortly before the premiere, an advertisement campaign was placed in issue #21 of the magazine Bühne und Film , with
7392-498: The crucial differences between stage and screen acting. Directors such as Albert Capellani and Maurice Tourneur began to insist on naturalism in their films. By the mid-1920s many American silent films had adopted a more naturalistic acting style, though not all actors and directors accepted naturalistic, low-key acting straight away; as late as 1927, films featuring expressionistic acting styles, such as Metropolis , were still being released. Greta Garbo , whose first American film
7524-474: The dark thoughts of human beings, responsible for epidemics that call for blood sacrifices in order to prevent them, is also closely linked to that of the alchemist Paracelsus , whose figure is partly embodied in the film in the character of Professor Bulwer (who is mentioned in the film to be Paracelsian himself). This is made concrete in the film in the plague epidemic that spreads through the city of Wisborg, which cannot be remedied by scientific methods, but by
7656-459: The development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid film. Although Thomas Edison was keen to develop a film system that would be synchronised with his phonograph , he eventually introduced the kinetoscope as a silent motion picture viewer in 1893 and later "kinetophone" versions remained unsuccessful. The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era" ( 1894 in film – 1929 in film ). The height of
7788-473: The documents between Orlok and Knock are written in Enochian language (angelic language, recorded in the private journals of English occultist John Dee and his colleague English alchemist Edward Kelley in late 16th-century Elizabethan England). The character of Professor Bulwer in the film is named in reference to English occult novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton . The idea of astral entities, arising from
7920-401: The drama on screen. Even when special effects were not indicated in the score, if an organist was playing a theater organ capable of an unusual sound effect such as "galloping horses", it would be used during scenes of dramatic horseback chases. At the height of the silent era, movies were the single largest source of employment for instrumental musicians, at least in the United States. However,
8052-555: The famous " Mighty Wurlitzer " could simulate some orchestral sounds along with a number of percussion effects such as bass drums and cymbals, and sound effects ranging from "train and boat whistles [to] car horns and bird whistles; ... some could even simulate pistol shots, ringing phones, the sound of surf, horses' hooves, smashing pottery, [and] thunder and rain". Musical scores for early silent films were either improvised or compiled of classical or theatrical repertory music. Once full features became commonplace, however, music
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#17327908089668184-530: The farmer believed had become an undead vampire. F. W. Murnau, director of the film, also saw considerable action in World War I – not only as a company commander in the muddy trenches of the Eastern Front , but also later in the air after he transferred to the German air service . He survived at least eight crashes. Max Schreck who portrayed Count Orlok also served in the trenches of the Great War with
8316-509: The film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 63 reviews, with an average rating of 9.05/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "One of the silent era's most influential masterpieces, Nosferatu ' s eerie, gothic feel – and a chilling performance from Max Schreck as the vampire – set the template for the horror films that followed." In 1995, the Vatican included Nosferatu on a list of 45 important films that people should watch. It
8448-725: The film set in Transylvania were actually shot on location in northern Slovakia , including the High Tatras , Vrátna dolina , Orava Castle , the Váh River, and Starý Castle [ sk ] . The team filmed interior shots at the JOFA studio in Berlin's Johannisthal locality and further exteriors in the Tegel Forest. For cost reasons, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner only had one camera available, and therefore there
8580-417: The film would still be made, saying "... But also, I don't know, maybe Nosferatu doesn't need to be made again, even though I've spent so much time on that." It was reported in September 2022 that Eggers' remake would be distributed by Focus Features , with Bill Skarsgård set to star as Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter. Willem Dafoe , Nicholas Hoult , and Emma Corrin will also be part of
8712-641: The film. His adaptation or détournement , titled Manuscrito encontrato en Zarazwela or Nos fera tu la pugnete , was based on a S8 mm print of the English version. "Observing the curious coincidence of the fiction that is related in the film with history", Díaz Noriega adapted Nosferatu 's plot to the years of the Spanish transition to democracy : Prime Minister Arias Navarro becomes Draculas Navarro and Juan Carlos de Borbón becomes Jonathan Carolus (prince of Franconia). The original Transylvania becomes Galitzia and
8844-407: The films. Pianists and organists would play either from sheet music , or improvisation . Sometimes a person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Though at the time the technology to synchronize sound with the film did not exist, music was seen as an essential part of the viewing experience. "Silent film" is typically used as a historical term to describe an era of cinema prior to
8976-481: The first film serial , The Million Dollar Mystery , released in 1914. The first westerns were filmed at Fred Scott 's Movie Ranch in South Beach, Staten Island. Actors costumed as cowboys and Native Americans galloped across Scott's movie ranch set, which had a frontier main street, a wide selection of stagecoaches and a 56-foot stockade. The island provided a serviceable stand-in for locations as varied as
9108-411: The first commercially successful sound film , but silent films were still the majority of features released in both 1927 and 1928, along with so-called goat-glanded films: silents with a subsection of sound film inserted. Thus the modern sound film era may be regarded as coming to dominance beginning in 1929. For a listing of notable silent era films, see List of years in film for the years between
9240-410: The first rays of the sun. Murnau prepared carefully; there were sketches that were to correspond exactly to each filmed scene, and he used a metronome to control the pace of the acting. The original score was composed by Hans Erdmann and performed by an orchestra at the film's Berlin premiere. However, most of the score has been lost, and what remains is only a partial adapted suite. Thus, throughout
9372-400: The foreign Orlok arrives in Wisborg by ship, he brings with him a swarm of rats which, in a deviation from the source novel, spread the plague throughout the town. This plot element further associates Orlok with rodents and the idea of the "Jew as disease-causing agent". It is also notable that Orlok's accomplice in conspiracy Knock is a Jewish realtor, who acts as the vampire's fifth column in
9504-648: The formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers. The "Edison Trust", as it was nicknamed, was made up of Edison , Biograph , Essanay Studios , Kalem Company , George Kleine Productions , Lubin Studios , Georges Méliès , Pathé , Selig Studios , and Vitagraph Studios , and dominated distribution through the General Film Company . This company dominated
9636-694: The harbour. In Lübeck , the abandoned Salzspeicher served as Nosferatu's new Wisborg house, the one of the churchyard of the Aegidienkirche served as Hutter's, and down the Depenau a procession of coffin bearers bore coffins of supposed plague victims. Many scenes of Lübeck appear in the hunt for Knock , who ordered Hutter in the Yard of Füchting to meet Count Orlok. Further exterior shots followed in Lauenburg , Rostock and on Sylt . The exteriors of
9768-464: The history of Nosferatu screenings, many composers and musicians have written or improvised their own soundtrack to accompany the film. For example, James Bernard , composer of the soundtracks of many Hammer horror films in the late 1950s and 1960s, wrote a score for a reissue. Bernard's score was released in 1997 by Silva Screen Records. A version of Erdmann's original score reconstructed by musicologists and composers Gillian Anderson and James Kessler
9900-465: The image to flicker , and images with low rates of flicker are very unpleasant to watch. Early studies by Thomas Edison for his Kinetoscope machine determined that any rate below 46 images per second "will strain the eye". and this holds true for projected images under normal cinema conditions also. The solution adopted for the Kinetoscope was to run the film at over 40 frames/sec, but this
10032-660: The industry as both a vertical and horizontal monopoly and is a contributing factor in studios' migration to the West Coast. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915, and were dissolved. The Thanhouser film studio was founded in New Rochelle, New York , in 1909 by American theatrical impresario Edwin Thanhouser . The company produced and released 1,086 films between 1910 and 1917, including
10164-860: The industry's acceptance of it, tinting was abandoned altogether, because the dyes used in the tinting process interfered with the soundtracks present on film strips. The early studios were located in the New York City area . Edison Studios were first in West Orange, New Jersey (1892), they were moved to the Bronx, New York (1907). Fox (1909) and Biograph (1906) started in Manhattan , with studios in St George, Staten Island . Other films were shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey . In December 1908, Edison led
10296-532: The introduction of sound with its 24 frame/sec standard speed 2-bladed shutters have become the norm for 35 mm cinema projectors, though three-bladed shutters have remained standard on 16 mm and 8 mm projectors, which are frequently used to project amateur footage shot at 16 or 18 frames/sec. A 35 mm film frame rate of 24 fps translates to a film speed of 456 millimetres (18.0 in) per second. One 1,000-foot (300 m) reel requires 11 minutes and 7 seconds to be projected at 24 fps, while
10428-478: The introduction of talkies, coupled with the roughly simultaneous onset of the Great Depression , was devastating to many musicians. A number of countries devised other ways of bringing sound to silent films. The early cinema of Brazil , for example, featured fitas cantatas (singing films), filmed operettas with singers performing behind the screen. In Japan , films had not only live music but also
10560-421: The invention of synchronized sound, but it also applies to such sound-era films as City Lights , Modern Times and Silent Movie which are accompanied by a music-only soundtrack in place of dialogue. The term silent film is a retronym —a term created to retroactively distinguish something from later developments. Early sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927, were variously referred to as
10692-568: The late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the advent of the Vitaphone system. Within a decade, the widespread production of silent films for popular entertainment had ceased, and the industry had moved fully into the sound era , in which movies were accompanied by synchronized sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects . Most early motion pictures are considered lost owing to their physical decay, as
10824-423: The laudatory votes, there was also occasional criticism that the technical perfection and clarity of the images did not fit the horror theme. The Filmkurier of 6 March 1922 said that the vampire appeared too corporeal and brightly lit to appear genuinely scary. Hans Wollenberg described the film in photo-Stage No. 11 of 11 March 1922 as a "sensation" and praised Murnau's nature shots as "mood-creating elements." In
10956-426: The longer, more prestigious films in the catalog are offered in both standard black-and-white "plain stock" as well as in "hand-painted" color. A plain-stock copy, for example, of the 1907 release Ben Hur is offered for $ 120 ($ 4,069 USD today), while a colored version of the same 1000-foot, 15-minute film costs $ 270 ($ 9,156) including the extra $ 150 coloring charge, which amounted to 15 cents more per foot. Although
11088-401: The mid-1910s, as the differences between stage and screen became apparent. Due to the work of directors such as D. W. Griffith , cinematography became less stage-like, and the development of the close up allowed for understated and realistic acting. Lillian Gish has been called film's "first true actress" for her work in the period, as she pioneered new film performing techniques, recognizing
11220-402: The modern sense? Not for me. I admire it more for its artistry and ideas, its atmosphere and images, than for its ability to manipulate my emotions like a skillful modern horror film. It knows none of the later tricks of the trade, like sudden threats that pop in from the side of the screen . But Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn't scare us, but it haunts us. In 1993, the 15th episode of
11352-520: The new "talkies" around the mid-1930s. The visual quality of silent movies—especially those produced in the 1920s—was often high, but there remains a widely held misconception that these films were primitive, or are barely watchable by modern standards. This misconception comes from the general public's unfamiliarity with the medium, as well as from carelessness on the part of the industry. Most silent films are poorly preserved, leading to their deterioration, and well-preserved films are often played back at
11484-486: The novel. A remake by director David Lee Fisher was in development after being successfully funded on Kickstarter on 3 December 2014. On 13 April 2016, it was reported that Doug Jones had been cast as Count Orlok in the film and that filming had begun. The film would use green screen to insert colorized backgrounds from the original film atop live-action, a process Fisher previously used for his remake The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005). In November 2023, it premiered at
11616-510: The persecution of a subgroup inside the larger German society". As such, it has been said that perceived associations between Orlok and antisemitic stereotypes are unlikely to have been conscious decisions on the part of Murnau. Murnau and Grau gave Orlok in the film a demonic lineage and an occult origin: Orlok is the creation of Belial , one of the Satanic archdemons . Belial in Psalm 41:8–10
11748-450: The plots without specialised subtitling or additional commentary. Few film scores survived intact from the silent period, and musicologists are still confronted by questions when they attempt to precisely reconstruct those that remain. Scores used in current reissues or screenings of silent films may be complete reconstructions of compositions, newly composed for the occasion, assembled from already existing music libraries, or improvised on
11880-438: The projectionist provided a detailed guide to presenting the film. Theaters also—to maximize profit—sometimes varied projection speeds depending on the time of day or popularity of a film, or to fit a film into a prescribed time slot. All motion-picture film projectors require a moving shutter to block the light whilst the film is moving, otherwise the image is smeared in the direction of the movement. However this shutter causes
12012-424: The reasons for the cited extra charge were likely obvious to customers, the distributor explains why his catalog's colored films command such significantly higher prices and require more time for delivery. His explanation also provides insight into the general state of film-coloring services in the United States by 1908: The coloring of moving picture films is a line of work which cannot be satisfactorily performed in
12144-491: The release of D. W. Griffith 's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). In 1999, the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki produced Juha in black and white, which captures the style of a silent film, using intertitles in place of spoken dialogue. Special release prints with titles in several different languages were produced for international distribution. In India, the film Pushpak (1988), starring Kamal Haasan ,
12276-728: The search for an alternative the choice finally fell on the then-still-unknown actor Max Schreck . Filming began in July 1921, with exterior shots in Wismar . A take from Marienkirche's tower over Wismar marketplace with the Wasserkunst Wismar [ de ] served as the establishing shot for the Wisborg scene. Other locations were the Wassertor [ de ] , the Heiligen-Geist-Kirche yard and
12408-440: The silent era (from the early 1910s in film to the late 1920s) was a particularly fruitful period, full of artistic innovation. The film movements of Classical Hollywood as well as French Impressionism , German Expressionism , and Soviet Montage began in this period. Silent filmmakers pioneered the art form to the extent that virtually every style and genre of film-making of the 20th and 21st centuries has its artistic roots in
12540-470: The silent era. The silent era was also a pioneering one from a technical point of view. Three-point lighting, the close-up , long shot , panning , and continuity editing all became prevalent long before silent films were replaced by " talking pictures " or "talkies" in the late 1920s. Some scholars claim that the artistic quality of cinema decreased for several years, during the early 1930s, until film directors , actors, and production staff adapted fully to
12672-524: The silent film era and the era of talkies. Sunset Boulevard shows the disconnect between the two eras in the character of Norma Desmond , played by silent film star Gloria Swanson , and Singin' in the Rain deals with Hollywood artists adjusting to the talkies. Peter Bogdanovich 's 1976 film Nickelodeon deals with the turmoil of silent filmmaking in Hollywood during the early 1910s, leading up to
12804-483: The silent film era that had earned the highest gross income as of 1932. The amounts given are gross rentals (the distributor's share of the box-office) as opposed to exhibition gross. Although attempts to create sync-sound motion pictures go back to the Edison lab in 1896, only from the early 1920s were the basic technologies such as vacuum tube amplifiers and high-quality loudspeakers available. The next few years saw
12936-427: The silents for nearly four decades. As motion pictures gradually increased in running time, a replacement was needed for the in-house interpreter who would explain parts of the film to the audience. Because silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen inter-titles were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue and sometimes even comment on the action for the audience. The title writer became
13068-447: The silver screen. The animated film Fantasia (1940), which is eight different animation sequences set to music, can be considered a silent film, with only one short scene involving dialogue. The espionage film The Thief (1952) has music and sound effects, but no dialogue, as do Thierry Zéno 's 1974 Vase de Noces and Patrick Bokanowski 's 1982 The Angel . Karl Etlinger Too Many Requests If you report this error to
13200-438: The size of the exhibition site, musical accompaniment could drastically change in scale. Small-town and neighborhood movie theatres usually had a pianist . Beginning in the mid-1910s, large city theaters tended to have organists or ensembles of musicians. Massive theatre organs , which were designed to fill a gap between a simple piano soloist and a larger orchestra, had a wide range of special effects. Theatrical organs such as
13332-438: The spot in the manner of the silent-era theater musician. Interest in the scoring of silent films fell somewhat out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s. There was a belief in many college film programs and repertory cinemas that audiences should experience silent film as a pure visual medium, undistracted by music. This belief may have been encouraged by the poor quality of the music tracks found on many silent film reprints of
13464-467: The standardization of the projection speed of 24 frames per second (fps) for sound films between 1926 and 1930, silent films were shot at variable speeds (or " frame rates ") anywhere from 12 to 40 fps, depending on the year and studio. "Standard silent film speed" is often said to be 16 fps as a result of the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe , but industry practice varied considerably; there
13596-489: The time. Since around 1980, there has been a revival of interest in presenting silent films with quality musical scores (either reworkings of period scores or cue sheets, or the composition of appropriate original scores). An early effort of this kind was Kevin Brownlow 's 1980 restoration of Abel Gance 's Napoléon (1927), featuring a score by Carl Davis . A slightly re-edited and sped-up version of Brownlow's restoration
13728-562: The title character's non-talkative nature to create a similar style of humor. A lesser-known example is Jérôme Savary 's La fille du garde-barrière (1975), an homage to silent-era films that uses intertitles and blends comedy, drama, and explicit sex scenes (which led to it being refused a cinema certificate by the British Board of Film Classification ). In 1990, Charles Lane directed and starred in Sidewalk Stories ,
13860-629: The traditional approach include organists such as Dennis James and pianists such as Neil Brand , Günter Buchwald, Philip C. Carli, Ben Model , and William P. Perry . Other contemporary pianists, such as Stephen Horne and Gabriel Thibaudeau, have often taken a more modern approach to scoring. Orchestral conductors such as Carl Davis and Robert Israel have written and compiled scores for numerous silent films; many of these have been featured in showings on Turner Classic Movies or have been released on DVD. Davis has composed new scores for classic silent dramas such as The Big Parade (1925) and Flesh and
13992-460: The turmoil of 1920s Germany and the war-time experiences of those who produced the film left their marks on the production of the film. As Lotte Eisner , a dedicated occultist, wrote: "Mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves, had flourished in the face of death on the battlefields" – these forces were intrinsic to the shaping of cinema's first vampires. Albin Grau himself also linked
14124-455: The vampire with her beauty and offers him her blood of her own free will; she decides to sacrifice herself. Ellen opens her window to invite Orlok in and pretends to fall ill so that she can send Hutter to fetch Professor Bulwer, a physician. After he leaves, Orlok enters and drinks her blood, but the sun rises, which causes Orlok to vanish in a puff of smoke. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband. Orlok's castle
14256-401: The vessel. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carries one of his coffins and moves into the house that he purchased. Many deaths in the town follow after Orlok's arrival, which the local doctors blame on an unspecified plague caused by the rats from the ship. Ellen reads the book that Hutter found; it claims that a vampire can be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts
14388-475: The viewing experience. Among the contemporary ensembles in this category are Un Drame Musical Instantané , Alloy Orchestra , Club Foot Orchestra , Silent Orchestra , Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Minima and the Caspervek Trio, RPM Orchestra . Donald Sosin and his wife Joanna Seaton specialize in adding vocals to silent films, particularly where there is onscreen singing that benefits from hearing
14520-651: The war and vampires: "this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men". Belial as well is the link between war and contagion, as Orlok is linked directly to the Black Death and many critics have linked Nosferatu ' s disease-bearing rodents to the transmissible sickness associated with trench warfare in which rats flourished. As noted by Ernest Jones in his psychoanalytic study of nightmares, vampire legends proliferate in periods of mass contagion. The studio behind Nosferatu , Prana Film,
14652-409: The wrong speed or suffer from censorship cuts and missing frames and scenes, giving the appearance of poor editing. Many silent films exist only in second- or third-generation copies, often made from already damaged and neglected film stock. Many early screening were plagued by flicker on the screen, when the stroboscopic interruptions between frames lay below the critical flicker frequency . This
14784-688: Was a black comedy entirely devoid of dialog. The Australian film Doctor Plonk (2007), was a silent comedy directed by Rolf de Heer . Stage plays have drawn upon silent film styles and sources. Actor/writers Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore staged their Off-Broadway slapstick comedy Silent Laughter as a live action tribute to the silent screen era. Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford created and starred in All Wear Bowlers (2004), which started as an homage to Laurel and Hardy then evolved to incorporate life-sized silent film sequences of Sobelle and Lyford who jump back and forth between live action and
14916-475: Was a short-lived silent -era German film studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and occultist artist Albin Grau , named after a Theosophical journal which was itself named for the Hindu concept of prana . Although the studio's intent was to produce occult - and supernatural -themed films, Nosferatu was its only production, as it declared bankruptcy shortly after the film's release. Grau claimed he
15048-475: Was also deeply influenced by work of the artist Hugo Steiner-Prag who had illustrated other texts with esoteric subjects such as Gustav Meyrink ’s Golem and E. T. A. Hoffmann ’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1907). Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen , a disciple of Hanns Heinz Ewers , the task to write a screenplay inspired by the Dracula novel, although Prana Film had not obtained the film rights . Galeen
15180-422: Was an experienced specialist in dark romanticism ; he had already worked on The Student of Prague (1913), and the screenplay for The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). Galeen set the story in the fictional north German harbour town of Wisborg. He changed the characters' names and added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship. Galeen's Expressionist style screenplay
15312-449: Was changed to Prince Wolkoff, Knock became Karsten, Hutter and Ellen became Kundberg and Margitta, and Annie was changed to Maria. This version, of which Murnau was unaware, contained many scenes filmed by Murnau but not previously released. It also contained additional footage not filmed by Murnau but by a cameraman, Günther Krampf , under the direction of Waldemar Roger [ de ] (also known as Waldemar Ronger), supposedly also
15444-415: Was compiled from photoplay music by the pianist, organist, orchestra conductor or the movie studio itself, which included a cue sheet with the film. These sheets were often lengthy, with detailed notes about effects and moods to watch for. Starting with the mostly original score composed by Joseph Carl Breil for D. W. Griffith 's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), it became relatively common for
15576-478: Was controversial, the door had been opened for a new approach to the presentation of classic silent films. Today, a large number of soloists, music ensembles, and orchestras perform traditional and contemporary scores for silent films internationally. The legendary theater organist Gaylord Carter continued to perform and record his original silent film scores until shortly before his death in 2000; some of those scores are available on DVD reissues. Other purveyors of
15708-451: Was expensive for film. However, by using projectors with dual- and triple-blade shutters the flicker rate is multiplied two or three times higher than the number of film frames — each frame being flashed two or three times on screen. A three-blade shutter projecting a 16 fps film will slightly surpass Edison's figure, giving the audience 48 images per second. During the silent era projectors were commonly fitted with 3-bladed shutters. Since
15840-404: Was going to be his second film, saying "It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next. I was really planning on waiting a while, but that's how fate shook out." In 2017, it was announced that Anya Taylor-Joy would be featured in the film in an unknown role. However, in a 2019 interview, Eggers claimed that he was unsure as to whether
15972-410: Was hampered by long exposure times for photographic emulsions , until Eadweard Muybridge managed to record a chronophotographic sequence in 1878. After others had animated his pictures in zoetropes , Muybridge started lecturing with his own zoopraxiscope animation projector in 1880. The work of other pioneering chronophotographers, including Étienne-Jules Marey and Ottomar Anschütz , furthered
16104-412: Was inspired to shoot a vampire film by a war experience: in Grau's apocryphal tale, during the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the undead . As a lifelong student of the occult and member of Fraternitas Saturni , under the magical name of Master Pacitius, Grau was able to imbue Nosferatu with hermetic and mystical undertones. One example in particular
16236-403: Was later distributed in the United States by Francis Ford Coppola , with a live orchestral score composed by his father Carmine Coppola . In 1984, an edited restoration of Metropolis (1927) was released with a new rock music score by producer-composer Giorgio Moroder . Although the contemporary score, which included pop songs by Freddie Mercury , Pat Benatar , and Jon Anderson of Yes ,
16368-514: Was no actual standard. William Kennedy Laury Dickson , an Edison employee, settled on the astonishingly fast 40 frames per second. Additionally, cameramen of the era insisted that their cranking technique was exactly 16 fps, but modern examination of the films shows this to be in error, and that they often cranked faster. Unless carefully shown at their intended speeds silent films can appear unnaturally fast or slow. However, some scenes were intentionally undercranked during shooting to accelerate
16500-403: Was only one original negative. The director followed Galeen's screenplay carefully, following handwritten instructions on camera positioning, lighting, and related matters. Nevertheless, Murnau completely rewrote 12 pages of the script, as Galeen's text was missing from the director's working script. This concerned the last scene of the film, in which Ellen sacrifices herself and the vampire dies in
16632-403: Was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism , such as those by Carl Mayer . Lotte Eisner described Galeen's screenplay as " voll Poesie, voll Rhythmus " ("full of poetry, full of rhythm"). Actor Conrad Veidt was offered the role of Count Orlok, having previously worked with Murnau, but had to decline for scheduling reasons. In
16764-480: Was ranked twenty-first in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. In 1997, critic Roger Ebert added Nosferatu to his list of The Great Movies , writing: Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires. ...Is Murnau's Nosferatu scary in
16896-633: Was released in 1926, would become known for her naturalistic acting. According to Anton Kaes, a silent film scholar from the University of California, Berkeley, American silent cinema began to see a shift in acting techniques between 1913 and 1921, influenced by techniques found in German silent film. This is mainly attributed to the influx of emigrants from the Weimar Republic , "including film directors, producers, cameramen, lighting and stage technicians, as well as actors and actresses". Until
17028-640: Was released in 1995 by BMG Classics , with multiple missing sequences composed anew, in an attempt to match Erdmann's style. An earlier reconstruction by German composer Berndt Heller has many additions of unrelated classical works. In 2022, the New York Times wrote about Dutch composer Jozef van Wissem 's new score and record release for Nosferatu . Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance incorporates electric guitar and distorted recordings of extinct birds, graduating from subtlety to gothic horror. "My soundtrack goes from silence to noise over
17160-575: Was solved with the introduction of a three-bladed shutter (since 1902), causing two more interruptions per frame. Another widely held misconception is that silent films lacked color. In fact, color was far more prevalent in silent films than in the first few decades of sound films. By the early 1920s, 80 percent of movies could be seen in some sort of color, usually in the form of film tinting or toning or even hand coloring, but also with fairly natural two-color processes such as Kinemacolor and Technicolor . Traditional colorization processes ceased with
17292-454: Was the cause of this outburst from director Marshall Neilan in 1917: "The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures." In other cases, directors such as John Griffith Wray required their actors to deliver larger-than-life expressions for emphasis. As early as 1914, American viewers had begun to make known their preference for greater naturalness on screen. Silent films became less vaudevillian in
17424-477: Was the cryptic contract that Count Orlok and Knock exchanged, which was filled in Enochian , hermetic and alchemical symbols. Grau was also a strong influence on Orlok's verminous and emaciated look and he also designed the film’s sets, costumes, make-up and the letter with the Enochian symbols. He also was responsible for film's advertising campaign, creating movie posters and advertisements. Grau’s visual style
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