Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film–— from Mies to Murnau
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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Stills. 6 Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film–— From Mies to Murnau SPYROS PAPAPETROS Parallel Gestures Frame One: The medium close-up of a curtained window: Through the open frame we see the outline of a row of houses with stubby gables. A beam of light falls diagonally on the façades, unveiling a series of windows. Frame Two: The wide shot of a Biedermeier bedchamber overstuffed with a canopy bed, a heavy armchair, a pedimented mirror, and silhouette portraits on the wall flanking the curtained window. Gradually, a spher- ical object starts rotating behind the ruffled bedclothes. It is the head of Nosferatu staring at the window. The vampire slowly rises, clutches his heart with his left hand, and then starts running. Frame One: But before Nosferatu moves, Murnau’s camera moves and returns to the medium close-up of the window. The screen is grad- ually invaded by the vampire’s clawed arms. While Nosferatu runs, the raised elbow of his right arm extends parallel to the windowsill, while his left hand still clasps his chest. Just before he slips out of the frame, Nosferatu is immobilized by the sunlight. Reflexively, the vampire’s right arm starts moving upward, and then his whole body starts rotat- ing toward the opposite side of the window frame. When the 180-degree turn is complete, Nosferatu extends his right arm forward until it is parallel with and above one of the slanting house-roofs visible through the window. Holding the same gesture, the vampire vanishes, leaving the window frame unobstructed. Frame Two: Murnau’s camera returns to the wide shot of the interior, where an oblique column of smoke is now rising from the carpet floor. Like Nosferatu’s arm a few moments before, the line of smoke appears parallel with the oblique rooftops visible through the window. Notice that all of these directorial maneuvers appear to be unscripted. In Henrik Galeen’s original film script for F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), during his death scene the vampire does not run across the room but Grey Room 20, Summer 2005, pp. 6–37. © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 collapses next to Ellen’s bed. Instead of standing up and extending his arm, the vampire kneels down on the ground and tries to “shield himself from the light.”1 Perhaps the ingenious setting of the curtained window—invented by the film’s architect designer, Albin Grau—inspired the change of action: notice that the vampire’s final gestures appear to address the houses behind the curtain frame. Witness the momentous geometry of Nosferatu’s hand signals. Not only does his right hand extend parallel to the slanting rooftop, but the elbow of his left hand holding his heart appears parallel in the same direction. These parallel lines create a contrasting depth. Nosferatu’s arms are in the foreground while the buildings are in the background, yet in the projected screen these asymptotic surfaces appear to be on the same level. As we know from Euclidean geometry, two parallel lines define one plane. Yet here these lines define more than one plane. They extend to a symbolic level, that of language—a form of communication not between two persons but between subjects and things. Arm and roof communicate. Parallel to one another, they are in correspondence. These covert exchanges between living subjects and inanimate objects describe the symptoms of modern animation. Here animation is con- ceived as the transference of energy from a semidepleted animate subject to its surrounding architecture, which becomes menacingly reinvigo- rated. Nosferatu’s final gesture describes precisely this energy transfer. Top row, left: Nosferatu: With his left hand attached to his heart and his right hand connected to A Symphony of Horror. his houses, the transparent Nosferatu becomes the center of an energy Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. Top row, right: Faust. circuit, as if his own inanimation feeds into the buildings’ animism. Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1925. Still. What is the impetus driving these gestures? Arrested between the Bottom row, left: Nosferatu: director’s camera frame and the designer’s window frame, Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror. desperately tries to adjust his body to the set by aligning his arms with Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. parts of the décor. In his final moments, the vampire behaves like a Bottom row, right: Eric Rohmer. L’organisation panic-stricken animal trying to blend into its surroundings. Nosferatu’s de l’espace dans le Faust final gesture rehearses his disappearance. The vampire is framed by an de Murnau, 1977. Diagram. 8 Grey Room 20 architecture that stages his demise. Notice that during the brief moment when Nosferatu begins dissolving in the light and becomes transparent, the rear edge of the window frame penetrates his torso precisely at the spot on his chest where the vampire had earlier clutched himself. As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a wooden stake pierces the vampire’s heart and finally kills the monster. Nosferatu is not only framed but killed by the window. Sunlight began the “death by transparency” story; the window frame completed the plot.2 According to the scenario the houses seen through the window were Nosferatu’s residence during his relocation from his medieval castle in the Carpathians to the nineteenth-century city of Wisborg. As the mas- ter dies, he is away from his houses yet reunited with them through a final gesture. His hand signal inscribes his body on the building frame that finally replaces him on the screen. The parallel gesturing of hands and scenery during Nosferatu’s trans- figuration scene is not without precedent in the film. In an earlier sig- nature scene, when the vampire mounts the stairs to Ellen’s bedroom, the elbow of his right arm moves exactly parallel to the diagonal handrail of the staircase, as does his left upper arm. The fact that both Nosferatu’s body and the handrail appear as coplanar shadows makes even clearer that such parallel gestures are exercises in projective geometry—they project the outcome of an impeding action. The French director Eric Rohmer detects similar parallel alignments between subjects and objects in Murnau’s next magnum opus, Faust.3 Rohmer shows how gestures in Murnau—from the arms of the pleading Marguerite raised parallel to a temple projected in the background to the hands of the prophet bran- dishing a cross over the heads of a crowd—have the power to organize space as well as extend in time by presaging the ominous outcome of the story. A similar scene from Murnau’s Faust portraying a highly prophetic hand signal helps decipher the cryptic meaning of Nosferatu’s final gesture.4 I refer to the moment when Mephistopheles performs a bene- diction over the head of the aging Faust, after which the hero regains the powers of his youth. This biblical laying on of hands signifies the pass- ing of a rejuvenating energy, but Mephistopheles’ gesture ultimately proves fatal for Faust. Like Mephistopheles’ hand wave, Nosferatu’s gesture is ambiguous: it signals both a blessing and a curse, a benediction and a malediction, ruin and regeneration. Evil comes from and falls upon the houses cov- ered by the vampire’s arm. The houses are both malicious and accursed. Arm and roof ascend parallel to their destruction. While the vampire vanishes, the houses pledge to avenge the abrupt demise of their master, yet their own future remains equally fragile. Papapetros | Malicious Houses 9 Turn-of-the-century theorists and architects such as August Schmarsow and Henry van de Velde argued that both line and space originate in human gesture.5 Nosferatu’s inhuman gesture not only organizes filmic space, as Rohmer argued, but also delineates an entire perspective that transcends the filmic screen. “Each gesture . each step, each move- ment is determined with scientific rigor according to the effect it will have on the spectator,” observed a journalist present on the set of Nosferatu.6 Gestures and movements extend beyond the cinematic frame to form a larger architectural construction. I would therefore like to consider Nosferatu’s farewell address as a crucial gesture for the impeding for- mation (the original Gestaltung) of modern architecture. The vampire’s theatrical transfiguration in front of the curtained window is only the preview of future spectacular architectural events. Perhaps the archi- tectural sequel to Nosferatu occurred not in the stage sets of the endless remakes featuring Count Dracula and other “living dead” but in the domain of modern architecture, which during the time of Nosferatu’s original release in 1922 was staging its own animated battles with numerous building representatives within the region of the “living dead.” Parallel Houses The four buildings serving as Nosferatu’s residence in Wisborg were in fact salt warehouses in Lübeck, built around the beginning of the eighteenth century. One can see them, along with other gabled houses from the same region, in several early-twentieth-century photographic surveys of Northern European architecture.7 While living in Lübeck in 1903, Edvard Munch produced an ink drawing of the warehouses that the ex-art history student Murnau might have seen.8 However, the Lübeck buildings are not the only models for Nosferatu’s residence. A number of similar architectural models serve as mediators between the nineteenth-century past that Murnau’s Nosferatu portrays and the modernist present that it allegorizes. Listen to the testimony of a con- temporary witness: In this age I now inhabit, a persistent feeling clings to me, as though at certain hours of the night and early morning gray, the houses took mysterious silent counsel together with one another.