Monthly Archives: March 2025

Nosferatu – a Symphony of Horror       F W Murnau  (Ger; 1922) Max Scheck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder

Live tracked by S!nk

Star and Shadow Cinema 14 Mar 2025; ticket £12; £10

the with and the without

By today’s standards Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ lacks the literalist rendering of Robert Eggers’ recent 2024 re-make of the same title.  Eggers’ movie with its promiscuous use of CGI replaces narrative coherence with a series of spectacles: hallucinations, tomb openings and the final sexual parody, the energetic absurdist coupling of the monstrous Nosferatu and Ellen.  Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ piling one thing on top of another devalues any sense of climax (sic), or plot line as the film comes to resemble a series of spectacular adverts.  For which one might conclude that it’s in tune in with the attention demands of today’s audience.

Murnau in 1922 delivered a completely different type of ‘Nosferatu’ which takes the form of a dark quest.  It’s a journey of evil in which the tensions are built up slowly as Nosferatu’s journey reaches its end goal the seeking out and possession of Greta (Eggers’ Ellen).  Murnau’s structure incorporates lyrical watery sequences that leaven the blood fuelled intentions of the Vampire as his coffin is carried by river and sea towards its destination. 

Murnau’s 1922 picture had no synchronised sound track. No dialogue no stings no reinforcing mood music.  But the experience of the audience was of course not silent.  Separated from the picture, music was played in the cinema as the accompaniment to the projected film. 

And this was the case at the Star and Shadow screening where the impro musicians – S!nk – live tracked ‘Nosferatu’.

To view film with sound married to picture (which is the universal situation today) and viewing film where the sound is separated from the picture is a very different experience; without the synchronised sound the audience has a completely different relationship with the image.   More intuitive, more direct, opening up the viewer to another level of involvement with the material. 

With sound on film the primary engagement of the audience is usually with the dialogue.  Dialogue makes a cognitive demand: in order to follow the plot to assess the psychological motivations of the players, the thinking mind has to be engaged.  Of course some of the narrative and characterisations are achieved by the picture,  but if the dialogue is removed from a sound film (or if it is in a foreign language without subtitles) the action usually becomes incomprehensible and the viewer usually loses interest.  Together with the dialogue sound on the picture is also represented by the music track and the FX track.  These tracks tend to be manipulative.  There are stings (either musical or FX) which underline moot points in the action and moments of realisation or in horror films characterised by exploiting sudden high volume. The music tracks typically reinforce the intended emotional response or mood the director thinks appropriate to any given scene.  Sound on picture tends to be designed for manipulative affect – steering plot and plot rationale and reinforcing desired audience response.

Something different happens when the sound (usually musical accompaniment) is separated from the image. The audience moves into a very different state of mind, developing a distinctly different kind of relationship with the projected images. Without dialogue, the viewer’s consciousness locks directly onto the picture.  Viewing becomes a non-verbal experience that replicates something close to the way in which the child experiences the world.  Although accompanying music might have stings and mood re-enforcement, the primary effect of the music is to ease the psychic passage of the viewer into flow of the film.  As the film develops the music starts to weave a trance-like atmosphere, creating the conditions for the viewers to pass out of their everyday state of mind and to be absorbed into the picture.  To become  again, for these moments, as children, at one with what they are seeing.    A condition where there’s no separation between subject and object: the viewer is in the screen.  And this surely is the ‘Magic of Cinema’ a magic that we have by and large lost.

This ‘Magic’ was re-activated by the audience, re-claimed by S!nk’s live tracking of ‘Nosferatu’.  Of course not all ‘silent films’ are live tracked with the artistry finesse and sensitivity that S!nk bring to the task.  But when it happens, then we are privileged to be able to take a step back in time both objectively and subjectively.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

Johnny Guitar     Nickolas Ray  (USA; 1954)  Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge

the eye’s have it

Nick Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ is an inverted Western, where many of the familiar tropes and expectations of the Hollywood genre are turned on their head.   It’s movie that induces into its chosen form a deep vein of psychic substance that is rare for Hollywood let alone cowboy pictures. 

The opening section comprises three sequences that indicate Ray’s movie is not going to honour the genre by following the familiar path: Johnny Guitar’s entry is heralded by explosions – the ripping apart of the mountains through which he is riding; a stagecoach hold up which he spectates; and a powerful overwhelming dust storm which blasts across the land.  Man made environmental destruction, extreme weather and indifference to stick-ups immediately suggests Ray’s Western has a alternate focus of attention.

This is confirmed quickly through the opening master scene that’s set in Vienna’s saloon where Ray’s script sets up his main protagonists as women.  In this era (and many others) women roles in Westerns are normally either non existent (except as extras) or more or less token petticoats whose role in the scenario to soften the exclusively male action.   Women are not players they’re pawns.

In ‘Johnny Guitar’ the women are the players: Vienna and Emma in ruthless stand off.  As in most scripts the two adversaries both hold different values which define and feed their animosity and provides the rationale for the play out of the plot. Vienna, with her Saloon built to profit from the new railroad, stands for the quickening forces of change, the increasing ease of migration, that are redefining power in the Western territories; Emma, a large rancher sees these changes as a threat to her interests, and determines to fight them – and of course Vienna.

So far so good. We have two women as the players in a theme that whilst having a socially and historically grounded script has the traditional oppositional structure. But Ray’s scenario, guided by his female leads, takes his Western deep into psycho-sexual areas that are almost entirely foreign to the genre. Westerns typically depict emotional relationships such as they are from the male character point of view. This is normally defined as a self sufficiency: the man does not need the woman.  The Cowboy is by definition the lonesome Cowboy (cf John Wayne). 

This suppression of emotion is subverted by Ray, feelings albeit conflicting feelings are poised like loaded springs at the core of the film, defining the characters and investing the action with a substrate of intensity which is both expressed and repressed giving edge to every line of dialogue every movement.  And it feels real.

Ray’s narrative play out is underscored by a matrix of cross referencing relationships. The aforementioned long key scene in Vienna’s saloon bar not only establishes the oppositional plot device centred on Emma and Vienna, it also opens up the two women’s contrasting sexualities. Emma’s self loathing shame at her physical attraction to a gangster which leads her to the twisted logic of wanting his death as the price of eliminating the warped internal conflict caused by her desire.  Emma’s eyes are hot with self anger.  Vienna’s eyes are cold.

Vienna’s sexuality has been used and abused.  Her eyes are cold because she is emotionally dead.  But Vienna has self awareness and at some level within herself; she’s unable to accept the end of love.  She has sent for her old flame Johnny Logan (Johnny Guitar) to give herself one final emotional test.  And in the key saloon section when all the shouting’s done, Emma’s gone, everyone’s left, Johnny and Vienna are alone.   

This is a long scene in which Vienna and Johnny are psychically folded into each other’s space. In their movement through Ray’s framing and dark low key lighting with its shadows and half seen faces, there builds up a erotic intensity between the two ex-lovers of desire acknowledged and desire denied that creates an unbearable tension between their two bodies, their two psyches trapped between acceptance and denial of feeling.  Vienna played by Joan Crawford, her face a mask of blood red lipstick and dark proscenium arched eyebrows, is the most vulnerable;  she has the most to lose as Johnny’s physicality presses upon her. But both of them reveal something at the core of their inner selves, the wounds and vulnerabilities the underlie the play out of their lives.   

Vienna’s embrace of the ritual elements of Ray’s script: the Pieta scene with the wounded gangster, the Blood Wedding and the calmness with which she sits on her horse, a noose about her neck waiting for Emma to hang her, are made all the more credible by the audience’s understanding of her inner toughness, as understood from the scene with Johnny.  Compared to living with her own inner turmoil, the externalities of life, however terrible, can be confronted with equanimity.

Many contemporary movies don’t contrive to be erotic. Films like ‘Anora’ don’t deal with emotions or feeling they just do endless scenes of fucking and humping, squealing and moaning: spectacle has taken over life so that all we see is ‘the fireworks’.  Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ in connecting outer life with inner feeling is a film that not only  blows the traditional Westyern apart, it occupies a space that all to rare in Cinema.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk