Max Schreck – The Realm of Silence

The cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu

This week, I revisit some of the cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). After catching Robert Eggers’s remake of the film earlier this year, I discussed my thoughts on its relation to the silent original in a podcast with Jose Arroyo (freely available here). To prepare for this, I rewatched (and watched for the first time) several modern films that cite or rework Murnau’s original – and made notes on my thoughts as I went. As a kind of written addendum to the podcast, I have collated and attempted to polish these thoughts into what follows…

Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). What can I say about this wonderfully strange and compelling film? Every image is perfectly composed, marvellously controlled. The world on screen, enriched by tinting, has marvellous texture and resonance. Nosferatu is a fantasy and a period piece, but both the fantasy and the period are rooted in real places – and, for me, its exteriors truly make the film. The town, the forest, the mountains, the castle, and the coast – these locations have such a sense of pastness, and such pictorial power, that they sink into your memory. No amount of parody or pastiche can lessen their value. So too with the performers. They are cinematic archetypes, enacting some kind ritual drama that future generations feel obliged to mimic. But the performances are also playful and delightful, even their most naïve gestures somehow innocent of cliché. There is more than a touch of camp about Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, but a camp that is always sinister. His sexual predation is not quite human; interpreting his desires and motives is like trying to understand the consciousness of an animal or an insect; those piercing eyes are bright with a life than cannot be fathomed. Murnau shapes Nosferatu’s otherworldliness through the darkness from which he emerges, the shadows he casts, the untenanted spaces he inhabits. The film plays with his ability to move across space and time: he walks with the ancient deliberation of an old aristocrat in one scene then scuttles at terrifying speed in another. The figure is allied with cinema’s own uncanniness, the medium enabling the monster: his carriage hurtling through a forest like a berserk toy, his erect body rising in magical defiance of gravity from his coffin. All this richness of image and gesture is enhanced by Hans Erdmann’s original score, best heard (I’ll have you know) via Gillian B. Anderson’s edition rather than the version released on various DVD/Blu-rays. (Anderson’s edition more closely replicates Erdmann’s original orchestration but remains, sadly, available only on a long out-of-print CD.) As it shifts from sequence to sequence, Erdmann’s music moves from the lyrical to the rustic and the elemental; it is charming, brooding, devastatingly simple. As its title states boldly at the outset, Nosferatu is a symphony of horror – a truly complete work of cinematic and musical art. As much as its images and ideas have been treated as a grab bag for future generations to ransack, it still holds an un-replicable splendour.

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979; W. Ger./Fr.; Werner Herzog). The first full remake of Murnau’s film, and by far the best. Shot on location in the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, Herzog has an unerring knack for the right places, filmed at the right time of day, captured in the right conditions. Always in his films, you can see that this is a director who has spent time walking. These aren’t pretty landscapes, touristic ones, places chosen second- or third-hand – they are fresh, harsh, rugged, sublime. There is also the sense that Herzog’s minimal budget and no-frills filmmaking benefits the atmosphere: it always feels like he has snuck into these spaces without asking permission. These are stolen images, not forged ones. The town, the coast, the mountains, the castle – all become otherworldly, other-timely. The camera seems to have found out odd corners of Europe where the past lives on, like finding patches of frost on a bright spring morning. The supernatural seems almost an extension of this natural world, the hypnotic slow-motion images of bats, the time-lapse photography of moving clouds, or the opening footage of mummified corpses fit perfectly into this world, this mood – all are implacably real and ungraspably strange. The cast, too, fits in with this mood – through costumes and setting and lighting, yes, but through performance. All is mood. This Nosferatu is ridden by angst, pain. Herzog often said that Klaus Kinski’s best performances came when he was exhausted to the point of collapse. The actor would rant and rage and scream and shout and threaten murder, and Herzog would wait until the storm ebbed – then he would roll the camera and shoot the scene. The result is an air of timeless exhaustion, of a pitiable figure advancing through centuries of fatigue. The slowness of Kinski’s gestures across the film are dreamlike, but then he moves with terrifying speed when his instincts are riled – as when he sees blood on Harker’s hand, or in his writhing death-throes, curling up like he’s a sheet of parchment caught in a flame. It’s a performance of amazing power that draws you in every time you watch it. Just as fine, perhaps finer still, is Isabelle Adjani. She is as otherworldly and magnetic as any of Herzog’s images, who indeed seems to have imbibed and embodied them. Her glance, her movement, her posture – what a sublime presence she is on screen. (Yes, I really do prefer Adjani to Greta Schröder in Murnau’s film.) Elsewhere, Herzog brings surprising depth and pathos to his characters. As Renfield, Roland Topor is oddly and touchingly gentle – a sad figure, a lonely man chasing someone to love him, or a child chasing a father. He is a world away from the comically sinister Alexander Granach as Knock in Murnau’s film (or the later scenery-chewing performances of subsequent versions). And I do love Bruno Ganz’s honest, harried Harker. He does not have the boyish innocence of Gustav von Wangenheim for Murnau, but I can believe him as a man who lives in this particular world, who loves his wife, who finds himself in thrall to the uncanny. His slow transformation into a vampire across the film is marvellous, and I have always loved his final scene. He has a marvellously comic flourish (getting the maid to sweep away the salt that keeps him magically penned in a corner of the living room), as though he were touched not merely by the spirit of Kinski but by the spirit of Max Schreck. Then Ganz takes on the faraway look of someone being drawn into another kind of life, or afterlife. The last image of him on horseback, riding across the wind-whipped sands, accompanied by the “Sanctus” from Gounod’s mass, is beautiful. This is a film of which I remain inordinately fond.

Vampires in Venice [aka Nosferatu in Venice] (1988; It.; Augusto Caminito/Klaus Kinski). Yes, dear reader, I even watched this – just for you. Frankly, it was hardly worth it for the few sentences I write here. Kinski has grown his hair, a caged lion with a rockstar mane. He wanders with glazed, angry boredom around Venice – in a Venice pretending vainly to be the past. Christopher Plummer tries to track him down in the present, encountering the vapid stock characters of post-synchronized Euro-horror. It’s a slovenly, sloppy film – salacious yet soporific. I drifted in and out of its louche, morbid pall of atmosphere. I remember the final images, which touch on the poetic – yet somehow remain earthbound. Kinski, a naked woman in his arms, walking across a deserted square in the fog. Where was the film that justified such an image? Murnau is dead, and director Caminito (and Kinski, his eminence grise) did not wander into the past to find him, or to resurrect anything of his world.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000; US/UK/Lu.; E. Elias Merhige). A film about the shooting of Murnau’s film, the concept of which is that the director hired a real vampire for the role of Nosferatu. What a curious thing this is. The concept is neat enough, but it is framed in such odd terms – at least, from a film historian’s perspective. We are told (via an intertitle, no less) that Murnau creates “the most realistic vampire film ever made” – and the character later explains that realism is the essence of cinema. For the film, this is fine, but I wonder if this is how the writer and director of Shadow of the Vampire really felt about Murnau. Does anyone associate Murnau with “realism”, let alone define him by this term? I ask, because in all other senses Shadow of the Vampire is oddly loyal to Murnau – recreating with rather charming precision many of his original shots. We see the camera’s eye view of scenes, though these shots mimic the worn monochrome quality of old celluloid. Yet the film also shows us Schreck watching some of the landscapes from Nosferatu projected on a screen – but instead of pristine rushes, we get the battered and blasted tones of a grotty 16mm print. Amid the attention to period detail, this one glimpse of Murnau’s original footage is distinctly unflattering. John Malkovich is (inevitably) a weirdly compelling Murnau, obsessive and cunning but often charming. Willem Dafoe has a twinkle in his eye as Max Schreck, knowing that it’s all a game – even if the film takes itself a little too seriously. Indeed, my reservations about Shadow of the Vampire all stem from the way it addresses its own premise. The film gestures towards an ideology or aesthetic of realism but never develops it, nor does it allow the horror to grow frightening enough to compensate. Shadow of the Vampire is not a comedy, but the comedic shadows its every move. Dafoe, I think, knows always the dramatic limitations of these projects. He is never parodic in drama, but he can tread the line wonderfully well, as he does in Eggers’s Nosferatu. Shadow of the Vampire is interesting enough as an idea, and as a curious period drama, but I’m not sure it is anything more than a superficial engagement with the cinematic past.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002; Can.; Guy Maddin). I sometimes get asked what I think of Guy Maddin, or else people assume that I am interested in his “new” silent films. I confess that I have never taken much interest in them at all, nor have I ever felt strong kinship or interest in any “new” silent productions. I was once in Paris at the time of a retrospective and caught Maddin in person, introducing Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). It remains the only film of his I have seen in the cinema, and I confess I found it interminable. Maddin certainly captures the stultifying awkwardness of certain early sound productions, but it felt like a short film blown out to feature proportions and even at 70 minutes it was a slog to sit through. His Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a much more lavish affair, taking its cue from innumerable previous iterations of the vampire myth – but shot silently and synchronized to a music soundtrack. In many ways, it’s a superb production. Maddin lights and shoots his scenes with stylish brilliance. His staging and choreography are striking, just as his mobile camera and his editing are dashing and spirited. But I regret how the many parodic performances and gestures it makes (not to mention the garish yellow text for the intertitles that sits superimposed over monochrome imagery) keep me at a distance. Campness need not be so superficial nor so silly as it is here, and these qualities make its aesthetic sumptuousness seem no more than surface and gesture. It has the trappings of silence but not of its depth or uncanniness. It’s a filmed ballet, but one without any frisson of liveness or great physicality. Rather, it’s a danced film – and I swiftly bored of its pretty artifices. Maddin’s film is only a very distant relation to Murnau, and despite its beautiful (sometimes ravishing) moments it has no resonance.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023; US; David Lee Fisher). You may not have noticed the release of this film, but I did – and its very existence requires some contextual explanation. Fisher’s only other film is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (2005), a remake of Robert Wiene’s silent original. Using digital scans of the original film, Fisher recreates (not quite shot-for-shot) the aesthetic with a new cast – and dialogue. I had the peculiar privilege of encountering this film for the first time on a big screen with a class of film history students, after having watched Wiene’s original the previous week. I am always very sensitive to the mood of a room, especially of students – I do so want them to engage with (if not love) the films they are shown. There was nothing worse as a lecturer to feel that you were showing students something they actively hated (and I could always feel it in the room). But Fisher’s Caligari was the first time I felt glad to sense that the room had turned against a film. As bad a habit as it is for a critic to feel superior to a film, it is a worse habit for the director of a remake to feel equal to the original. The digital process of copy-and-pasting sets is neat enough, but the film has no idea how to replicate the sense of presence: Fisher’s cast are walking about mostly in green screen spaces, utterly divorced from their surroundings. It has the trappings of a period piece, but neither costumes nor faces nor performances can convince they have anything to do with the period. The dialogue is absurd, banal to the point of existential embarrassment. (How can such a script be thought adequate?) And when Fisher recreates the famous close-up of Conrad Veidt’s Caligari opening his eyes, the void between past and present is at its most unbridgeable, the gulf in intensity of drama and performance most apparent. (It is the same problem that Scorsese had in including this same shot of Veidt in Hugo (2011): it has infinitely more power and presence than anything in the surrounding film.)

So to Fisher’s second film… Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was, so the internet tells me, funded via a Kickstarter campaign way back in the 2010s. The film was purportedly shot in 2015-16, which seems remarkable given that it took another seven years to get released. Of course, it has been released only for streaming via Amazon Prime, which I suppose is the equivalent nowadays of what was once called “straight to video”. As with Fisher’s Caligari, original images from Murnau’s film have been digitally transplanted around a new cast. The effect is both more detailed and somehow more disappointing. In Fisher’s Caligari, the sets are at least flat in the original. In Nosferatu, an entire world is reprocessed in a manner that I found positively sickly. I earlier described the richness of the locations being one of the chief pleasures of Murnau’s film, and their systematic eradication was one of the chief disappointments of Fisher’s film. The landscapes are CGI creations, imaginatively stunted – as is every interior space, every shot in fact. The backdrop to every scene resembles a generic screensaver, without a trace of weight or reality or mystery. (The costumes are no less convincing, nor even the occasional moustache.) Among the cast, I single out Sarah Carter as the only figure to have genuine emotional depth – or any kind of convincing presence. She stands in a different league to anyone else on screen, even Doug Jones, whose Orlok is at least a committed performance. But it, like everything else in the film, is an exhausted stereotype of something we’ve seen dozens of times before. Fisher’s technology has improved, but he still cannot write dialogue or assemble convincing faces or performances. In comparison, Maddin’s Dracula (for all my reservations) is an infinitely more convincing use of a silent milieu.

Nosferatu (2024; US; Robert Eggers). All of which brings us to Eggers. Oh, Eggers… I have only seen one of his other films, and I thought The Lighthouse (2019) was as dramatically hollow as it was stylistically skilled. The tone of the script and performances rubbed me the wrong way. Was this a parody that took itself far too seriously, or a serious drama that was incredibly flippant? Much as I admired the way it looked, I squirmed with embarrassment and irritation at the dramatic tone. Some of my reservations about The Lighthouse I also have about Nosferatu, but I enjoyed the latter much more.

For a start, it looks lavish, and Eggers knows how to dress a set and provide a beautiful background. There are images that evoke Caspar David Friedrich (almost more so than evocations of Murnau), and there are glimpses of some fabulous locations (in the Czech Republic). The whole section in which Hutter travels to the east is the best in the film, and I wish I had seen more of the amazing churches and villages glimpsed all-too-briefly here.

But the richness of this part of the film’s world, so breezily skipped through, makes the inadequacies of the Wisburg setting more apparent. The exterior spaces of Wisburg consist of little more than two streets and a very small crowd of inhabitants. There is no sense of place and time here, nor of the scale of the invasion of the rats and the accompanying plague. (Compare this to Herzog’s film to see how much difference this space makes in dramatic tone and mood.) And while I loved some of the scenes set on the coast, you never get the sense that Eggers quite knows how to let these images sink in or resonate. They are very pretty, but they have no greater purpose. Eggers can dress a world impeccably, but a world is also people and ideas – these take work of a subtler and more difficult kind. As with The Lighthouse, to me Nosferatu was a very modern set of people dressing up and playing the past. The very impeccability of the images made the dialogue and the tone of many performances incongruous. While the film is happy to employ religion and supernaturalism, no-one seems to believe in any kind of corresponding or supporting ideology. And while the film offers a token critique of (male) medical authority, it is also entirely predicated on the idea of female desire as hysterical and “other”. (Nosferatu is explicitly summoned, if not created, by Ellen.) What, if anything, does this film believe, or want us to believe, about the drama it shows?

The performances are a curious mix. I must begin by praising Nicholas Hoult, who as Thomas Hutter is the emotional heart of Nosferatu. I was moved by him as by nothing else in the film. When he says he loves Ellen, you truly believe it – a conviction without which the film would fall down. Hoult was absolutely the best thing in Nosferatu, the least histrionic and the most believable. Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu is very… well, loud. His abstract presence is first signalled by a vast roar of sound in the film’s prologue that had me covering my ears. And when we meet him and he speaks, his voice (featuring rrrs that roll like no other), even in a whisper, reverberates throughout the speakers and floor of the cinema. Utterly unlike the silent and unknowable figure of Murnau’s film, this Nosferatu is a physical, corporeal, rotting being, defined as much by sound as image.

As Ellen, I found Lily-Rose Depp oddly unsatisfying. She gets to romp and roar and moan and writhe, and does so with aplomb. (Many of her poses are supposedly based on historical accounts of madness/hysteria, but I felt I had seen young women writhe and vomit blood this way a thousand times before in horror films.) But when she must deliver the (vaguely) period dialogue, it carries the whiff of parody. In part, it is the script’s fault for attempting (and, I think, failing) to mimic nineteenth-century turns of phrase, but mainly it is an issue of tone. I remain unconvinced that Eggers knows how to handle (or to decide upon) a consistent or convincing tone. Depp was one of the main reasons I felt this Nosferatu was playing dress-up. Again, I do not blame the performer so much as the director. This too is the case with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance as Harding, which I found inexplicably bad. How can an English actor speak English so unconvincingly? I do not blame Taylor-Johnson, for he’s clearly been asked to perform like this by the director. But why? Why is he so artificial, so mannered, so parodically out of place? I am at a loss as to how I am supposed to feel towards Harding or his family. His children are ghastly screaming creatures, mobilized by the film (so I thought while watching the first half) to make us glad of their eventual demise – but when the demise came, suddenly the tone suggested they had earned our sympathy, as had Harding. Why? How? When? As for Simon McBurney’s Knock, he is as scenery-chewing as they come, gnawing on live animals and shouting – always shouting. While the characterization might echo Murnau’s version, it brings nothing new (other than fatuous gore). Just think how tender Herzog’s Renfield is by comparison, a character who is more than one-dimensional – and whose madness is a blissfully quiet delight.

What of Eggers’s relationship to Murnau? I noticed how the new film’s credits never mention Murnau, only Henrik Galeen, the screenwriter of the 1922 film. How odd, and how ungenerous, given the direct citation of the film’s (i.e. Murnau’s) imagery as well as its characters. Yet I never quite got the sense that film history truly informed this film. Eggers has surely seen Carl-Th. Dryer’s Vampyr (1932) – the floating shadows, the uncertainty of space, the dislocation of sound and image – but his Nosferatu has nothing uncanny about it. Dryer makes his sounds teeter on silence, slip back into it, emerge unsettlingly from it; Eggers makes his film quite unbelievably loud, roaring, throbbing – even his vampire’s whispers are rendered at the volume of earthquakes. Nor did I get a sense of other Galeen films lurking in the background of Eggers’s. Perhaps this new Nosferatu has some faint echo of Galeen’s Alraune (1928), but only in the sense that both films have an interest in female sexuality and the uncanny. (And let me be absolutely clear: Lily-Rose Depp is no Brigitte Helm.) But I found no echo of the world of Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (1926), which has its own rich cultural history, being itself a remake of the (to my mind) superior version of 1913 (a film I discussed here). This is a whole strain of German cinema that I feel very little evidence of in Eggers’s film. On its own terms, this new Nosferatu is a perfectly enjoyable film – but it is a bold move to identify itself with the silent past. If nothing else, it invites comparison where otherwise it might not. Having summoned the comparison, I cannot but think that Murnau’s film is an eternally peculiar and resonant work whose secrets elude Eggers.

In summary… well, what is my summation? I set out on this little crash course through the afterlives of Nosferatu with the aim of suggesting how and where Murnau’s film inspired future generations. In the end, I fear that all I’ve done is complain. If this does not make for a neutral survey, at least it’s an honest assessment of what I felt. The more remakes, revisits, or (god help us) “reimaginings” of a film, the wearier I grow. There is something in the metaphor of the vampire, in its unkillable afterlife, that fits the ceaseless round of resurrections cinema has performed on Nosferatu. But having rewatched all these films, I feel I am become Kinski’s incarnation – eternally weary, wishing for the end of this eternal round. Let me return to my silent realm.

Paul Cuff

Am Rande der Welt (1927; Ger.; Karl Grune)

In January 1927, the director Karl Grune began a major new production for Ufa. He had co-written the screenplay with Hans Brennert, and he as deeply passionate about his project. Am Rande der Welt (“On the Edge of the World”) was to be a pacifist film, set in an unnamed borderland on the frontline of an unnamed war. The cast boasted veteran actors Albert Steinrück and Max Schreck (Nosferatu himself) alongside younger stars Wilhelm Dieterle and Brigitte Helm (fresh from shooting Metropolis). Filming took place entirely in the studio spaces of Ufa during January-March 1927. Grune completed editing Am Rande der Welt and presented it to the German censors in April 1927. It was passed and the film readied for release. At this point, the management of Ufa stepped in. In March that year, Ufa had been bought by the press baron Alfred Hugenberg, who demanded that his management team take greater control over the films they produced. This was not only for the same of economics (Metropolis had nearly bankrupted the company), but for the sake of ideology. Hugenberg was ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalist—he would later abet the rise of Adolf Hitler to power. It was the ideology of Grune’s film that was the problem: it was too pacifist, perhaps even anti-patriotic. Am Rande der Welt did not meet their moral standards. The result? The film was cut, not by the censor, but by Ufa itself. Grune’s original version measured 2635 metres (approximately 114 minutes at 20fps), whereas the version resubmitted to the censor in August 1927 was 2429m. Grune complained in private and then in public. The film had not just been reduced, but re-edited and re-titled. He felt that these changes were so severe, so damaging to the film’s pacifist message, that he asked for his name to be taken off the film. Am Rande der Welt premiered on 19 September 1927 at the Gloria-Palast in Berlin, shown with an orchestral score by Giuseppe Becce. So, what remains—and how does it stand up?

Act 1. From the mists of space, a spinning globe bowls forward. Jazz bands, dancers, superimposed—naked bodies writhing, parting. Fireworks, grotesque dancers. A Catherine wheel spins, overhead visions of dancers, dissolves away over the image of a spinning windmill. The camera tracks back, and back. Surely we at the edge of the world. A title, a motto etched on the wood. The mill is ancient, and it’s as though we’ve travelled back in time since the opening montage. What century are we in now? The only technology here is pre-modern. Labour is manual, the only mechanism the ancient technology of the sail and grindstone. The mill stands at the edge of the world: a studio painted horizon marks the limits of reality as the film knows it.

The old miller (Albert Steinrück) is sieving flour, his oldest son Johannes (Wilhelm Dieterle) emptying a bag, his youngest son Michael (Imre Ráday) cleaning the giant stone grinding wheel. This huge space is the interior of the mill, and it feels cavernous: the exterior is a model, yet the interior is an expansive reality. And here’s Magda (Brigitte Helm), feeding chickens, her hair blowing in the wind.

But already an outsider (Erwin Faber), silhouetted against the pond in the foreground, the mill turning behind him. His letter brings him to work at the mill, but it also promises further “instructions”. He reads the letter one last time, then burns it. Something sinister is afoot. A real sky glowers gloomily above the model and studio set. Just as the man meets Brigitte, the wind picks up; he is heralded by a great gust of dust. Portentous signs…

Inside, the millers gather round the dining table. The newcomer is all helpfulness and smiles, helping pick up the fragments of a dropped plate (but is he the cause of this first mishap?). “I come from the other side of the border”, he explains. The miller (Albert Steinrück) doesn’t mind, just so long as he works well. He is given a room somewhere in the mill, a gloomy cell.

Outside another figure stands before the mill. As the newcomer unpacks, the other man stalks the corridor outside. His knock portends doom. The camera pans rapidly to the door, then shakily follows the man to the door.

It’s Max Schreck, tall, sinister, a devil’s pointed beard and hat. “Are you afraid?” he asks. He’s a pedlar of sorts, but surely far more portentous. But to Brigitte he’s more flirtatious, more camp. He applies lipstick, powder to his own face to tempt her, but she laughs him off. The pedlar leaves, his appearance leaving some strange atmosphere behind him.

Another gloomy interior, the end of the working day. “Next week we’ll celebrate”, the mill will be three hundred years old. An assistant miller plays the accordion, the millers comically cavort. The miller’s son, Johannes (Wilhelm Dieterle), runs after his wife (Camilla von Hollay), who leads him outside, only to show him a baby’s clothes, newly made.

Outside, the pedlar observes the newcomer flirting with Brigitte. Scared by him, they run inside and dance… only to find his eye at a keyhole—the camera tracks rapidly into its sinister ken.

But the baby clothes attract the millers, while the newcomer seeks the owner of the eye at the whole—of course it is the pedlar. “I’ve been overserving you these last days. No love affairs”, he warns. Who is this man, and what is his power? Another shadow falls across the ground. But the truth begins to emerge: the pedlar instructs the newcomer, and threatens him destruction if he betrays his mission. He is a spy!

The old miller reads the paper, which denies the threat of war. That night, a silhouetted figure wanders the plains outside the mill. Vertical wipe-dissolves take us from room to room, then a horizontal wipe from Brigitte’s bed to the newcomer, his shadow moving over the walls, spade in hand. Now he is a prick of light in the dark, inching forward. He digs. But the miller wakens, lights a candle, creeps to the window. The newcomer dashes madly back to bed to avoid detection. (His bed is a sinister war chest, bulging with giant protruding nail heads.) The pedlar stalks the land. End of act 1.

Act 2. The mill’s anniversary. Food and drink are being prepared. A montage of delicious produce, and the labour taken to prepare it: hands stirring, washing, striking, mashing, straining, plucking. Outside, a band of musicians, villagers in their Sunday best, marching to the mill.

Brigitte is making herself look pretty (in the homeliest way—a far cry from her later films). The old miller wears his best suit, his top hat, which he raises to the millers and to the outside world. Johannes is busy building a crib for his future child. After showing off his construction, he rushes into his festive clothes and joins the others. He and his wife march proudly with the rest out to greet the crowd. They parade with the band to the green, where the whole village has become a funfair.

Circus folk—midgets and the “woman without a head”, strapped into a chair. (It’s a grotesque image; the people laugh, but it portends something untoward.) The camera tracks overhead, looking down at the happy dancers, the clowns, the merry-go-rounds—but the camera dissolves into another tracking shot, falling back before a squadron of riders in black masks and hoods. Disaster is surely coming.

The newcomer and Brigitte are flirting. He gives her a love token. She refuses it and runs away, all fidgety nerves, all innocence and fear. She rejoins her family, as does the newcomer—disappointed but tagging along.

The pedlar meets the riders. Spies! “Order to alarm the border villages”.

The dance continues, swirling around the millers. The dance is intercut with the riders. The wind picks up. A rider appears with the news: war has been declared. The dancers are become statues, heads bowed. “Long live the fatherland!” someone cries, and the band strikes up an anthem. (But what anthem to they sing for this prolonged shot of communal musicmaking?) Close-ups of the crowd, of medals on a man’s chest, and the artificial leg he bears. Old heads shake, young faces beam.

The abandoned fete. The camera rises. There is only the sense of the wind travelling through the empty stands, billowing the streamers. But here is death, astride the horizon, ushering animated lines of bayonets through the horizon. The leaming weaponry becomes a real phalanx of infantry, rising over the folds of the landscape toward the camera.

Act 3. Suddenly it is winter, there are gas-masked troops, warning of attacks, flooded positions. The Great War is upon us, without being heralded by its name.

The pedlar is instructing the newcomer about the arrival of their troops. The latter wants nothing to do with the pedlar, but the pedlar says “there is no way back for you”—he is being watched. The troops wearily arrive at the mill, thronging about its flanks. The millers give them water. Clouds gather on the horizon: horsemen appear. It’s a fabulously sinister image, these real clouds glowering over the studio landscape and stilted trees. Five eyes watch the mill from five angles gathered in a single shot.

The millers wait nervously inside. “The world will perish in poison and gas!” says Johannes, as the newcomer tries to talk to Brigitte. Infantry roll over the folds in the land. It’s another brilliant shot, sinister, rapid. The cutting grows quicker: the single shot becomes a half dozen of the raiding tide, sweeping towards the mill.

“The enemy!” cries Michael. The newcomer looks guilty, scared. He wanders off as the knocking grows more aggressive, as the door is forced open. The enemy burst in, their faces hidden—they are just a flood of silhouettes, backs to the camera.

“Stand up!” the officer (Victor Janson) roars. It’s all stillness now. We can take in the strangeness of the infantry: their metallic helmets (half jäger’s shako, half “coal scuttle” Stahlhelm), the odd cages around their rifles that makes them half resemble automatic weapons. The officer has his rank on his chest, an oversized treble chevron. Touches of expressionism that creep into this half-real world. The mill is commandeered for supplies. The younger men react violently. Brigitte is restrained. Her young brother is taken outside. Brigitte’s glowing face makes the officer halt is roughness a moment. The man is clearly smitten. (It’s like the moment when the villain in Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney is overcome by the extreme close-up of Brigitte’s face.)

Another face at a loophole window: this time it is Brigitte’s anxiously looking out as her brother is led away. “Why so sad miss?” the captain asks, and Brigitte’s huge eyes almost make contact with the camera as she turns to the man. Her brother will be court martialled, says the officer, his hands seeking hers. Grune cuts away to the old mother in a chair, sneezing. (The camera whips round handheld, as it often does—destabilizing the world, here for comic rather than dramatic effect.)

The newcomer sets the wheels of the mill going, then arrests their motion. It’s a signal. The pedlar, now revealed in his officer’s uniform, issues instruction. Great guns open fire, huge plumes of black smoke and debris slow-motion their way into the sky.

Act 4. The young son paces his cell. The father visits. “They don’t understand out language”, he cries to his son. But the brute sign language of the solders is made to feel: he is ushered away. Artillery fire draws closer to the mill. The hillsides are torn up, buried under smoking clods of earth. Brigitte is cowering in feat somewhere inside. The father’s face is etched deep with age and angst. Michael is to be judged today. Brigitte leaves, determined to act.

In the cell, the captain orders that Michael be shot. Brigitte flirts her way inside, but is separated from her brother’s embrace. Her drooping head, in profile—a glorious glimpses of her poise, her grace as a performer, amid this rather ordinary scene. The captain says she can save her brother the solution of which is implied simply by his smirk, his leather-gloved hand over her neck, down towards her chest. She has 24 hours to decide. The officer who first raided the mill asks if he can help her. But “war turns people into wild beasts”, she says, and flees inside.

The corridor of the mill’s interior looks narrower, more confining. Here is the newcomer. He says: “Magda, I love you”, but almost in the same breath he confesses he guilt as an agent. Magda—her face in the first big closeups of the film, and they’re beautiful. He says he will turn against his kin to save her brother.

The junior officer tells the senior that he thinks they treated the boy to harsh, but the elder says they need to be strict—to show the locals they mean business. The junior officer finds Magda at home. Her bed is a picture book wooden frame, picture book carvings at its foot. The officer says he will save her brother, but he is seen by her father stroking her hair. So he lumbers in, lumbers between them. She cosies up to him, but he shrugs her off—the only man to resists her great big eyes in the film. Snow is falling. It coats the artificial plains before the mill.

Akt 5. The boy is to be shot. The captain looks at the hour, pours himself a drink, is served his meal, hacks at a great chunk of meat. (His black shirt, his white marks of rank make him look like a fascist: so too his slicked-back hair, cut short.) The lieutenant has aided the escape of Michael. The captain knows it.

The newcomer stops the mill again. The enemy gunners call the captain. The mill must come down, as it is being used as a point of observation by their enemy. (The newcomer is in communication with the pedlar’s men, directing fire.)

Michael returns to his father, in disguise—he wears the uniform given him by the lieutenant, who now arrives—and says they must hide the bother’s clothes or they will be lost. so they go into the basement, where the newcomer is going about his secret task. The lieutenant and Magda flirt, end up in each other’s arms, kiss. She does not quite flee him, succumbs willingly enough to his kiss.

Michael aims to flee in his disguise to their own troops. Johannes’s wife is in bed, presumably nearing the birth. Michael crosses no man’s land, handing a document to an enemy guard. A delightful scene: Magda uses flower to transform the man’s chevron into a stick figure, the head a heart. But the guns are firing outside. “Why are you our enemy?” asks the man, bewildered. “When the war is over, I won’t be an enemy anymore”. He imagines the future…

Akt 6. Soldiers enter the mill. The captain announces the building will be burnt down. A close-up of the father’s face, creased with repressed emotion. But first the captain wants the mill searched for Michael—only to find his lieutenant lurking in the basement. The telephone line has been found. It is cut, but the lieutenant is interpreted as the spy. He ranks is removed and the officer demands the man shoot himself. Magda and her father and Johannes battle the soldiers, who are about to burn the mill. Even the old mother throws water in the face of the guard by Johannes’s wife’s bed. Johannes himself calls the soldiers beasts, says that people need the bread they make. But in come the torches, the flames rise, the smoke thickens. The lieutenant questions Magda about the telephone and she points him to the newcomer. But they, and the family upstairs, are trapped in the burning building. Suddenly the newcomer emerges from his hiding place underground. “It is all my fault!” The lieutenant fights him before Magda, as the building starts to fall around them. It is prolonged, brutal, captured in a long handheld takes—the solider all in black, the assistant in his white shirt. Soon they are bleeding, half naked, sweating. The newcomer says he will die with Magda, but soldiers are breaking through the window to help her out. The assistant says he has betrayed his own fatherland and demands the soldiers shoot him. They oblige, and Magda is set free.

The mill burns, its wings spinning madly, then slowing… as Johannes, his wife, and the father struggle to a nearby farm building and fashion the wife a bed from hay. On the horizon, Magda and the lieutenant embrace. Magda is a silhouette on the horizon.

The baby is born. “He too will go to war—he too will kill people”, the mother mourns. “No, he will build new mills”, says the father, as superimposed artillery fire dissolves over the image of the family in the farm—like a Biblical scene—and the world is a vision of nighttime split open with fire. “Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do”, says the father, as the ghostly mill becomes a cross looming over the smoking battlefield. Ende.

I enjoyed this film a lot. The limited setting and studio aesthetic convey a peculiar atmosphere that is both sinister and otherworldly. It helps make the familiar seem unfamiliar: it’s like a slightly distorted dream of 1914. The uniforms are almost familiar, the setting almost realistic. Everything is subtly exaggerated, subtly off-kilter. Sets, costumes, performances—all are heightened, but only to better convey the atmosphere of the setting and story.

As for the film’s political message, the version that survives still carries a strong pacifist note. There is nothing remotely glamorous about the war or its protagonists. The soldiers are genuinely frightening. Their combination of archaic helmets and modern gasmasks and guns makes them even more sinister, just as their black uniforms give them a distinct flavour of fascism. The religious tone of the final scenes (supposedly highly censored by Ufa’s recutting) still comes across, and I wonder how much more obvious Grune had wanted to make the “message” at the end. As the film stands, the religious imagery creeps up on the viewer rather unexpectedly—and quite effectively. The transformation of the windmill into a cross needs no further visualization than as given in the film. The expressivity of “mute” objects is powerful enough. That said, I do love the fully-realized vision of Death when war is declared. There is something very pleasing about seeing an early twentieth-century version of medieval iconography. (Just as I love these elements in Murnau’s Faust (1926).) Perhaps there was more of this material in Grune’s original cut?

In one aspect, I was a little disappointed by Am Rande der Welt. I confess I wanted to watch the film primarily to see Brigitte’s Helm’s second cinematic appearance, but she’s very much limited by her character here. Her screen persona is very much along the lines of the “good” Maria in Metropolis, but without the exuberance offered to her by her other performance as the robot Maria. In Rande der Welt, she is wholly good and admirable—her character has little in the way of depth or complexity. One might say that about all the figures in the film. Since Grune sets out to make them emblematic of an older, less modern way of life they are all limited in their psychological depth.

My only other reservations about Am Rande der Welt are due to my own moderate confusion when watching the film. I was a little unclear of the nature of the spying, and where/how the artillery was using the newcomer’s telephone to direct fire. There is a lot of cutting to spaces beyond the mill, but we never see the context of these spaces. Thus, where Max Schreck has his observation post is a mystery—as is where any of the other sites of guns, trenches etc.

But the question of how we read the film’s continuity, or its politics, also depends on what version we’re watching. Here, the information is unclear. Having been digitized from a Bundesarchiv print by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Muranu-Stiftung, the film is freely available online via filmportal.de. But there is no clarification on the physical length of the print used, or whether the intertitles are recreated—and from what sources. The digital version is a few seconds shy of 104 minutes. The database gives the framerate of other archival copies as 22fps, but the Bundesarchiv copy appears to run at 20fps. (Though the video itself translates the original frames into 23.97fps for digital playback, which makes identifying and counting the original celluloid frames difficult.) This would equate to approximately 2400m, so presumably accords with Ufa’s cut of August 1927. (If I’m wrong and it is at 22fps, 104 minutes would equate to Grune’s original version of April 1927. See why it’s important to provide this kind of information with a digital release?)

But regardless of how closely it resembles Grune’s original vision, it’s still a fascinating film. I’m very grateful the film is freely available, but I’d love to see it in better quality. Who knows what a proper restoration and a good score might not do for it.

Paul Cuff