Cinema
Nosferatu
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
F. W. Murnau · 1922
Synopsis
In 1838, in the imaginary port of Wisborg, the estate agent Knock sends his young employee Hutter to the Carpathians, to a Count Orlok who wants to buy a house in the town. Hutter entrusts his anxious wife Ellen to their friend the shipowner Harding. At the castle, he wakes with two marks on his neck, and the count, who has seen Ellen's portrait, signs the deed of sale. Orlok leaves, lying in coffins of earth, aboard a sailing ship whose crew dies at sea of an unknown disease, while Hutter returns by road.
Context
The film was the only production of Prana-Film, a company founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau. Henrik Galeen drew the screenplay from Bram Stoker's Dracula without the rights having been acquired, set the action in an imaginary town in northern Germany and changed the names. Shooting began in July 1921 in Wismar, then in Lübeck. Presented on 4 March 1922 at the Marmorsaal of the Berlin zoological garden, the film was condemned to destruction in July 1925, at the end of the lawsuit brought by Stoker's widow; copies already sold abroad saved it.
Who it is for
A silent film in five acts, shot largely on location, whose versions differ in their intertitles and in the names of the characters.
Prizes and reception
A commercial failure on its release: the company that had produced it went bankrupt a few months later.