ABSTRACT
Lotte Eisner described Friedrich Murnau as “the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known” (Eisner, 1973a, 97). Werner Herzog's 1979 film Nosferatu, in many ways an homage to Murnau, seems to confirm the relevance of Eisner's judgment to the New German Cinema. Murnau's 1922 version of the Dracula legend is surely one of the best-known and most successful films of the silent German cinema. Herzog's self-described goal in retelling Murnau's cinematic tale is to affirm a kind of spiritual bond between the contemporary German cinema and the past: “We are trying in our films to build a thin bridge back to that time, to legitimize our own cinema and culture. We are not remaking Nosferatu, but bringing it to new life and new character for a new age” (Andrews, 1978, 33). How appropriate that Lotte Eisner should affirm Herzog's “rebirth” of Nosferatu, declaring that “the film is not being remade, it is being reborn” (Andrews, 1978, 33).
