Nosferatu at 100

If you’ve never seen a silent film with a live musical accompaniment, you really should. Even if you have nothing more than a passing curiosity about silent film, the experience is worthwhile. The film pops off the screen in a way that 3D has always promised but never delivered. The mixture of the calcified, preordained celluloid with the spontaneity of live music creates a subtle kind of clash of the arts, but a productive clash all the same. I was lucky enough to see Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera with a live score by DeVotchKa several years ago at the Denver Film Festival. It’s one of my all-time favorite cinematic experiences, an electric expression of cinema as dynamic art.

This past Friday, though, I got to see something that may have topped Man with a Movie Camera. The Lyric in Fort Collins showcased Nosferatu, one hundred years old this year, with a live score by Austin-based band Invincible Czars, as part of a tour across North America. And although Invincible Czars have been performing Nosferatu scores since 2015, this 2022 tour features an updated and refined version. Let me tell you: the score is fantastic, and seeing it performed live shook me to my core.

Even as F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece of German Expressionism is celebrating its centenary this year, I don’t suppose I have much to add to any discussions of the film’s lingering power, its perpetual role in the shadow-play of society’s collective nightmares. In a hundred years, so much has already been said. In Robin Wood’s now-dated terms: “more than seventy years later, it remains easily the most intelligent adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel”.

Meanwhile, in the year 2022, one hundred years after Murnau’s vampire stalked the screen, I still find myself sitting through movies like Moonfall. You’d think filmmakers would have learned a thing or two since Nosferatu, but some seem to be actively doing the opposite. Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall was fun enough the first time around, when it was Independence Day, but the subsequent iterations just seem redundant. Cinema took humanity to the surface of the moon decades before science made the impossible real; now, cinema has taken humanity inside the megastructure of the moon, which is as dumb as it sounds.

In short, I hope that in a hundred more years we’re still talking about Nosferatu and that no one has heard of Moonfall.