F.W. Murnau

This article proposes the concept of vampiric love as love of the dreaded thing. Through an analysis of F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, I show how vampiric love is love turned back on itself to threaten the communal bond with its own excess. Through an act of sacrifice, catastrophe is averted and the community saved in leaping from dread to love. Drawing on Derrida's idea of autoimmunization as well as Hägglund's idea of secular love, the article examines vampiric love as an autoimmunization of the biopolitical community - an attack upon itself - that exposes the communal organism to death and chance as salvation from dread. The autoimmune process is traced back to Romantic yearning for impossibly lost love and its flipside in Gothic dread in Polidori's 1819 short story The Vampyre, where the outlines of the autoimmune process can be clearly seen. Employing Kierkegaard's concept of dread, I undertake an analysis of the sacrificial logic at work in Nosferatu. where dread must be passed through in an awakening of the spirit to possibility; a process enfolded into the performativity of the film itself in an autoimmune attack on its own formal system.

A comparison between the release of SUNRISE in New York and then in LA, the first with a Movietone sound/effects track, preceded by a long talking Mussolini newsfilm, the second the "silent" version, with prologue, music and all else in keeping with the mood of Murnau's film.  Questions about executive decision-making and the relative importance of the Movietone system per se vs. SUNRISE as Wm Fox's investment in prestige cinema.  A study in promotion, distribution, exhibition, technology, context, international travels of movie personnel, mysteries of the very early recording of sound/effects tracks for Fox, dual-version films, and conflicts with Wm. Fox-Murnau's aspirations toward furthering film as an art form, highlighting questions as yet unanswered regarding  a much-studied, classic film

This essay explores how Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film Sunrise (1927) participates in discourses of modernity in the mid- to late-1920s. It shows that the film – against many prior interpretations – can be read as a timely contribution to specific US-American debates: discourses about the big city, the new consumer society, tourism, the emancipation of the New Woman, and changing morals. The film thus documents in audiovisual form a discontent with rapid modernization – a discontent the film mitigates in dialectical form.

Em 1927 os realizadores alemães F.W. Murnau e Paul Leni chegaram aos EUA,
contratados pelos estúdios FOX e Universal, respetivamente. Graças a filmes como
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1928) e The Cat and the Canary (P. Leni, 1928), os dois
cineastas introduziram um estilo “expressionista” cujo formalismo, apesar de
contrário ao estilo clássico hollywoodiano, exerceu uma profunda influência em
cineastas norte-americanos como Frank Borzage, John Ford e Raoul Walsh.