December | 2024 | The Long Take

With the release of Robert Eggers’ apparently very good remake of the most seminal of horror films, let’s look at the last time they also, somehow, managed to do it right.

Remaking one of the seminal films of the 20^th century isn’t likely to win you any critical favors. However, for Werner Herzog, a filmmaker of unnatural receptivity to the world and general skepticism to the people who inhabit it, the film seems to have called to him nonetheless. Faced with the unenviable task of divining the original Nosferatu’s spirit rather than merely upholstering it for a new era, of being a necromancer rather than a cryptkeeper, Herzog seems to have done neither. Beckoned not by the surface or the soul of the original film itself but an unclarified possibility latent within it, his film is neither a remake nor even really a re-envisioning but, rather, a malevolent force that vibrates to an entirely different frequency, a tone poem that stalks the corridors of the unknown only to finally implore us to recognize our very selves.

Herzog is no stranger to films about men on strange journeys, impelled by the delusional hopes of a soul haunted by the belief that they can test the mettle of the cosmos and emerge unscathed. In his most famous, and best, film, Aguirre the Wrath of God,Klaus Kinski’s impenetrable and monomaniacal explorer believed he heard the siren song of a divine, heavenly order that was, finally, merely his own desire for control. Here, this film’s version of Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is not an impossible id but a bourgeois bastion of modernity attempting to colonize the world, to partition it into parcels of private property that attempt to compartmentalize the cosmos. In doing so, Herzog fears, the world invites its own destruction in the process.

Yet it is not the bland Harker, finally, who captures the film’s soul, but, rather, its melancholy, banal Dracula. If Herzog worried, with Melville-esque apprehension about the fate of modernity, Klaus Kinski was, of course, his Ahab, a once-in-a-lifetime conduit for Herzog’s divine and demonic sorcery, his own doomed attempts to channel and best the world with monomaniacal monstrousness. Casting Kinski, an actor who seemed to barely be able to bear the weight of the cosmic flux around him, as the creature would seem to finally set him up as the very force of nature he so desperately wanted to be, to become a literal embodiment of the quest for containing the universe that tortured him. When he sets off for the East to sell a home to Dracula, we are immediately cast into the realm of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” a portal of exquisite otherness that the man-creature is, nominally, the corporealization of. It’d be as though he had finally broken open his mortal shell and achieved an ecstatic sublimity of sheer resonance. The physical instability of the world, the very thing that had exposed Kinski’s cavernous ego in the stiflingly humid air of his own excessively imperialistic self-importance in Aguirre, now seems to warp around him as he wields the darkness of a world where reason long ago failed to extend to the depths and explore the breadth it promised to.

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A right-ward track across the now-abandoned remnants of a concentration camp simultaneously models and critiques the encounter between the roving detective-camera, searching for the trace of history, and the trauma of the past that exposes itself, lying in wait to the perceptually attentive. Just as the film’s narrator remarks that there are “no images of the past,” seemingly resigning us to a doomed present sequestered off from a past stranded in history, the camera is suddenly intercepted, even assaulted, by the sudden shock of the black-and-white “documentary” image. History, the film suggests, insists on being heard.

Yet if the images we see construct a contrast between the moving color present and the grayscale truth dormant beneath, and thus rely on and seem to affirm the journalistic equation of black-and-white with both the past and the “real,” these sights also trouble the very argument they seem to be founding. Shots of marching Nazis intervene in and fulfill the camera’s search for a “real past” only to, in turn, question that very fulfillment, insofar as these images are themselves mediated by their presence in another film. Our first introduction to “the past” is actually an image from Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1933 propaganda film Triumph of the Will presented, by this film, as a document of history. Our engagement with the past, the film seems to remark, is already shot-through with its own slipperiness.

It is thus that director Alain Resnais’ seemingly straightforward documentary about the necessity of memory reveals itself as a meditation on the difficulty of history. In these opening moments, 1955’s epochal Night and Fog cuts together three exploratory images, “stitching” various rightward tracks (from different concentration camps) into both an existential demand for engaging the remnants of the past and a reminder of the difficulty of parsing that past and piecing it together. The film suggests the need to capture an ephemeral totality more substantial, and more impossible, than any one camp’s empirical reality. It asks what image – if any – truly indexes the gravity of the Holocaust. The film’s deepest and thorniest conundrum is how to treat the past as at once a necessary shock of light for the audience and an ambiguous shadow stalking that very light.

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The Long Take

Monthly Archives: December 2024

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