Agnuzzo recovered his poise and looked at Murnau with delight. Murnau looked back, his hands still propping up his head. All aspects of Agnuzzo’s expression made clear that the meeting had been everything that he’d been hoping for and more.

Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens

NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS

EXTERIORS

Six weeks of exteriors: the Carpathians, the Baltic towns of Wismar, Rostock, and Lübeck, as well as ocean vistas of Heligoland and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea. All shooting, exterior and interior, must be finished by November 1921. We begin here, in Czechoslovakia. Half the company has yet to arrive; those who have are filled with questions. Nothing of course has gone as planned. To add to the confusion there are my daily visits to foreign doctors, to say nothing of the visits of nurses to me. What time I have is often expended in elegiac dreams about H—. But already the film takes me from the soft anguish of idleness and drives me from any room where I cannot work.

7/12/21. This is intended to be for the patient readers of Der Querschnitt the journal of a filmmaker’s progress: an ongoing chronicle, from rough notes composed day to day, of the trials and tribulations of this new project. I hereby pledge to do my utmost to prevent this diary from becoming a “melancholy school of posturing and dreary self-deception.” Frankness and clarity will be the goals. If I will not, cannot be truthful with myself here, where can I be?

With this film, I will not aim at poetry. I will try to build a table. It will be for you to eat at it, criticize it, chop it up for firewood.

It seems appropriate in this confessional form to chronicle the beginnings of my slide from the status of a young man of promise into the regrettable position of filmmaker. Early in 1914, with my career in the theater—specifically, with Max Reinhardt’s prestigious troupe—all but assured, I drifted into a moving-picture show to see the American D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia. I was mesmerized by the giant figure of the wine-guzzling Holofernes, who towered over everyone. Where had they found him? In some circus, I supposed. I mentioned this to Reinhardt, who laughed and told me that the same actor had visited Germany a year earlier, and was shorter than he was. He had been made to seem huge by Griffith’s camera. Reinhardt had had no idea how. He suggested I write to Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s cameraman. I was possessed by the trick, and would have, had the war not intervened. I was twenty-five and as curious as a field dog about everything having to do with filmmaking.