In the 1914 war, I served in the Air Corps, and came to understand aviation as a new way of seeing. (The air arm itself grew out of the reconnaissance service.) Airborne vision now escaped that Euclidian tyranny so acutely felt by the ground troops in the trenches; in this new, astounding topological field, air pilots already had their own special-effects, with their own names: loops, figure-eights, falling-leaf rolls. My understanding was transformed by the way the airborne observer’s hand seemed to detach itself from the body and stretch out in freedom … the aerial body, looking down from a great height.… Good training for the fledgling film director.

After the war I bought a battered old view camera and tripod in a Charlottenburg junk shop and began shooting pictures of everything within range. I even attempted to develop and print the footage myself in a converted coat closet. The experiment was not a success.

Eventually I progressed in the only way possible for me, which was to make every mistake until there were no mistakes left to make, and the right way of proceeding was the only possibility remaining. Like many of the early filmmakers, I thought myself an urbane bohemian and outsider, eager to experiment, one of the sensitive, nervous spirits of the age, a tinkerer and a visionary with what I hoped was a keen business sense.

Even then the film world, to my dismay, did not fall prostrate before me. The truth was that I would have to become a bit less gangly and awkward, at least enough to overcome the distressing habit of falling over my feet, before I could impress that world with the idea that I was a gifted artist drawing on vast resources of experience and sophistication.

Dolny’ Kubi’n, Slovakia. Grau wants the names of Stoker’s characters changed, but echoed. Harker has thus become Hutter. On the long trip here I wrote the first title from his diary, which will introduce the story: Nosferatu. Doesn’t the name sound like the midnight call of a death bird? Beware of uttering it, or the pictures of life will turn to pale shadows, nightmares will rise up from the heart and nourish themselves on your blood. [Fade in a long shot of the town.] For a long time I have been meditating on the rise and fall of the Great Death in my father’s town of Wisborg. Here is the story of it: In Wisborg there lived a man named Hutter with his young wife, Ellen.