One of Wagner’s assistants is spending the week filming the light at dawn (real) on the castle gates (constructed). His task is to open on a fade every morning until “morning’s dawn” becomes “morning horror”: Morgengrau becomes Morgengrauen. I have a specific effect in mind, and this stock can capture it. Then he’ll be sent home to film the dilapidated salt storehouses of Lübeck, for the long shots of the Bremen house of the vampire. All those empty window-sockets, with their uncanny anthropomorphic quality.

Dinners with Spiess and Wagner help us clarify our ideas. The shot is not a painting, dependent only upon the expressive content of its static composition; it’s also a space negotiable in every way, open to intrusion and transformation, inviting the most unpredictable courses. It’s necessary to understand the process by which the mood and tone of such spaces can change. If only the camera could move! If the question becomes not only “what is the image?” but also “how does it change?” we exploit precisely that connection between film and dream; spaces shift with the logic and fluidity of the dream state. The geography of the film must be evocative yet elusive; the vampire’s castle and the wilderness concrete in their tone and unmappable in their contours. Reality, but with fantasy; they must dovetail.

Spiess agreed. Wagner offered in support the reminder that in Rubens’s engraving of the sheep, which Goethe showed to Eckermann, the shadow is on the same side as the sun.

If only the camera could move! Imagine if the camera could move! Wagner is every bit as excited about the possibilities. “When and if,” he says dryly, “we have the budget to experiment accordingly.”