Of Monsters and Mountains
Of Monsters and Mountains: Erotic Danger in The Blue Light and Nosferatu the Vampyre
Kayla Conde
Abstract
Despite their differences in genre, age, and politics, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) share notable similarities in their portrayal of erotic danger—a monster in the mountains not only threatens but allures those who wish to stop it. Consequentially, these films also share significant sources of influence, namely F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and German Romantic visual traditions of the sublime, resulting in the emphasis of image in both films. This paper will explore the means of cinematic representation used in either film for quite different ends —how each film deals with the erotic threat. In this comparative analysis, I find Herzog’s finale to fall more in line with the philosophy of German Romanticism, as it conveys humanity’s helplessness when faced with the mighty and fascinating monsters of nature.
At the tail-end of the Weimar period, the Bergfilm, or German “mountain film,” was a popular genre which looked toward pre-modern, country life for the setting of mythical melodramas. Such films “glorif[ied] submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might” and were fronted by filmmakers like Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl, the latter of whom went on to become Hitler’s chosen filmmaker for Nazi propaganda films (Rentschler 137) . Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932) follows the legend of Junta, a beautiful villager whose ability to successfully scale the local mountain keeps her ostracized from society. Like Junta, the mountain’s radiant, blue glow seduces the young men of the village to their death. Fifty years later, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), a canonical New German film, similarly associates the dangerous with the erotic, placing the intriguing Count Dracula, or Nosferatu, in the perilous Carpathian Mountains. Both films emphasize the power of the image, evoking German Romanticism’s visual language of the sublime in their portrayals of erotic danger, albeit in drastically different forms. As Eric Rentschler has shown, Riefenstahl’s film draws on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) for its aesthetic treatment and its “exorcism of a dangerous sensuality” (38). The connection with Murnau is relevant for Herzog’s engagement with the material as well. Both The Blue Light and Nosferatu the Vampyre are likewise connected by their shared visual language of German Romantic landscapes, their “monstering” of the source of erotic danger, and their “othering” of the city. Though The Blue Light and Nosferatu the Vampyre use similar means of cinematic representation, their endings notably differ; while the former film stifles the source of erotic danger with Junta’s death, the latter perpetuates it with the transformation of Harker and Lucy into vampires. While Riefenstahl’s ending reads as a cautionary tale about the consequences of conquering nature, Herzog’s ending implies the triumph of nature’s indifference in the face of human intervention.
A near-contemporary film to The Blue Light, Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror inspired Riefenstahl to capture the “eerie and ethereal” aspects of natural settings using special effects in her mountain films (Rentschler 37). As noted by Rentschler, both Riefenstahl and Murnau were concerned with “recast[ing] the still lifes of romantic painting” and conveying the emotional experience of the sublime—its conflict of desire and terror—through motion pictures in the context of developing modernity (37). I’d like to extend Rentschler’s discussion to include Herzog as a filmmaker concerned with capturing the “inexplicable and unsettling,” at least in Nosferatu the Vampyre (37). This film quite explicitly pays homage to Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, both in its content and style. Though its references to German Expressionism are not remiss, its aesthetic and thematic focus on the German Romantic image, rather, is central to its story’s conclusion, especially in conversation with Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, whose ending falls more in line with Murnau’s tragic “exorcism.” Herzog’s refusal to “exorcise” the source of erotic danger seems to more acutely capture the sentiment of German Romanticism—the brutal indifference of natural (and supernatural) forces towards human endeavors—with the subtle pessimism of post-war modernity. Such a recouping reflects the sentiments of the German post-war generation while paying homage to the pioneers of the very genres he engaged with.
From the Alps to the Carpathians, the glory of the mountains pervades both The Blue Light and Nosferatu the Vampyre, demonstrating their shared German-Romantic visuals. At the climax of The Blue Light, city-painter Vigo and town-brute Tonio race to reach Junta as she swiftly scales the mountain to the luminous grotto at its peak. Riefenstahl juxtaposes close-ups of the struggling men with extreme long shots of the fierce mountains to visually signal the impressive danger of their feat—conquering both the mountain and the woman they desire. This effect creates simultaneous awe and fear in the audience as they witness the peril of the melodramatic climax while admiring the beauty of the Alps, as captured by the camera like a canvas. Rentschler writes that “the panoramic arrest of sublime landscape goes hand-in-hand with a desire to shape and subdue female presence,” stating that, in the Bergfilm, mountains and women are “properties men revel in and at the same time fear” (156). In the synonymizing of Junta and the mountain in The Blue Light, Riefenstahl participates in the German Romantic tradition of paradoxically producing irrational splendor and rational distress within the viewer. While Junta is the narrative source of this attraction, the shots of the mountains serve to enhance the sense of erotic danger through visual sensory experience.
In Nosferatu the Vampyre, Herzog similarly utilizes Romantic visual language to amplify the duality of the sublime. It is no question that Herzog was influenced by German Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich; Herzog himself admits his references to Friedrich’s paintings The Abbey in the Oakwood and Monk by the Sea in the long shot of Nosferatu’s castle and the final shot of the film, respectively (Calhoon 113). However, the sequence which evokes the particular visual language of The Blue Light occurs towards the beginning of the film in a five minute long, dialogue-free montage following Harker as he treads through the Carpathian Mountains on foot. Through slow takes and epic long shots, Herzog allows the audience to absorb the surrounding landscapes as Harker does, taking his time and stopping before great waterfalls and high rocks as moonlight seeps through the mountain peaks. As Brad Prager discusses Friedrich’s artwork, the landscape in Herzog’s film “achieves an explicitly temporal component; it is to be appreciated over time, like a walk in the countryside” (99). Like Riefenstahl’s mountain sequence, though, Herzog’s sequence foretells the danger of the protagonist’s surroundings with disorienting shots filled with chiaroscuro, not unlike Murnau’s depiction of Hutter’s journey in the dark. Though Harker evidently enjoys the break from the port-town of Wismar, the Carpathian’s sublimity, as captured by Herzog, forms apprehension in the viewer and ultimately sets in motion a sense of erotic danger which permeates the film.
Riefenstahl and Herzog both elaborate on the beauty and terror of the Romantic sublime through the simultaneous repulsion and attraction towards the characters Junta and Nosferatu in their status as “monsters.” In The Blue Light, Junta has the “primary disruptive agency” often prescribed to women figures in the Bergfilm (Rentschler 153). Junta, though not physically a monster, still carries the monster’s narrative elements which “destabilize the relationship between the man and the mountain” (Majer-O’Sickey 371). Her deviant behavior and supernatural mystique are the reasons she is ostracized by the village and pursued by Vigo and Tonio up the perilous mountain. Herzog’s Count is “monstered” in a much more classical way; his grotesque and supernatural nature is manifested in his physical form, through fanged teeth, pallid skin, and an overall insect-like demeanor. Like Junta, Nosferatu functions as the source of erotic danger, destabilizing Harker’s relationship with Lucy and his old life, and being the source of pursuit throughout the film. Herzog establishes a curious mystique around Nosferatu, given his odd physical appearance and behavior; however, the Count’s eroticism is amplified when he slowly and menacingly leans over a petrified Harker after smelling the blood from his shaving nick, as if to overtake him. Towards the end of the film, Nosferatu’s eroticism is further heightened as he suggestively holds Lucy while drinking her blood, Lucy gasping in his arms.
Rentschler writes that in the Bergfilm, “mountains take on the proportions of Nosferatu or destiny incarnate, an essence that is formidable, inscrutable, and inexorable,” reaching a “simultaneity of beauty and terror, of fascination and horror, of solace and peril” (151). Such connections surrounding the Bergfilm, between monsters, mountains, and leading ladies, were developed in the Weimar-era popular cinematic culture, and evidently reemerge in Herzog’s film half a century later: “…the threatening aspect of nature relates to energies coextensive with female sexuality. This parallels the special relationship we find between monsters and women in the films of the fantastic” (Rentschler 152). Junta and Nosferatu, the films’ token “monsters,” are isolated, ostracized, supernatural, attractive, and dangerous. Nosferatu, though not a woman, functions in the same position as Junta in the Bergfilm. Both attractive forces are defined as “monsters,” as they ultimately lead to the demise of those whom they seduce—they are the driving forces of erotic danger.
The “othering,” or purposefully marginalized portrayal, of the city and modernity complements the “monstering” effect present in each film. Both films use this device in slightly different ways. Such “othering” is consistent with the German Romantic tendency to reject the rationality and reason of Enlightenment thought, considered modern in the eighteenth century as Romanticism became a prominent mode of thought (Prager 102). Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey discusses the concept of “othering” in the Bergfilm extensively, and remarks:
… the oscillations of Riefenstahl’s characters are signs for [her] anxiety about modernity, especially changing gender roles. Thus we see the new discourses of the urban space interjected into the mountain film in the guise of insecure characters…portrayed as the trespassing Other into hyper-masculinized mountain spaces. (378)
The city, represented by Vigo in The Blue Light, is a presence which threatens the purity of the mountainscapes; this is exemplified in Vigo’s endeavor to profit off the crystals in the grotto at the top of the mountain. While the production of Bergfilme themselves are paradoxical in their use of modern film technology to capture the real, natural mountain settings, the narratives of such films often rely on this neo-Romantic perception of modernity as a source of anxiety: “Read symptomatically, the mountain film manifest a desire to take flight from the troubled streets of modernity, from anomie and inflation, to escape into a pristine world of snow-covered peaks and overpowering elements” (Rentschler 139).
In Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, such “othering” is slightly more complicated, and more comprehensive; while there is a tradition of “othering” Eastern Europe as an archaic, misunderstood world—represented by the vampire—present in the original text of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1898), the town of Wismar is “othered” in the tradition of the Bergfilm through Herzog’s pandemonious depiction of the city towards the end of the film: Lucy frantically wanders through Wismar, shocked and distressed by the townsfolk’s revelry in the plague—the plague which she intuits to be a signal of Nosferatu’s intrusion into the city. In a sequence of impressive overhead long shots, Herzog follows Lucy as she navigates through the square of dancing townsfolk, strewn-about caskets, and countless mice at the feet of diners at a misplaced last-supper; irrationality has plagued Wismar. This sequence resonates with Majer-O’Sickey’s observation about the Bergfilm’s necessary and “brief excursion back to the city” in order to “configure the metropolis as the undesirable Other” (366); in this sequence, Wismar is undesirable indeed, making the calculated, supernatural world of Nosferatu seem less chaotic. The “othering” of the town, otherwise seen as identification with the vampire, is further supported by the transformation of the protagonist, Harker, into a vampire in the final moments of the film. In Nosferatu the Vampyre, erotic danger, in the form of Nosferatu’s careful and orderly existence, turns into the desirable when compared to the demise of Wismar.
Taking the aforementioned devices into consideration, the ending of Nosferatu the Vampyre diverts from the Bergfilm’s traditional conclusion found in The Blue Light. Though both films utilize German Romantic visual language, the function of the destabilizing “monster,” and the “othering” of modernity, Nosferatu the Vampyre distinguishes erotic danger, in the form of the vampire, as an unforgiving and unavoidable aspect of nature. The ending of The Blue Light, prior to the framing narrative’s conclusion, ends with the death of Junta as she jumps off the mountain after seeing her grotto stripped of its crystals; Vigo mourns over her body, but has already brought wealth to the once-poor village through his exploitation of the mountain’s beauty. The source of erotic danger has been stifled with Junta’s death, caused by a city-man’s interference with nature. The Blue Light’s ending thus suggests that it is possible to conquer the dangerous nature which intrigues us, though such an endeavor is not without its consequences.
Nosferatu the Vampyre, on the other hand, ends with the implicit and explicit transformations of Lucy and Harker, respectively, into vampires; Harker has even grown the sharpened teeth and nails characteristic of the Count. The film ends on a stationary long shot of Harker as he rides on horseback through a desert-like landscape, the horizon indiscernible. He traverses the frame from left to right, riding West to East towards Transylvania, shrinking in the frame and ultimately disappearing into the dust. In these very last moments of the film, Herzog demonstrates “the indifference of the universe to man, the irresistible certainty of death” (Calhoon 122), the ultimate turning towards the pre-modern natural world—supernatural, even—manifested in eternal death, the vampire. Nature’s seductive peril will always prevail; in Nosferatu the Vampyre, this is represented in the triumph of the vampiric race.
Despite their historical, gender- and genre-related differences, Riefenstahl and Herzog managed to create two films which utilize German-Romantic visual language and philosophies to distinguish sources of erotic danger in pre-modern natural environments faced with modernity. Not unlike its predecessor, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, The Blue Light uses these devices to warn viewers of both the danger of sublime nature and the consequences of trying to control it, despite the possibility of success. Nosferatu the Vampyre takes this one step further; instead of condemning man’s interference with nature, Herzog depicts nature as a force so powerful it becomes supernatural, portraying its ultimate form as never-ending death over helpless mankind.
Aware of the cultural implications of the Bergfilm’s conventions, the constant battle between romanticized past and encroaching modernity, Herzog, among other contemporary German filmmakers, builds upon the often contested and historically contained legacies of his predecessors, including Riefenstahl and Murnau, to reshape cinematic representations according to shifting sensibilities. Such cinematic evolutions, from The Blue Light to Nosferatu the Vampyre, demonstrate the utility of film as a survey for the continuity of themes, issues, and figures which have sunk their teeth into the various stages of German cultural history.
Works Cited
Calhoon, Kenneth S. “Werner Herzog’s View of Delft Or, Nosferatu and the Still Life.” A Companion to Werner Herzog. Blackwell Publishing, 2012, pp. 101-126.
Herzog, Werner, director. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht [Nosferatu the Vampyre]. Gaumont/Herzog Filmproduktion, 1979.
Majer-O’Sickey, Ingeborg. “The Cult of the Cold and the Gendered Body in Mountain Films.” Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. Rodopi, 2010, pp. 363-380.
Murnau, F. W., director. Nosferatu — Eine Symphonie des Grauens [Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror]. Prana Film, 1922.
Prager, Brad. Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Camden House, 2007.
---. “Mountains and Fog.” The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. Wallflower Press, 2007, pp. 82–119.
Riefenstahl, Leni, director. Das blaue Licht [The Blue Light]. Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, 1932.
Rentschler, Eric. “A Legend for Modern Times: The Blue Light (1932).” The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and It’s Afterlife. Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 27-52.
---. “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.” New German Critique, no. 51, 1990, pp. 137-161, https://doi.org/10.2307/488175.
Kayla Conde is a current MFA candidate at the University of Oregon. Though she mainly writes poetry, she has a second passion in German Cinema Studies thanks to her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Florida under the mentorship of Dr. Barbara Mennel. She is interested in cinematic representations of the Other in their fleshly, supernatural, and unlikely forms. This is her first academic publication.
Picture: “The German filmmaker Arnold Fanck (1889–1974) filming at Sellapass in the Dolomite Mountains, presumably for his film The Holy Mountain.” 1925/26. From Wikimedia. Source: Private Archive of Matthias Fanck (grandson of Arnold Fanck), Germany. This image is in the public domain.
