silent horror

I’m watching the restored version of Nosferatu. It’s not quite as impressive as the Metropolis restoration, on a few fronts.

Though some of the source material is startlingly excellently great, other bits are really irreparably grungy.

The translation is a bit weird and literal, with a few grammatical errors for extra flavor.

The new English intertitles they generated based on the translation are cheap-looking and far from seamless; I could have done better in half an hour in Photoshop.

For some reason they chose not to motion-estimate missing frames, so the film still occasionally skips a bit.

There’s a really long written intro that babbles on about the restoration; it’s distracting and a bit wanky.

Though it’s fantastic that they located and recorded and overlaid the original score, the original music is often not really appropriate to the mood of the images. It’s weird. There’s a horrible, creepy thing on the screen, and the music is all majestic violins.

All of that said, this is the best version to date; these are small criticisms compared to every other version on DVD. And what’s more, just as with Metropolis, the new version makes it possible to follow and appreciate the story! Before, it was just a weird dreamlike drip of images. Now it feels like a finished, sophisticated film.

Oh man. Just after I resumed my ever-present musing on why nobody had released a proper, Metropolized version of Nosferatu, I learn that this just came out. Released, yes, by Kino again.

So. There we are. We’ve got it. My favorite silent film, presented as properly as it might be, for the first time in seventy-something years. And what a snazzy cover!