1981–1987 Restorations
- Orlok’s resurrection begins: finally brought back to life after lying dormant for decades
- Third time’s the charm: after two earlier efforts, the film was returned to première length
- After living in black and white shadows, the vivid original tinting scheme was reinstated
- The original score was also reconstructed and heard for the first time in over 60 years
This is part of a series of articles covering everything Graf Orlok and best read sequentially. They detail the film’s history, many different versions and home video releases, and I suggest you start reading from Part 1, unless you want to skip straight to the restored DVD and Blu-ray reviews.
Poster by Mario Cruz aka Fantitlan, 2012
Contents
- Restorations galore: reincarnated to kill again and again
- Timeline of restorations and home video versions
- 1981 restoration
- 1984 restoration
- 1987 restoration
- Related articles
Restorations galore: reincarnated to kill again and again
Unlike many – but by no means all – silent films, Nosferatu is fully copyrighted worldwide. Despite this, it is often thought of as being in the public domain. In practice though, what’s tended to happen is that anyone and everyone will take any old battered, incomplete and unrestored copy (usually one incorrectly known as the “public domain version”) and slap it on a DVD. It’s usually appears alongside similarly poor quality, generic, unsynchronised public domain music, known as a ‘needle-drop’ score. Dozens and dozens of companies have done this, but the results are invariably unwatchable and not worth the effort, no matter how cheaply you acquire them. To avoid wasting your time and money, stick to the high quality restored versions discussed here. Even when confining ourselves to these it gets very complicated: often, not just with Nosferatu, there are many competing versions of silent films from different labels and differently-restored sources. I’ll attempt to unpick the myriad manifestations of Count Orlok as simply as possible.
UK Eureka/Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
From the late 1910s onwards, it was the norm for major silent film productions to shoot with at least two cameras simultaneously. This gave greater flexibility during editing to select the best takes and angles. Two negatives, designated A and B, would be prepared, with the A negative, consisting of all the very best takes, used for domestic prints. The B negative, complete with flash titles (consisting of just a few frames, intended for local translation), would be the source of all exported, foreign language prints. In Nosferatu’s case, to keep costs down only one camera was used. This of course resulted in only one original negative, which simplified things considerably when it came to its restorations. However, Nosferatu was almost lost completely and because of the variable quality of surviving materials, it can never look pristine. That is, unless someone turns up an excellent condition early print – unlikely but you never know.
Another thing: Nosferatu was specifically designed and filmed with colour tinting in mind. And with very good reason: many scenes simply don’t make sense without it being present throughout. For instance, due to the ‘day for night’ filming of the era, Count Orlok often appears to be walking around in broad daylight. All original release prints were tinted and all restored versions have reinstated it. If you plan on watching a black and white copy, don’t – lest you make him angry!
Count Orlok by Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine illustrator Basil Gogos, 2000
Timeline of restorations and home video versions
Over the years since its original release, the few surviving prints of Nosferatu suffered many reductions in length due to damage, censorship, and reissue cuts. In 1981 Enno Patalas, then head of the Filmmuseum München, in conjunction with the Cineteca di Bologna, oversaw the first concerted attempt at restoration. The resultant negative drew together prints from several different European archives and he went on to have four attempts in total. The second two Patalas restorations each built on the previous one: his 1981 restoration was in B&W, while the 1984 restoration merely added “speculative tinting” to it. The 1987 restoration expanded on the first two by adding a more accurate tinting scheme and missing footage, bringing it up to full length for the first time since its original release. Patalas carried out a completely new restoration in 1995, followed by a new digital restoration supervised by Luciano Berriatúa in 2006 All three complete restorations used different combinations of the same extant prints; no new early prints of Nosferatu have been identified since late 1984.
- 4th March, 1922 première version, length 1,967m – 95min at 18fps
- 1965 Atlas Film version, length 1,660m – 63min at 24fps; based on MoMA’s print, from B&W French copy of Czech export print
- 1981 Patalas restoration, length 1,733m – 84min at 18fps; based on B&W French copy of Czech export print
- 1984 Patalas restoration, length 1,733m – speculative tinting added
- 1987 Patalas restoration, length 1,910m – 93min at 18fps; added missing footage and correct tinting, based on newly discovered original French print
- 1991 Shepard version, film equivalent length 1,660m – 81min at 18fps; based on MoMA’s print: tinted with new intertitles
- 1995 Patalas restoration, length 1,910.3m (incorrect longer lengths sometimes quoted are probably based on restoration work-in-progress) – 93min at 18fps; based on original French print
- 2000 Eureka version, film equivalent length 1,910m – 92min at 18fps; based on B&W copy of 1987 restoration: sepia toned and partially retinted versions with new intertitles
- 2000 Shepard version, film equivalent length 1,660m – 81min at 18fps; re-retinted edit based on Eureka version
- 2005/6 Berriatúa restoration, length 1,914m – 93min at 18fps; based on original French print
Insert poster by Albin Grau
1981 restoration
Premières:
- France 5.6.1981, Paris Cinémathèque Française. It’s unconfirmed, but the première screening may well have been without any music at all; a common occurrence for silents at the time. We’ve thankfully come a long way since then.
- East Germany 4.4.1981, broadcast on DDR-FS TV; unconfirmed if restored version; possibly Atlas Film version.
“B&W print of the second French version [sic] of 1928 (Cinématèque Suisse [also the source of the MoMA print]). Missing scenes were taken from a nitrate copies of the apocryphical version, Die zwölfte Stunde (Cinémathèque Française and Filmoteca Española), as well as newly produced German intertitles and inserts according to the original title list (as printed in Lotte H. Eisner: F. W. Murnau, Paris 1964), and based on the graphic design of a copy provided by the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR.” – Enno Patalas
Additionally, the film’s original five-act intertitles were reinstated and have remained since in all complete versions, bar Photoplay’s revamp.
1984 restoration
Premières:
- Germany 17-18.2.1984, Berlin Film Festival, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. Original Hans Erdmann score reconstructed for salon orchestra by Berndt Heller.
- 20.2.1984, Berlin Zoo Palast; adjacent to the site of Der Marmorsaal, venue of its original preview screening, 62 years before.
“From the B&W duplicative negative of 1981, a colour copy was screened at the at the Berlin Film Festival. The colouring was determined by speculative tinting: brown for sunlight, pink for dusk, blue for moonlight, yellow for artificial light.” – Enno Patalas
1987 restoration
Premières:
- Germany 1-5.2.1987, Gasteig, Carl-Orff-Saal. Original Hans Erdmann score reconstructed for full orchestra by Berndt Heller.
- 29.12.1988, broadcast on ZDF. New orchestral score by Hans Posegga.
- 1989, broadcast on TVE. Posegga score, new Spanish video intertitles (“death-bird” title split into two) except for credits and diary entries: original German w/subtitles.
“As in the case of 2.1984, a copy of the B&W duplicative negative of 1.1981, likewise by means of a filter, but now with corrected colouring, based on a tinted copy [identified in late 1984] of the first French version of Nosferatu in the Cinémathèque Français.” – Enno Patalas
This version was brought up to full length by the addition of missing scenes contained in the same Cinémathèque Française print that enabled corrected tinting. It’s the only one of the first three restorations to be released on home video, but with redone tinting and its original, Grau-designed, German intertitles replaced with new English ones for the first Eureka and second Image releases.
Poster by PerfktDrug, 2008
Nosferatu: History and Home Video Guide, Part 5
Grateful thanks to Aitam Bar-Sagi, David Shepard, Lokke Heiss, Martin H. Larsen and Patrick Stanbury for help with this series of articles.
Related articles
This is part of a unique series of articles covering everything Graf Orlok.
