In Nosferatu, the first thing I noticed was that the camera doesn’t move. Except for a few brief pans to show the setting or the landscape. When one scene ends, it blacks out to the next scene, or just jump cuts in a few places to a totally different theme. I think it was because of the old technology everyone moved really fast. An example of this is when the horse and buggy come down the long and winding road from the castle of Nosferatu. This made it seem more humorous than believable. There were places where the movie skipped too. I guess that is just because it was so old.
The lack of lighting made it difficult to tell sometimes when it was supposed to be daytime or nighttime. I know from the story that vampires only come out at night, but the scenes that took place at midnight are lighted the same as during the day. That was a little confusing. The only time I was absolutely sure was when the guy lit the lantern and it was brighter than the already bright background.
Even though this film was silent, it wasn’t hard to watch. The actors portrayed what was going on well without using dialog. The parts we had to read weren’t too long either. Each character sort of had their theme music. For the most part the music followed what was going on pretty well. When things moved fast, the tempo of the music increased, and there was increased dissonance for suspense. I only heard three sound effects in the whole film. One was when the clock struck midnight, the others were the cock crowing at dawn, and the drummer out in the streets announcing the plague had arrived. Or at least I think that’s what he was doing. But that’s a pretty lousy job.
There were points in the film where shadows added to the drama. Nosferatu was coming to get someone where they would just show a big shadow of his hands with his long creepy looking fingers. I guess this made it look suspenseful. Having three separate story lines going on also created drama. Jonathan, Nina, and Renfield, whose
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