Olga Tschechowa points the finger.
It's a listless country house gathering, broiling with intrigue under the surface: Bertie Wooster might appear, except we're in Germany. The hunt is rained off: nobody has anything to do except read the paper or gossip. And then Graf Oetsch arrives, suspected of murder, and they really have something to gossip about...
I first saw F.W. Murnau's Schloß Vogeloed (1921), under the misleading title The Haunted Castle, on a grey-market VHS bought on eBay. Grey was the word: the washed-out images were devoid of clarity, life and atmosphere, and the only thing that struck me asides from the pervasive theatricality was a double dream sequence which crashed into the plot for no real reason.
The first dream is scary, although the dreamer is the film's comedy relief character, "the anxious gentleman" played by Julius Falkenstein. As he slumbers, the window blows open and the diaphanous curtains blow in the gale.
It's a listless country house gathering, broiling with intrigue under the surface: Bertie Wooster might appear, except we're in Germany. The hunt is rained off: nobody has anything to do except read the paper or gossip. And then Graf Oetsch arrives, suspected of murder, and they really have something to gossip about...
I first saw F.W. Murnau's Schloß Vogeloed (1921), under the misleading title The Haunted Castle, on a grey-market VHS bought on eBay. Grey was the word: the washed-out images were devoid of clarity, life and atmosphere, and the only thing that struck me asides from the pervasive theatricality was a double dream sequence which crashed into the plot for no real reason.
The first dream is scary, although the dreamer is the film's comedy relief character, "the anxious gentleman" played by Julius Falkenstein. As he slumbers, the window blows open and the diaphanous curtains blow in the gale.
- 9/1/2011
- MUBI
Title a film The Haunted Castle and you are probably going to build up a certain number of expectations in an audience’s mind, namely there’s going to be a castle and it’s going to be haunted, but this early film by German master Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is not the Gothic ghost story that you may expect. The original German title for the film is perhaps more appropriate, and it’s the one Masters of Cinema have opted to place more prominently on the DVD cover, translating to the less suggestive ‘Vogelöd Castle’.
Just a year after Schloß Vogelöd Murnau made what is almost certainly his most famous, if not best, film Nosferatu, a wonderful achievement and an iconic film from the silent era. Schloß Vogelöd is much more of a restrained and understated film than something like Nosferatu but it is nonetheless a very interesting film both...
Just a year after Schloß Vogelöd Murnau made what is almost certainly his most famous, if not best, film Nosferatu, a wonderful achievement and an iconic film from the silent era. Schloß Vogelöd is much more of a restrained and understated film than something like Nosferatu but it is nonetheless a very interesting film both...
- 8/25/2011
- by Craig Skinner
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
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