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The technical innovations of the second half of the 19th century brought about the invention of photography and established the first form of art of "the age of mechanical reproduction."1 As critically discussed and uncanny an art form as photography, film, which in its smallest unit is based on the photographic image, was an even greater challenge to traditional art and art criticism. Condemned as a numbing mass entertainment and hailed as a new "Gesamtkunstwerk," a total work of art, many films of that time reflect the struggle to position film among the traditional arts. Based on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922), one of the masterpieces of German expressionist cinema, this essay attempts to trace the intermedial exchanges of film and the other arts as an act of intermedial incorporation. In this respect, the vampire serves as the figuration of this process and his urge of feeding on human blood reflects the way film incorporates the aesthetics of the other arts without destruction of the latter. Within this analogy, the process represents a main quality of film that has accompanied its development ever since and that especially for early cinema was significant in order to find a position of its own.
The first part of the essay outlines the context in which film came into being and in how far the figure of the vampire is appropriate to analyze the origin of cinema in terms of an intermedial incorporation. The second part illustrates this process with the analysis of exemplary scenes of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922). Its main protagonist, the vampire, serves as a meta-cinematic representation of incorporation in regard to painting, literature, sound and other technologies.
THE ORIGIN OF FILM AS AN ACT OF INCORPORATION
European and Soviet avant-garde cinema attempted to establish film among its sister arts, above all literature and painting. Whereas the comparison to painting and literature served to legitimize film and its place within the tradition of art, the emancipation from these very same arts and the search for a unique specificity of film are of crucial interest to many early directors. F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu is exemplary of this ambiguity and reflects both Murnau's educational background and his keen...