I SAW IT ON TAPE - Nosferatu

The VHS era was wonderful for a lotta reasons. For one, it did its best to make the entirety of Cinema that much more readily available to the public. It was also an artistic medium unto itself, creating an entire market of content made specifically for (and sometimes on) videotape. But in terms of "Film Preservation", at least from a consumer's point of view, it was pretty fleeting; regardless of how old or new these films were, once they were on VHS, that would likely be the worst they were ever gonna look and sound. And since Laserdisc didn't seem to be really taking off, this kinda felt like theses movies' final destination.

That's not to say that every title from history was endlessly available at our fingertips; it was common for an entire wall of your video store to become dedicated to 40 copies of Sister Act if that was the big deal that week. But it's probably no shock to you that I had some amount of difficulty tracking down a silent film from 1922 on VHS (no matter how "revered"). But in late 1992 it was absolutely imperative that I track it down. This was during my own private Bram Stoker's Dracula mania, when I was saturating myself not just in stuff from that movie but also any and all vampiric pop culture (which seemed to be booming at the time). Most of that saturation was books and magazines, and no chapter or article would talk about vampires (or at least vampires on film) without talking about F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. 

I'd always known about it and was certainly familiar with much of its copyright-free imagery (a lot of it was used in the Queen/David Bowie "Under Pressure" music video), but now it was at the point where I needed to actually see it, and like Abraham Van Helsing I was gonna have to hunt. And again, this was late '92/early '93, which historically meant I had at least a half dozen video stores to visit just in my home town alone. Though honestly I don't remember much from that experience, but I do remember the relief of finally finding it - in a place where I'd never thought to look for movies: The Public Library. Never mind renting a rare, ancient Monster Movie, but borrowing it for free (and for a much longer period of time before I had to return it) was the real novelty. And it came in this clinical cover labeled "Film Classics" which gave off a kinda underground/bootleg vibe before I even knew such a vibe existed. To top it off, when I watched it, the picture quality was (predictably) not great -- everything considered, it's possible this tape had been around since 1922. But like always I braved the tracking fuzz, and gleefully absorbed what was probably my first Silent Film, almost certainly my first German Expressionist Film, and definitely my first video rented from the library.

- Paul