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You may have to clarify that for me, because I remain unconvinced.
A better example than Van Sant's Psycho of the kind of filmmaking you seem to be describing in your opening post would be Peter Jackson's King Kong. "Hey, instead of a twenty-second sequence of Kong fighting a dinosaur, we can do a ten-minute set-piece of Kong fighting three dinosaurs! At once! While falling down a ravine! And they're all on fire!" (Okay, I made that last part up. But still.)
The new Kong may be a hugely entertaining film (I haven't seen it), but it doesn't seem like a film that was crying out to be made. It exists only because Peter Jackson is a big ol' fanboy who thought it would be OMG SO FUKKN KEWL to do the story with supah-modern technolology and lotsa kicky-splodey... you know, just the way Merian Cooper and Willis O'Brien would've done it in 1933, if they'd had ultrafast computers, THX sound, and digital image processing, not to mention color stock and and eighty bajillion dollars. And you know, he's probably right about that.
Now, it's been a while since I watched either Nosferatu, but it seems to me that Herzog—for my money one of the genuine mad geniuses of cinema—had more on his mind than "doing Count Orlok right" or doing only what Murnau woulda-if-he-coulda.
What, exactly, do you think Herzog is driving at here? Is it the same thing Murnau was trying for in 1922, or something different? How does the use of color, sound, steadicam, what-have-you, amplify the tones and themes of the 1922 silent? |
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