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This is a still from Robbert Eggers‘ recent film NOSFERATU (2024). Being a narrative and aesthetic homage to Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 silent film of the same title, Eggers‘ NOSFERATU features a noticeable amount of candle- or moonlit night scenes. For the latter ones, DoP Jarin Blaschke developed a unique filter that spares almost all red wavelength of light to simulate the perception of moonlight by the human eye. This relates to the post-Aristotelian tradition of the media diaphana (Somaini 2016), by which the human perception is always mediated through a diaphanous medium like air, fog, smoke, water, etc. The medium of cinema being able to alter the human perception by creating a virtual environment that influences the affective state of the audience is a main subject of the atmosphere discourse (Tröhler 2012, Sinnerbrink 2012, Hven 2022). In the case of Eggers‘ NOSFERATU, a certain Stimmung is mediated by recreating the human eyesight during a moonlit night, reproducing an already affectively charged situation (just think about waking up at night, seeing your bedroom through a shade of moonlight shining through the window). This correlates with the subject-object-relation established by Gernot Böhme, in which the atmosphere mediates between an environment and the human subject, creating an affectively charged space. In this development, Eggers moves one step closer to the subject side by simulating certain modes of human perception through the medium of cinema, after historically mediating late 19th century atmosphere by using cinema techniques like filming his 2019 drama THE LIGHTHOUSE on 35mm black and white film stock in an 1.19:1 aspect ratio, emphasizing Walter Benjamin’s concept of the medium of perception (Medium der Wahrnehmung) by which human perception is also historically framed (as we only know late 19th/early 20th century through black and white film/photography). It’s interesting to see how Robert Eggers, being repeatedly acclaimed for his ‚atmospheric‚ films uses those operations to create atmospheres by altering the audience’s perception.
