ION AND AMBIGUITY: THE DISPLACEMENT OF SEXUALITY IN MURNAU'S FILMS To turn from this general discussion to Murnau's specific contribution, I believe that although the kinds of conventions outlined here are limited in number, it is reasonable to assume that the contemporary audience for Weimar cinema was already accustomed to types, to a conceptual cinema that was in certain regards highly conventionalized. It can be argued, further, that this popularizing of abstraction and ambiguity allowed Murnau to represent sexuality in a displaced and abstracted fashion that is to say (with the foregoing discussion in mind) that he was able to reshape or modify 7. Journals consulted include the Lichtbildbiihne, Der Film Kurier, Der Film, The American Cinematographer, and Variety. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 03:47:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms FILMS OF F.W. MURNAU 193 conventions in a way that could still be seen as falling within the norms of his audience and industry. For example, Murnau's use of the double in Nosferatu and Sunrise has been linked by Robin Wood to the of sexuality (Wood 1976, Wood and Lippe 1979).8 According to Wood's argument, Nosferatu, the vampire, represents sexuality itself, and as such must be eliminated from the world of the narrative. His double is Jonathan, who shares none of Nosferatu's characteristics, lacking in particular both power and sexuality. Nosferatu's antagonist is not Jonathan, but his wife, Nina, who sacrifices her own life for her husband. In a highly ambiguous gesture, where she seems both to need and to repudiate sexuality/Nosferatu, she attracts and keeps the vampire with her until the cock crows at dawn. Nosferatu then disintegrates into vapor, and Nina dies. Wood draws a convincing parallel between Nosferatu and the City Woman in Sunrise, both creatures of the night, the unnatural, and sexuality. The City Woman clearly represents evil, and a threat to nature, the family, and civilization. (One might add that visually, as well as functionally, she is very close to Mephisto in Faust, dressed in black satiny materials, and is, like him, the character with the greatest physical presence in the film.9) Her failure to entice the man from the country to murder his wife, sell his farm, and go away with her to the city is viewed by Wood as analogous to the necessary destruction of the vampire at the end of Nosferatu. This victory over sexuality, however, is not only won by default the man remains passive throughout but it has its price. As with Nosferatu . . .the sharp division remains between pure love and eroticism. The wife of Sunrise quite lacks the blanched and angular quality of Nina, the appearance of a female Christ-on-the-Cross, but, although very feminine, she strikes the spectator as decidely unsensual (an impression to which her tightly knotted hair contributes a great deal). And sensuality, again, is depicted unequivocally as evil and destructive (Wood 1976:17). The chief double Wood sees in Sunrise is the husband, who is alternately a monster and normal, depending on whether or not he 8. I am not addressing Wood's reformulation of this thesis, from the of sexuality to the of homosexuality, although I agree that Murnau's known homosexuality adds an important dimension to understanding his films. However, it is difficult to refer to this dimension, particularly when attempting to describe a shifting, unstable homoerotic charge that the films seem to carry. Wood's analysis proceeds in a different direction than mine; he also does not seem to be using repression in its psychoanalytic sense. For a more recent elaboration of Wood's views about the of homosexuality deforming filmic systems, see his article on Raging Bull (Wood 1983). 9. The degree to which a character in a film is endowed with the illusion of physical presence, and for what reasons, has been an on-going concern in the Cahiers du Cinema over the past ten years. The study of Lang's Hangmen Also Die by Jean-Louis Comolli and Franqois G're (1978) is particularly important. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 03:47:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms