Nosferatu
Werner Herzog, 1979
catalogue # DVD 313

Shadow of the Vampire
E. Elias Merhige, 2000
catalogue # DVD 348

The bloodsucker -- a potent symbol spanning centuries of folklore, literature and pulp -- has been a staple of horror movies since the dawn of cinema. F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu was not the first, but certainly one of the most memorable exploitations of the subject. It is actually a thinly-veiled, unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and a subsequent lawsuit by Stoker's widow stipulated that all existing copies be destroyed. Despite this effort to cleanse the world of Nosferatu (which means, loosely, "plague carrier"), the film -- like the vampire itself -- mysteriously escaped its tomb to infect the world, not only in its original form, but also in mutations that, when placed side by side, seem to illustrate Harold Bloom's ideas of "creative misprision," or the bending of a narrative to conform to one's own worldview.

If Murnau changed the name of the central character to sidestep the nuisance of copyright infringement, Werner Herzog, the great visionary director of the German New Wave, restored the name of Dracula in his remake yet created a veritable homage to Murnau -- riffing on the original, sometimes shot for shot, in imagery and staging. Although Murnau's film is often cited, along with Robert Wiene's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as one of the prime examples of cinematic Expressionism, it is still suffused with a naïve Wagnerian Romanticism in which evil is conquered through the sacrifice of pure love. Herzog's interpretation, on the other hand, reflects a fatalistic Vietnam-era cynicism, in which evil is never eradicated, only temporarily halted until it reappears in another place or a different form.

Post-modern self-reflection and distrust of the author informs E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire. Released at the turn of the millenium, the film cleverly subverts the idea of artistic representation by creating a narrative revolving around Murnau's filming of Nosferatu, in which Max Schreck, the actor who played the vampire really is a vampire, yet proves to be less of a monster than the artist Murnau, who loses his soul in the execution of his craft.

Gimme Shelter
David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwernin, 1970
catalogue # DVD 032

Thelonius Monk : Straight, No Chaser
Charlotte Zwernin
catalogue # DVD 454

Although the primacy of editing and montage has been a given in filmmaking at least since Vsevolod I. Pudovkin's pioneering theoretical writings and cinematic experiments, the ascendence of the director in the popular imagination as the sole author of a film has tended to overshadow the creative contributions of most other collaborators.

The career of Charlotte Zwerin, who died last week, calls to mind the crucial role the editor plays in channeling an often shapeless mass of raw footage, especially documentary footage, into a compelling narrative. Although she eventually made her mark as a director in her own right (Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser), she is best known for her work with Albert and David Maysles on their cinéma vérité masterpieces, Salesman and Gimme Shelter.

Rather than setting out with a preconceived agenda, the Maysles brothers tried their best to fade into the background while filming their subjects. The idea was to approximate direct experience, which would later be distilled from thousands of meters of celluloid into a richly-layered story of emotional and moral depth. This is especially true of Gimme Shelter, which started out as a fly-on-the-wall concert film documenting the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour, only to take on an unexpected cultural significance when a free music festival near San Francisco turned into a debacle that many saw as the dark side of Woodstock Nation.

Stephen Lighthill, a cameraman on Gimme Shelter quoted in Zwerin's New York Times obituary, said that "the real hero of the making of the film was Charlotte Zwerin ... I was stunned with what she got out of my footage. She compressed it and gave you a sense of a buildup of tragedy that you otherwise wouldn't have."

The Times goes on to explain that "it was her decision to include the band members' reactions to the killing of a fan on the stage of a concert at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, Calif., the site of the tour's last concert."

The Maysleses so valued her work on both films that they credited her as the third director, a highly unusual step, but one that illustrates the fluid boundaries of such a collaborative medium: the final effort is the work of many hands, and it's impossible to dust for fingerprints.

It's here — our quadrennial exercise in representational government. Over the course of the election season the Pick of the Week will highlight various films that deal with the political process as well as the effects of political decisions on the country and the world.

In today's media-saturated political environment, it is instructive, if a tad nostalgic, to visit a time when cameras were a novelty on the electoral trail.  In 1960, the TV producer Robert Drew pioneered a new kind of photojournalism — now commonplace — in which he covered the Democratic primary campaign of Sen. John F. Kennedy by filming around-the-clock for weeks on end. Through technological breakthroughs considered revolutionary at the time, he was able to do this with a crew of two (Richard Leacock on camera and Drew himself on sound), thereby sinking into the background enough to let history unfold spontaneously before the camera.

It is also refreshing, indeed almost shocking, to see the humble level on which the campaign was waged, with Kennedy and his rival, Hubert H. Humphrey, emerging from the front seats of station wagons to press the flesh and talk with ordinary Americans who seem indistinguishable from extras in a Frank Capra movie.