Haunted Seascapes and Sublime Terror in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea

By Julia Biggs

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar . . .  

— Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), Canto IV, stanzas 178 – 181

In his influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke argued that terror—the passion associated with the sublime—is best aroused by things that are uncertain and confused. This obscurity and instability precariously pose the subject on thresholds, uncomfortably mixing the wonderful and the horrible, the awful and the awesome. It also opens up a space for interrogating the dreadful pleasure of the littoral zone. Embracing the shoreline’s hybrid reality, I argue, takes centre stage in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s eerily potent Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922) and Caspar David Friedrich’s poetic Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer, c. 1808-10). (Fig. 1) Water permeates the cool fabric of both the film and the painting, creating an uneasy mood of longing as the boundaries between self and Other become ever more slippery.

Fig. 1. Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer), c. 1808-10, oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin/Photo: Andres Kilger CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In Cinema and Painting: How Art is used in Film, Angela Dalle Vacche (noting the critical approach of Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen) examines horror and desire, the two key elements in Murnau’s film, in relation to German Romanticism, and especially the work of Friedrich. She maintains that “in the wake of Romantic painting, in which landscapes become a mental projection, Murnau learns to use the cinema to make visible the invisible, while imbuing objects and decor with intangible states of mind.”[i] To Dalle Vacche, Murnau’s and Friedrich’s shared aesthetic preoccupation with “making visible the invisible”, with exploring subjectivity and the unconscious via the sublimity of the seascape, suggests an “unfulfilled yearning toward the divine”.[ii] As this essay shows, Murnau’s carefully composed cinematic frames and painterly style distil Friedrich’s discovery of what the French sculptor David d’Anger declared “the tragedy of landscape” (with its vastness, difficulty, darkness and sudden lights) through Bram Stoker’s influence (Dracula, 1897), to conjure the supernatural in daily life.

As scholars such as Lynda Nead, Tom Gunning and Stacey Abbott collectively recognise, there is something inherently Gothic about the medium of film.[iii] Dalle Vacche suggests that “Nosferatu’s bloodsucking, which drains the world of its vital forces, plays on the notion that cinema, the art of movement as life, may also be a form of death at work, with one image exhausting itself into the next.”[iv] That the relationship between the vampire and film was part of the earliest conception of Nosferatu can hardly be denied, but as Barbara Laner argues: “With the analogy of film as the vampire that feeds on the essences of the other arts (. . .) we can assume the positive energy film gains from the ‘life essences’ of the other arts without the necessary death or destruction of its ‘victims’.” On the contrary, she stresses, “the vampire as a hybrid and cannibalistic figure stands for film as a genuine intermedial art form that absorbs and incorporates the aesthetics of the other arts to develop its own specificity.”[v]

Seemingly “wholly self-conscious about the manner in which the discourses of painting and literature impinge upon his film-making”, Murnau’s references to painting, as Brigitte Peucker notes, “never suggest that he has fallen back on mises-en-scène that are ready to hand for want of imagination; his homage is always also critique, his troping pointed”.[vi] Murnau’s art historical training accounts for his deliberate use of pictorial allusions in Nosferatu. After studying philology in Berlin, where he forged important friendships with young artists and writers (including the Expressionist painter Franz Marc, the theatre director Max Reinhardt, the sculptor Renée Sinténis, and the charismatic poet Else Lasker-Schüler), Murnau took courses in German Romantic literature, Shakespeare and art history at the University of Heidelberg. Here, he explored the work of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Holbein.

Various commentators have identified Nosferatu’s rich range of painterly sources.[vii] Its references include seventeenth century Dutch painters like Frans Hals, Rubens, Vermeer and, above all, Rembrandt (specifically, his 1632 Anatomy Lesson), and nineteenth century artists like Moritz von Schwind, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Carl Spitzweg and Arnold Böcklin. (Böcklin’s spectral 1880 painting The Isle of the Dead underpins the image of Nosferatu crossing a Bremen canal in a small boat.) Among other art historical inspirations are Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (Der Golem, 1915), Franz Marc’s animal paintings and Ludwig Kirchner’s The Red Tower in Halle (1915), which is mirrored in the film’s opening scene of the city tower.  Dalle Vacche also proposes Giorgio De Chirico for some of the townscapes and Emile Nolde for other scenes.[viii]

However, the most pervasive and consistent influence on Murnau’s cinematic imagination is Friedrich, whose landscape paintings, with “their simultaneously sharp focus and vague, dissolving air of unreality” are the closest to the director’s own abstract and subjective stylistic orientation.[ix]  Rebutting traditional approaches to the sublime in his personal evocation of infinities, Friedrich pushed representation into a colder, less comfortable corner, his canvases, “in which landscape becomes a meditation on vision itself”, corresponding to Murnau’s deployment of landscape as “an analogy for the desiring self”.[x]

Significantly, Friedrich-esque elements are condensed in the film when, as Saviour Catania observes, Nosferatu’s presence “manifests invisibly in terms of a symbology of infinity, which finds embodiment in the illimitable seascape Ellen scans from the beach cemetery” where she sits, awaiting the arrival of an unspecified ‘him’, wanting to reach out for something eternal.[xi] (Fig.  2) The scene, rooted in Friedrich’s elegiac Monk by the Sea and Stoker’s world, is transformed into a “vampiric version of Odysseus’s nostos or homecoming”, with Ellen longing, “like a Bremen Penelope”, for the arrival of the Charonic Nosferatu.[xii] The erotic ambiguity of the situation, as Ellen’s 'unnatural’ husband (Nosferatu) travels by ship (the Empusa), while her ‘natural’ husband (Hutter) journeys across the land, grows progressively more unsettling, with the sustained, rhythmic passage of crosscutting between Hutter, Nosferatu and Ellen (whose black clothes resemble both those of Nosferatu and widow’s weeds) becoming crucial to the film’s meaning. The editing betrays Ellen’s unconscious desire, her sensually tinged death drive, as she summons the vampire from a shoreline dotted with crosses bent over by the wind, marking graves of sailors. Grief, memorial, return and a risky sexuality converge on the fragile coast, and the traditional association of the sea with what Robin Wood called “purity, or purification” is inverted, as the ship bearing Nosferatu and his pestilential coffins sweeps across it.[xiii]

Fig. 2. Ellen on the seashore in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens), directed by F. W. Murnau (Prana-Film, 1922)

Although the use of natural settings “may at first glance seem simply a trick, a decoration designed to render the fantastic narrative more plausible and effective”, the natural world “is the true protagonist of Nosferatu”.[xiv] Friedrich’s landscapes and early Scandinavian cinema (notably the work of directors like Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, Urban Gad and Benjamin Christensen), with its feeling for the open air, informed Murnau’s decision to shoot on location, and the beach scenes were filmed at List, on the North Sea island of Sylt. The restless quality of Murnau’s images, conveying both the immediacy of the physical environment and its overwhelming strangeness, reveal the director’s almost mystical vision of seascapes.

The peculiar, arresting entanglement of horror and yearning that inflects the shoreline mise-en-scène also sees Murnau borrow from Friedrich the spectator figure viewed from behind; Ellen is placed in the shot as a Rückenfigur. The function of the Rückenfigur, the signature, almost obsessive, motif of Friedrich’s art, is paradoxical, as it is the “site of both our identification with, and our isolation from, the painted landscape”.[xv] It invites us into the image and yet it impedes our gaze, its absorbed viewing or profound meditation seeming to exclude us. This subversive “emotional and cognitive inaccessibility” creates a fragment of intensity within the composition that results in both Friedrich’s monk and Murnau’s Ellen foregrounding “the gaps or tears in the fabric of existence”.[xvi] (A parallel can be drawn here with Emily Alder’s theorisation of Gothic thinking as possessing oceanic qualities, for it prises “open fractures in dominant narratives”.[xvii])

Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea was unveiled at the Berlin Academy exhibition in 1810 alongside Abbey in the Oak Wood (Abtei im Eichwald, c. 1809-10), where it enjoyed remarkable success. (Both works were subsequently purchased by the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm III.) However, as Matthew Beaumont posits, in rehearsing the problem of precarious visibility, the painting also challenged contemporaries “in part because it compelled spectators to confront the sublime both in its material as well as its philosophical or spiritual implications”.[xviii] Provocative in its refusal of perspective and daringly sparse, the landscape in the picture (identified as a beach on the island of Rügen) is indicated with just the grey-white shore, the dark ribbon of the green-black sea and the blue-grey-white sky above. Besides a number of gulls, the diminutive figure of a lonely Capuchin monk (who many scholars read as a self-portrait by the artist), buried in melancholy reflection, is the single identifiable motif and the only vertical element in the composition. No sailing ships appear in the work. Originally, as revealed by infrared reflectograms, a couple of vessels featured, but as part of an ongoing process of revision, reduction and concealment Friedrich painted them out, creating a landscape of unprecedented and oppressive emptiness. The pure horizon is all that remains, guiding the beholder’s eye laterally, “both anticipating the moving diorama (and cinematic pan) and emphasizing the picture plane”.[xix]

Horizontal bands of paint appear to stretch beyond the frame itself, and the vibrating juxtaposition of colour fields, which Robert Rosenblum connected to Abstract Expressionism (particularly Mark Rothko’s canvases), is of decisive significance in illustrating the elusive nature of the picture’s boundaries.[xx] At the transition from land to sea, the dividing line created by the different colours at first seems clear. However, on closer inspection, the viewer can no longer be sure whether this is the shoreline. As Melanie Maria Lörke outlines in relation to her concept of a-limitation, the monk seemingly stands on an elevated part of the beach, which prevents the viewer from seeing the coastline: “At the same time, the boundary between beach and sea is transgressed: the bushels of beach grass seem to merge with the waves.”[xxi] Likewise, at some points the similarity of the colour values on either side of the boundary between sea and sky forms an “atmospheric density”.[xxii] At once thrilling and threatening, the distinction between sea and sky collapses, as the dark sea fades into the dark sky that becomes lighter until it turns dark again at the painting’s upper edge. Lörke contends that Romantic a-limitation “is the oscillation between the transgression, transcendence, or dissolution of a boundary and its reinstatement”, with Friedrich’s painting thus foregrounding a-limitation “by seeming to organize the image into different boundaries and at the same time dissolving these boundaries”.[xxiii]

A-limitation can be a frightening, perhaps even dangerous experience, as Heinrich von Kleist recognised in his imaginative report Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape (Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft), written for the journal he edited, the Berliner Abendblätter, in 1810. Grappling with the sublime optics of Friedrich’s painting, Kleist deployed the compelling trope of lidless eyes: “The picture with its two or three mysterious objects lies before one like the Apocalypse (…) and since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no foreground but the frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off (als ob Einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären).”[xxiv] Kleist’s extreme metaphor evokes the almost intolerable affective impact of the image, as the sublime is directly inscribed onto the body of the spectator in a moment of radical freedom and horrifying trauma.[xxv] Stripped of its protective lids, the eye is plunged into something beyond calculation that it cannot control. The sensation becomes existential and ontological.

That the Monk by the Sea pushes the boundaries of comprehension is clear from Friedrich’s own writings about the picture.  The painting urges the spectator to admit the futility and arrogance of attempting to understand “the uninvestigable hereafter”, and “of deciphering the darkness of the future”, for the core of the image is “to be seen and recognised only in belief”: “Your footprints in the bleak, sandy shore may be deep, but a quiet wind wafts across them and your tracks are no more to be seen; foolish man filled with vain presumption!”[xxvi]

Exploring a water-bound approach to the sublime, as distinct from landlocked perspectives, both Friedrich and Murnau draw attention to the shoreline as the quintessential space of in-betweenness.[xxvii]  They figure liminality, according to Dalle Vacche, “in the guise of the mind longing for something powerful out there, but also turning back to what is close and familiar”.[xxviii] Dalle Vacche goes on to argue that if Friedrich “is interested in blurring the limit between the natural and the supernatural”, Murnau, on the other hand, “underlines (…) the meeting of land and water at the shoreline, precisely because his fantastic tale is about the unstable boundaries between what is real and what is imaginary, what is normal and what is monstrous”.[xxix] As Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith have noted, the shoreline is an ‘ecotone’, “a boundary zone where two ecosystems meet and overlap”; it is an ‘interface’, as opposed to an edge or a limit.[xxx] Murnau, then, exploits the shore as ecotone to initiate an anxiety-inducing coming together of the self and Other. Privileging obscene proximity or porousness, the director presents an uncanny vision of a space in which borders—between living and dead, fluid and fixed—are disrupted and transgressed. Thinking with, rather than against, the shoreline’s permeability, Murnau’s Ellen dares to embrace instability and enters an active, ambivalent realm that enables her to explore “the possibilities of other modes of being by becoming something else”.[xxxi] Sea-gazing in this instance makes visible alternative, dynamic conditions of knowledge.

Murnau represents and interrogates the perverse pleasure underpinning the littoral zone as a site of an intricate web of intimacy, reciprocity, interconnection, identification and contagion. Mingling attraction and repulsion, Ellen’s disorientating slippage into Otherness is disturbingly and enthrallingly enacted on the seashore, where relations “are ever in multidimensional flux”.[xxxii] Waves of disquiet break on the beach as “secret affinities” eerily emerge from the watery depths.[xxxiii] These unpredictable, subversive correspondences, which encompass the telepathic link between Nosferatu and Ellen (and mirror the communication between Dracula and his victims explored in Stoker’s novel), are established by Murnau’s editing, which, Dalle Vacche suggests, is “indebted to the principle of empathy, or ‘Einfühlung’, which means literally a ‘feeling into’ another”.[xxxiv] This hazardous and liberating experience of absorption, the enfolding of bodies within bodies (that is similarly evoked by the word ‘symphony’ in the second half of the film’s title), is deepened by the director’s montage, which demands a rethinking of spatiality and temporality that presses the sublime to its limits.

Murnau and Friedrich portray water as an actant that makes present what is absent. In Monk by the Sea, a kind of nothingness is materialised on the canvas, as Friedrich renders the vacant space of the seascape “the focal point of the painting, as if the gaping void were an object in and of itself”.[xxxv] The spectator finds themselves under a terrifying spell, “condemned to see what is not there”, as the picture’s emptiness immerses them in a transcendent reality.[xxxvi] Murnau’s destabilising seascape, like Friedrich’s, is a meditation on what Gilberto Perez termed the “hollow space”, with Nosferatu hedged between the seen and the unseen: “the hidden from view in the space off-screen and the depths, recesses and shadows of the image haunts Murnau’s compositions.”[xxxvii] Murnau’s beach scene recalls the horror vacui of Stoker’s churchyard cliff at Whitby.[xxxviii] However, the sublime vacuity of Nosferatu comes closest to Dracula in S.L. Varnado’s reading of Stoker’s Count as the embodiment of Rudolf Otto’s “negative numinous”. To Varnado, the vampire appears as a profane ghost of the sacred, sharing elements of the “divine power”, and lifting us, ultimately, beyond the rational “into a region of dread and wonder”.[xxxix] To Friedrich, Murnau and Stoker, pure experience is the void, and the void is utter freedom.  Through violent transformative practices we for a moment become unrestricted: without reservation. The strange sense of absent presence releases one into a state of simultaneous mesmerising ecstasy and extreme anguish.

Focusing on the kind of looking Murnau solicits from his viewers, Dalle Vacche concludes that: “German Romantic painting in Nosferatu presupposes an extremely active mode of looking, precisely because for Murnau ‘horror’ means feeling beyond seeing, reaching out beyond the self-image that society allows one to have.”[xl] This mode of looking is deeply unresolved, as the director’s use of art historical allusions charges the film with unsettling patterns of repressed desire. Relying on the exercise of an investigating gaze, Friedrich’s canvas returns in Murnau’s film as both unspeakable fear and shuddering pleasure, rupturing boundaries by underscoring the insuperable might of the sublime, which “produces an atmosphere of toxic breathlessness”.[xli]

Convulsed by terror and yet yearning for transcendence, Friedrich’s monk and Murnau’s Ellen are drawn to the pounding surf, and thus experience the shoreline as a haunted, hypnotic space marked by hybridity: everything is ever on the brink of metamorphosis, moving towards an uncertain site or condition entailing both peril and promise. Painting and film reimagine a new type of subjectivity that recognises the capacity of the self to sink into the oceanic domain of monstrous, darkly captivating, difference.

Ominously and exhilaratingly reconfiguring the aesthetics of the sublime, Monk by the Sea and Nosferatu cast the coast as a site of intense, bewildering sensation.  Painter and director position us, their spectators, before the dangerous littoral threshold and ask whether we are ready at last to dive into the depths of fear and fascination.

Julia Biggs is an independent art historian, writer and lecturer. Her introductory guides to Raphael and Renaissance Art have been published by Flame Tree, and she has contributed to catalogue texts including Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Her recent research explores the culinary uncanny and the delicious excesses of the Gothic mode. Her poetry and short fiction has featured in various journals and magazines in print and online.

Bibliography

Abbott, Stacey, and Simon Brown. “Gothic and Silent Cinema”. In The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume III, Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend, 22-42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Alder, Emily. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic”. Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 1-15.

Allen, Nicholas, Nick Groom and Jos Smith, ed., Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Beaumont, Matthew. “Looking through Lidless Eyes: Friedrich, Kleist and the Logic of Sensation”. Angelaki 23, no. 6 (2018): 3-19.

Blum, Hester. “Introduction: Oceanic Studies”. Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 151-155.

Calhoon, Kenneth, S. “F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator”. Modern Language Notes 120, no. 3 (2005): 633-653.

Catania, Saviour. “Absent Presences in Liminal Places: Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ and the Otherworld of Stoker’s ‘Dracula’”. Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2004): 229-236.
— . “Ferrying Nothingness: the Charon motif in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ and Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’”. Melita Classica 3 (2016): 125-139

Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art is used in Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Eisner, Lotte, H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Translated by Roger Greaves. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973.

Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2000.

Gehler, Fred, and Ullrich Kasten. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Augsburg: AV-Verlag F. Fischer, 1990.

Grave, Johannes. Caspar David Friedrich. Munich: Prestel, 2017.

Honour, Hugh, and John Fleming. A World History of Art, 7th ed. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005.

Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.

Laner, Barbara. “The Vampiric Film: Intermedial Incorporation in ‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror’ (1922)”. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 32, no. 1 (2012): 28-38.

Lörke, Melanie Maria. Liminal Semiotics: Boundary Phenomenon in Romanticism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

Meyertholen, Andrea. “Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art”. The German Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2013): 404-420.

Miller, Philip, B. “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich”. Art Journal 33, no. 3 (1974): 205-210.

Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Perez, Gilberto. “Shadow and Substance: Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’”. Sight and Sound 36, no. 3 (1967): 150-153, 159.

— . The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Peucker, Brigitte. Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Rosenblum, Robert. “The Abstract Sublime”. ARTnews 59, no. 10 (1961): 38-41, 56, 58.

Seeba, Hinrich, C. “The Eye of the Beholder: Kleist’s Visual Poetics of Knowledge”. In A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, edited by Bernd Fischer, 103-122. New York: Camden House, 2003.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Varnado, S.L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987.

Wood, Robin. “Murnau’s Midnight and Sunrise”. Film Comment 12, no. 3 (1976): 4-19.

[i] Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art is used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 161-96 (168)

[ii] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 162

[iii] Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, “Gothic and Silent Cinema”, in The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume III, Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 29

[iv] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 181

[v] Barbara Laner, “The Vampiric Film: Intermedial Incorporation in ‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror’ (1922)”, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 32, no. 1 (2012): 30

[vi] Brigitte Peucker, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73-4

[vii] See Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting; Peucker, Incorporating Images; Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973); Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (Augsburg: AV-Verlag F. Fischer, 1990)

[viii] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 169-71, 175

[ix] Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art, 7th ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 651

[x] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 171

[xi] Saviour Catania, “Absent Presences in Liminal Places: Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ and the Otherworld of Stoker’s ‘Dracula’”, Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2004): 232

[xii] Saviour Catania, “Ferrying Nothingness: the Charon motif in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ and Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’”, Melita Classica 3 (2016): 131

[xiii] Robin Wood, “Murnau’s Midnight and Sunrise”, Film Comment 12, no. 3 (1976): 8

[xiv] Gilberto Perez, “Shadow and Substance: Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’”, Sight and Sound 36, no. 3 (1967): 150

[xv] Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 253

[xvi] Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 79-80

[xvii] Emily Alder, “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic”, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 7

[xviii] Matthew Beaumont, “Looking through Lidless Eyes: Friedrich, Kleist and the Logic of Sensation”, Angelaki 23, no. 6 (2018): 4

[xix] Kenneth S. Calhoon, “F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator”, Modern Language Notes 120, no. 3 (2005): 652n33

[xx] Robert Rosenblum, “The Abstract Sublime”, ARTnews 59, no. 10 (1961): 38-41, 56, 58

[xxi] Melanie Maria Lörke, Liminal Semiotics: Boundary Phenomenon in Romanticism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 31

[xxii] Johannes Grave, Caspar David Friedrich (Munich: Prestel, 2017), 159

[xxiii] Lörke, Liminal Semiotics, 33, 43

[xxiv] Heinrich von Kleist, “Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape”, in Philip B. Miller, “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich”, Art Journal 33, no. 3 (1974): 208

[xxv] Beaumont, “Looking through Lidless Eyes”, 4, 15

[xxvi] Caspar David Friedrich, quoted in Grave, Caspar David Friedrich, 151

[xxvii] Hester Blum, “Introduction: Oceanic Studies”, Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 151

[xxviii] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 175

[xxix] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 178

[xxx] Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith, eds., Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5

[xxxi] Lörke, Liminal Semiotics, 184

[xxxii] Blum, “Introduction: Oceanic Studies”, 151

[xxxiii] Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 238

[xxxiv] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 188

[xxxv] Andrea Meyertholen, “Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art”, The German Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2013): 407

[xxxvi] Hinrich C. Seeba, “The Eye of the Beholder: Kleist’s Visual Poetics of Knowledge”, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer (New York: Camden House, 2003), 104

[xxxvii] Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 137, 138

[xxxviii] Catania, “Absent Presences in Liminal Places”, 232

[xxxix] S. L. Varnado, Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 101-2, 111

[xl] Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 191

[xli] Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 19