Dracula 1931

Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula presents the viewer with a meta-cinamatographic narrative that carries with it a subtle didactic function. By marrying silent film convention with audio dialogue, Browning has created a bridging film that educates audiences how to accept narrative with the new advent of sound, much in the same way Sabine Hake describes Nosferatu (1922) as demonstrating “a kind of promotional self-referentiality that draws attention to the cinema and foregrounds its means” in order to “show audiences how to appreciate the cinema in its increasingly sophisticated products” (37-38). Dracula covertly educates audiences to understand narrative not only in the conventional visual way established in the era of silent films, but also in the newly available ‘talkie’ format. The narrative in Dracula is carried in two distinct ways: visually and through spoken dialogue.
The convention of inter-titles from the silent film era is present in different formats that seem to ease the viewer out of such conventions into other expository forms. Early in the film, spoken narration is introduced as an important element. The verbal warnings of the village peasants to Renfield are almost exclusively expository. They inform the listener/viewer (via dialogue with Renfield) that Dracula’s castle is a house of vampires and that to travel there is certain doom. In this way, the dialogue takes the place of the traditional inter-title that would have formerly provided such exposition as information from an omniscient narrator, or as dialogue presented in a textual form, on-screen. In fact, the convention of the inter-title is maintained in several ways early in the film. Visuals which provide the audience member with the perspective of the reader on-screen make use of newspaper articles that fill the position formerly occupied by the inter-title. From printed newspaper articles the viewer is informed of the tragedy on the ship on which Dracula traveled, amongst other things.
Other visual conventions are also present. While the opening scene is dialogue-laden, much of the early part of the narrative contains very little dialogue. The characterization of Dracula is accomplished with sweeping histrionic movements, slow and deliberate. His white shirt and pale face float through scenes in which his black clothing renders his body invisible against a black background. Most scenes are filmed by a stationary camera positioned as the theatrical fourth wall. Dracula, however, is often shown in close-up creating the sense that he is threateningly too near, closing in. The camera occasionally sweeps towards him creating the illusion that he is gliding across the room in a supernatural movement (an image to which Coppola paid homage in his version of Dracula (1992) when Oldman sweeps across the room). The only other character seen in such ominous close-up is Mina, and only once she has become a vampire herself.
The thematic juxtaposition of Dracula against Von Helsing is also visually deployed. They are both elderly, powerful figures that dictate what happens to poor Mina. They are visual foils. Von Helsing is white haired while Dracula’s hair is jet black. Von Helsing is almost always in the light and in the civilized confines of a Victorian home. Dracula is almost always enshrouded in darkness and mist, and usually outdoors, or in his castles of wild foreign origin or ruin. Dracula takes residence in the wild ruins of Carfax Abby, a setting to which the viewer is only exposed towards the end of the film. Its threatening backdrop is a strong contrast to the otherwise secure setting of Mina’s home, otherwise invaded by open windows and wild bats. The wild outdoors is a visual foil to the civilized indoors.
However, the conventional visual of the silent film is married into a new form of juxtaposition. Dracula and Von Helsing are likened as foils through speech. They are the only two characters who carry ‘foreign’ accents. All of the other characters have normalized Victorian British accents. They are both verbally bombastic, authoritative, and patriarchal. This similarity allows the thematic difference of the scientific Von Helsing to be more effectively contrasted against the archaic wildness of Dracula. The latter half of the film maintains the visual conventions established in the earlier parts of the film, but is laden with far more dialogue. Through dialogue we learn of Dracula’s weaknesses, his designs on Minna, the methods by which he can be thwarted, and the superstition come science that Von Helsing believes he represents. The use of newspaper inter-titles is abandoned entirely as the climax of the film approaches, and audiences have been conditioned to follow the narrative through dialogue. However, the dialogue remains largely expository, and carries only the esoteric details of the narrative, while the emotional impetus of the film is carried through visual convention. Shakespearean text-based narrative, this is not, but rather a unique representation of the changing artform of film at the cusp of the silent film era, and the ‘talkie.’