To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision

his students into the night-side of Nature. Murnau intercuts Bulwer’s lecture with shots a film historian (and likely a contemporary viewer) would recognize as taken from (or closely patterned on) the scientific films of the era, including a close-up of a Venus flytrap closing around its prey and a spider crawling along its web toward a trapped insect. Murnau uses complex and highly symbolic intercutting in this scene and throughout the film, less to arouse Griffithian suspense than to create a series of magically interlocking events carried by sinister correspondences and analogies. 1 Thus, although the cut to the spider web confirms Bulwer’s demonstration to his students of the pervasive cruelty of nature, its vampire-like system of feeding on other species, this spider web does not cling to some untidy corner of Bulwer’s lecture room. Rather, through editing’s ability to juxtapose different spaces, this web hangs in the asylum cell of the vampire’s minion, Knock, whom we have just seen devour insects, proclaiming, “Blood is life!” Just as Bulwer compares the carnivorous plant to the vampire, Murnau’s editing compares the madman and the scientist, each the center of a dark system of deadly metaphors and hysterical imitations. Murnau cuts back from the asylum cell to Bulwer and his students bent over a water tank, as the scientist isolates another vampire of the natural world. A “polyp with tentacles” appears not merely enlarged by a close-up but obviously filmed through microcinematography, a frequent technique of scientific films since the invention of cinema. 2 As the microscopic monster’s tentacles grasp another cellular creature