EARLY MURNAU FIVE FILMS, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 1

Transcription

1 EARLY MURNAU FIVE FILMS, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 1 23/06/ :43

2 CONTENTS 2. SCHLOß VOGELÖD 6. On Murnau s Schloss Vogelöd by Charles Jameux 16. On Schloss Vogelöd by Lotte H. Eisner 24. A Note on Tinting 26. DIE FINANZEN DES GROSSHERZOGS & PHANTOM 28. Murnau at the Crossroads by Janet Bergstrom 50. TARTUFFE 52. The Vanity of Earthly Things: Style as the Servant of Meaning in F. W. Murnau s Tartuffe by R. Dixon Smith 68. DER LETZTE MANN 70. Expressionism and the Kammerspiel Tradition in F. W. Murnau s Der letzte Mann by R. Dixon Smith 80. Der letzte Mann by Tony Rayns 84. With Murnau on the Set by Robert Herlth (as told by Lotte H. Eisner 92. The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles: By Its Very Nature the Art of the Screen Should Tell a Complete Story Pictorially by Robert Herlth (as told by Lotte H. Eisner 98. BLU-RAY CREDITS 2 3 EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

3 DIE ENTHÜLLUNG EINES GEHEIMNISSES [ CASTLE VOGELÖD: THE REVELATION OF A SECRET ] Director Scenario Based on the story by Cinematography Set Design Artistic Consultant Producer F. W. Murnau Carl Mayer Rudolph (Rudolf) Stratz Fritz Arno Wagner László Schäffer Hermann Warm Count F. Montgelas Erich Pommer LEFT: An original German poster for the film. Year of première Format mm 1.37:1 von Vogelschrey, Lord Vogelöd Centa von Vogelschrey Count Johann Oetsch Count Peter Paul Oetsch Baron Safferstätt Baroness Safferstätt Father Faramund Provincial Judge (Retired) The anxious gentleman The butler A servant Arnold Korff Lulu Kyser-Korff Lotar Mehnert Paul Hartmann Paul Bildt Olga Tschechowa Victor Blütner Hermann Vallentin Julius Falkenstein Robert Leffler Walter Kurt-Kuhle RIGHT: F. W. Murnau in the mid-1920s. 4 5 EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

4 ON MURNAU S SCHLOSS VOGELÖD by CHARLES JAMEUX This essay originally appeared in Positif no. 80, December Translated from the French by Craig Keller. The truly meaningful artwork will be drawn by the artist from the farthest reaches of his being; there, no brook s babble, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves occurs. Chirico It is only with a fragile, clumsy conscience that filmmakers who have genuine means at their disposal press onward in evading a cinematographic poetry such as Man Ray, during the period of 1930, wished to define the term: the least interesting film always carries within it a few minutes, sometimes an instant, where the images, breaking with the inherent banality of the storyline, inform us of their flip-side poésierésurgence, exaltation. One would have to add to this hypothesis, which establishes an involuntary poetry within inevitability, that the entrancing presence of an actor or the strange atmosphere of the film contradictory, and rather moving, filigree are so many natural elements making up the latent content of a scenario, which might yet be referred to in both senses of the term. By and by, the irreducible Ego, intervening between the audience and the works projected before it, expresses the sociological conditions of a justified appreciation: two people seeing the same images are far from certain that they re seeing the same film. The transmission of a similar feeling between spectators is made discontinuously, fragmentarily, despite bringing the entire audience into play. I reject realism, with its falls-from-grace as its agonistic source. It was in this state of mind that I happened to watch Murnau s Schloß Vogelöd, a few days after having learned of the death of Erich Pommer, which occurred in Hollywood on 8th May, It s well known that Pommer at his peak, the brilliant producer of Ufa took particular care in his choice of subjects, of writers and directors along with their collaborators, personally supervised by Decla-Bioscop; he ended up producing, in succession, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920], the films of Joe May and E. A. Dupont, certain films by Lang and by Murnau, Das blaue Engel [The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930]... Thus having taken part in assisting 6 7 EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 7 23/06/ :43

5 LEFT: Erich Pommer in the 1920s. those whom Louis Delluc, Emile Vuillermoz, and Dr. Paul Ramain perceive as cinegraphers of genius (in , the revue Cinéa discovered Wiene, Leni, Murnau, Lang), as early as 1931, Pommer was considered by C. A. Lejeune as the supreme artist of the German screen. [1] Schloß Vogelöd, produced by Pommer, was shot from 10th February to 2nd March, 1921, across sixteen days, two of which were devoted to filming exteriors. [2] The brevity of the shoot indicates that preparation for this film had been painstaking; it seems to be the first picture where Murnau abandons the facile conventions of a wholly surface fantasy (Der Januskopf [Janus-Head, 1920]), of naturalist drama (Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin [The Hunchback and the Dancer, 1920], Der Gang in die Nacht [Passage into the Night, 1921]), of the Detektiv-Film (Abend... Nacht... Morgen [Evening... Night... Morning, 1920]), and of the rustic chamber drama (Marizza, genannt die Schmugglermadonna [Marizza, aka the Smuggler-Madonna, 1922]). The subject here is modernity, timid power of the Murnalcian universe in 1921 [3], and I imagine the hushed ambiance of those salons which hail back to the German counterrevolution to be but the pretext of an entirely different debate: in a single set, a sort of model of the soul, of the passions that agitate the characters, however unemphatically and the greatest sobriety inspires a completely restrained mise-en-scène. The recourse to the present time is a means of detour by essence : as in Swedish films, with which Murnau seemed to have been familiar [4], cinematographic dramaturgy frees itself as much as possible from theatricality, and a contemporary storyline those tragic colloquia, usually occurring under cover of night... is adroitly punctuated by lakes and by woodlands. The screenplay, adapted by Carl Mayer from a mediocre novel by Rudolph Stratz, could belong to any one of the countless Detektiv- Filme shot by Richard Oswald, Joe May, or Otto Rippert, except that the text attributed to Mayer already precisely anticipates the visual effects of Murnau s film Mayer, as is known, having had the talent to write for cinema in cinema-terms and that there seems to exist a tacit complicity between the screenwriter and the director, the accent being placed most specifically on descriptions of the characters inner states and psychology. For all this, along with the summary of an otherwise complicated storyline, I refer to the excellent work by Lotte Eisner [5] : I prefer to investigate, first and foremost, only a few aspects of the narrative. The theme illustrated here inscribes itself within the more general Murnalcien schema of the secret and its elucidation: it s no accident if, indeed, the subtitle of the film be The Revelation of a Secret. The characters observe maybe more so than in other films by Murnau the strange symmetry of doubles and doublings: the two protagonist 8 9 EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 9 23/06/ :43

6 at times a double and which assigns to his core being the sometimes dire, sometimes vindictive retort of a deceased brother. In the end, the terrified gentleman, the kitchen assistant, and the cook, minor characters, come to tease out via comic interludes a specifically German Stimmung. But aside from that, one has to admit that the narrative, alternating through the editing between scenes interior (taking place in the present time and in flashback) and exterior (taking place across scale-models and landscapes), places somewhat middling value on the literary and cinematographic qualities of the themes. And on this level, I agree with Lotte Eisner in saying that there s no unreality in the film : the compensatory dream of the kitchen assistant and the frightened man s nightmare announce neither Jannings dream in Der letzte Mann [The Last Man, aka The Last Laugh, 1924], nor the dreams of Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens. [Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror., 1922]. The two suicides at couples of the drama the lord of the manor and his wife; the Baron Safferstätt and his wife both swap roles of victim and sacrificateur. Friendship followed by accusation unites these four people, two by two, in a hierarchy of combinations that stems from mundane conversations simple quarrel, mediumistic discourse and the death of two within the group drives them apart, as though this event seems to rise from the deep affectivity of a fragile world where passions represent a tranquil rift in the continuum. Count Johann Oetsch, played by Lotar Mehnert, represents the Intruder: condensing hostility and pervasive malaise, he alternately resorts to his own personality and to a disguise in order to uncover the murderer of his brother, the first husband of the lady of the house. One would have to evoke here the procedures of the crime novel, of the drama, and of romantic opera to understand the proportion of the obscure at play in this character a veritable hero, at times himself, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 11 23/06/ :43

7 the end of the film, as though rubbed out by way of ellipsis and intertitle, have nothing of the grand Wertherian leap into nothingness: a sort of dramatic motivation that seems intended to artificially conform itself; coming after the crux of the tragedy, an appeasement to the preestablished idea I have of this denouement: the suicides evoke through their unembellished presentation the sociological assessment of a Durkheim, rather than the emotion of Murnau s typical register. One must search elsewhere for this feeling: in the mysterious atmosphere that reigns between the images; in the staking out of a style rich in ephemeral beauty. Here, imposed like revelation, is that which holds only a fleeting correspondence: Schloß Vogelöd matters to me more by what is hidden than by what is said outright. For example, the tales of the lady of the manor are perceived as belonging to the past not by any skilful transition or technical artifice, but by the very aspect that distinguishes them from and that conflicts with the present time of the film: a brilliant light contrasting and sculpting what memory retains with the delicacy and intensity of lived experience, a direction of the actors that sometimes insists upon the gaiety of a vanished happiness. I m thinking too of a close-up of Count Johann Oetsch in which the actor s face, expressing a profound concentration, a pained reflection, is illuminated by a light that seems to emit from the interior of the being and which seizes in the boundary of a heavily contrasted profile the pores of the skin and the incertitudes of the soul. Simply put, the ambient grey of the salons makes the request, through Fritz Arno Wagner s hesitant light, that we become acquainted with the feelings of the characters. This kind of light-ray is an emotion that can ward off the dark smoke of a cigar rising from the depths of an armchair. The black frock-coats and the courtesies of the invitees, the white dresses and the exaggeration of the emotions, create an atmosphere of malaise and anxiety in which the filmmaker who no longer belongs takes refuge in his fear. It s nice to think that within this colourful silence that unsettles us so, the game of unbridled imaginings has an entirely different object the passing of ancient civilisations, and oxygen newly emerging. In the symbolic point of view that gives birth to forms, Murnau portrays objects, feelings, makes use of light, establishes correspondences: and the world being described is his interior world. The set design, executed by Hermann Warm, is the architectural development of interior landscapes. As such, in the scene of confession, passed through the filter of memory, the set design is seen from the highest point, everything in vertical lines, tight, stylised strips inside the reflections and on the walls, a gallery of mirrors inhabited by emptiness, in which the stationary actors along the walls act out the EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 13 23/06/ :43

8 ENDNOTES [1] Cinema by C. A. Lejeune, London 1931, p [2] cf. F. W. Murnau by Lotte H. Eisner, Paris 1964, p. 29. [3] The cinema historian will note that in the same year, in Sweden, Dreyer, contrary to Murnau, captured in Prästänkan [The Parson s Widow] a style and a technique of mise-en-scène, a narrative form whose core principle was not to evolve afterwards. [4] Siegfried Kracauer, the first, goes so far as to see in Schloß Vogelöd a policier film visibly influenced by the Swedish. [5] Eisner, pp. 36-9, 112, 114. situation-limite of non-acting. Metaphysical interiors... What is that voice, fine and sensible, that tells me of the interior of the Night? It is Murnau s, but actually, it is Novalis : A breath of melancholy makes shiver the fibres of my soul. I should fall in dewdrops and mingle with ashes EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 15 23/06/ :43

9 ON SCHLOSS VOGELÖD by LOTTE H. EISNER The following is excerpted from Eisner s 1973 Murnau (now out of print) an English-language revision and enlargement of the author s French-language 1964 volume F. W. Murnau. This film still exists, although, as in the case of Der Gang in die Nacht, the titles are missing. Their absence makes the film rather difficult to understand in some places, for although a later Mayer script such as Der letzte Mann had no need of titles, Schloß Vogelöd has a complicatd plot adapted from a semi-highbrow, semi-commercial novel, and much necessary explanation was consigned to the numerous titles. They were numerous indeed: the script includes no less than a hundred and sixtyfive, though judging by the spaces for titles in the surviving copy, Murnau reduced them by almost half. [EDITOR S NOTE: The preceding was not exactly the case even at the time of Eisner s writing. The restoration of the film presented in this release and carried out by the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in 2002 from an original and extant negative at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin, and a nitrate print with Portuguese intertitles from the Fundação Cinemateca Brasileira, preserved at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Koblenz, makes use of the extant intertitles gleaned from the flash titles on the original negative and re-establishes the missing intertitles by referring to both the shooting script and a preserved Decla-Bioscop title list dated 31st March, Eisner goes on to remark in a footnote at the end of the preceding passage: Eighty-six titles are indicated in the copy at the Cinémathèque Française. In a later footnote, and with regard to the long plot summary that appears in the corresponding chapter of her book, she clarifies: This summary was made by Henri Langlois and myself after I had examined the film and read the fragments of titles written in ink on the leaders. It was later compared with the rediscovered scenario and found to be correct. ] It is therefore necessary to lay some stress on what is the real content of this film, especially as Theodore Huff, in his Index to the Films of F. W. Murnau [1948], provides only vague and sometimes inaccurate glimpses. He says it is a horror film; this is an error. He says too that it EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 17 23/06/ :43

10 is rather like the one in Stroheim s The Honeymoon [1928; Ed. the last print of the film known to exist as of 2011 was destroyed in a fire in 1957]. Mayer says a faint wisp of smoke comes up out of the chairs when the guests sit down; this already creates a sort of Stimmung. But at bottom all these gentlemen are rather tedious in their costumes of the period and with their slicked-down old-fashioned hair. And for characters in a Murnau film they are all very ugly! is plainly influenced by the Swedish school, and is notable for atmosphere and impressionistic sets which projected the lonely feelings of a young couple living in a deserted castle. The conjecture about the Swedish influence is safe enough; but the error of thinking Vogelöd is a deserted castle seems to have arisen out of a too literal translation, and hence misinterpretation, of the name literally bird s desert. Only the efforts of Murnau, Carl Mayer, Hermann Warm, and Fritz Arno Wagner could have succeeded as indeed they did in creating out of this somewhat confused story an authentic, oppressive, anguish-ridden atmosphere. But the castle, far from deserted, and full of hunting trophies, The flashback scenes are quite a different matter. Here the sets are noble and varied, and the images luminous and mysterious. The handsome Count, Peter Paul Oetsch, sits in his study buried in his books, while the Baroness tries in vain to embrace him. A Rembrandtesque light shines through the velvety darkness. In the script, Mayer had written: A study. Standard lamp. Lighting effect. Murnau and his team did the rest. The most impressive image is of a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room. The light pierces downward from two tall windows into the blackness; two shadowy figures face each other, leaning against opposite walls, withdrawn into the dark. Mayer had indicated: A very long, high room. Afternoon. Almost general shot: room in antique style. Severe. Practically no furniture EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 19 23/06/ :43

11 There is a scene in this film introduced by the title The confession. In a large lofty room stand a murderer who has killed for love, and his beloved; and they both remain there motionless like statues. Such a thing has rarely been seen in the whole existence of the cinema... Haas refers again to the infinite restraint exercised in Schloß Vogelöd: Murnau s artistic tendency is to moderate strong gestures into others more noble and subtle. This makes him more successful than any other director in conveying intimate dialogue, the completely silent exchanges of the heart, as in the scene of the confession, where the emotion is expressed through the extraordinary tension of the bodies. Only the walls! And: The Baroness. Crouched against a wall. Frozen with horror. Struggling not to cry out. She remains thus. Panting horribly. And the Baron. A long way away. Crouched against the other wall. His anguished face turned upwards. Thus he remains like her, not moving. This is the scene that follows the Baron s confession to the young woman that he has murdered her husband. It is one of the most beautiful pictures Murnau ever created. In his review in Film Kurier, 8th April 1921, Willy Haas says: EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 21 23/06/ :43

12 Perhaps Murnau wanted some grey tones in his drama to match the rain outside. At least more intimate scenes, like that in the boudoir between the Baroness and her hostess though the characters act in a way that is curiously passionate, even tormented have much warmer values and a much more subtle Stimmung. At all events it was certainly with deliberate intention that Murnau refrained from giving any really supernatural atmosphere to the nervous gentleman s nightmare. We are a long way here from the nightmare in Der Januskopf. Murnau is making fun of the character s timidity, and the part is played by Julius Falkenstein, a well-known comic actor of the German cinema. There are some very beautiful landscapes in the main part of the film shrubs lashed by the rain, a carriage driving through the evening like a shadow, reminding one of the coach in Nosferatu. Mayer was keen on showing the castle, either lit up or in darkness, with the rain falling on it. For this Murnau used a model, and inserted several shots of it among interior scenes. He and Mayer were to use a similar juxtaposition for Orgon s house in Herr Tartüff [aka Tartuffe, 1925]. Neither is there any of the fascination that emanates from the dream in Der letzte Mann, in the little scullion s wish-fulfillment dream. In these two dream sequences in Schloß Vogelöd we are face to face with the other Murnau, the Murnau of Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, the rather naïve epilogue to Der letzte Mann, or the absurd Luna Park gags in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans [1927]. As all his friends tell us, Murnau could be shy, sensitive, and melancholy. But he could also suddenly be as gay and mischievous as a schoolboy. Such is the double face of Schloß Vogelöd. The very conventional and formal visual treatment of the crowd scenes involving the guests seems to be intentional. [The same contrast can be seen in Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Grand Duke s Finances, 1924), where everything is bathed in sunshine except the scenes in the capital, which are deliberately nebulous and dull. Eisner s footnote.] EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 23 23/06/ :43

13 A NOTE ON TINTING NOTES ON VIEWING In the essay On the Way to Nosferatu in Filmblatt no. 18, July 2002, Enno Patalas writes: We do not know, unfortunately, how much influence Murnau exerted on the colouring of his films. I only remember one note, in his handwriting, in the script of Schloß Vogelöd, saying, Leave the dream scenes black-and-white. (Strangely, the relevant page has in the meantime disappeared from the script preserved in the Bibliothèque du Film.) He obviously left the rest of the colouring to the laboratory staff making the prints. In preparing this release, we enquired with the FWMS about the choice to keep the dream scenes (see p. 9/10) tinted in their restoration. FWMS state that, indeed, this page does not exist in the script, and that the tinting was restored using the Brazilian export print struck in Germany in 1921, and in which the dream scenes appear coloured as their basis for reference. Because many questions pertaining to the role of authorial intent and to aesthetic efficacy surround both the contemporary and restorational practise of tinting silent films, we leave it to the viewer to choose between watching the film with the hues inherent to the restoration, and watching the film with the colour on the display turned to off or zero. Schloß Vogelöd: Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses was shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. When viewing on widescreen systems, the display mode should be doublechecked so that the film appears with its original dimensions intact, with black bars bordering the left and right of the image (pillarboxed). The film image as intended by the director when shown correctly on a widescreen display. SPECIAL NOTE: Any motion smoothing settings (such as PureMotion / MotionFlow, etc.) should be switched OFF so the film can be viewed as intended. Please calibrate your display settings in order to experience this film optimally (many factory default settings are neither suitable nor desirable) EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 25 23/06/ :43

14 Director Scenario Based on the novel by Cinematography Production Design Construction Art Director Year of première Format Alfred Abel Frieda Richard Aud Egede Nissen H. H. v. Twardowski Adolf Klein Olga Engl Lya de Putti Ilka Grüning Lya de Putti Grete Berger Anton Edthofer Karl Ettlinger Lil Dagover Heinrich Witte F. W. Murnau Thea von Harbou Gerhart Hauptmann Axel Graatkjär Theophan Ouchakoff Hermann Warm Hermann Warm Erich Czerwonski mm 1.33:1 Lorenz Lubota Lorenz s Mother Melanie, Lorenz s Sister Hugo, Lorenz s Brother Harlan Harlan s Wife Veronika, Harlan s Daughter The Baroness Melitta, the Baroness Daughter Mrs Schwabe Wigottschinsky Starke Marie, Starke s Daughter Clerk Die Finanzen des Großherzogs [ THE GRAND DUKE S FINANCES ] Director Scenario Based on the novel by Cinematography Production Design Year of première Format Harry Liedtke Don Esteban Paqueno Ilka Grüning Hugo Block Guido Herzfeld Hermann Valentin Georg August Koch Max Schreck Hans Hermann Walter Rilla Alfred Abel Julius Falkenstein Mady Christians Robert Scholz F. W. Murnau Thea von Harbou Frank Heller Karl Freund Rochus Gliese Erich Czerwonski mm 1.33:1 The Grand Duke Ramon XII Adolphe Engers, Minister of Finance The Grand Duke s Personal Chef Joaquino, the Valet Semjon Marcowitz Mr Bekker The Dangerous Conspirator The Sinister Conspirator The Hunchbacked Conspirator The Ambitious Conspirator Philipp Collin, aka Prof. Pelotard Mr N. Isaaks The Woman Her Pursuer EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 27 23/06/ :43

15 MURNAU AT THE CROSSROADS PHANTOM AND DIE FINANZEN DES GROSSHERZOGS by JANET BERGSTROM Janet Bergstrom teaches at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. She s also the creator of the documentary Murnau s 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film. Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs were directed by F.W. Murnau during the anxious years of 1922 and 1923, respectively, when inflation was fast escalating in post-war Germany. At the same time, it was proving impossible to suppress the horrific psychical toll from the Great War and its aftermath. Though these films are about other things too, they are both organised around money. In Phantom, we see nightmarish hallucinations experienced by the impoverished poet-dreamer Lorenz Lubota (Alfred Abel) after he comes under the spell of the gold-digger Melitta (Lya de Putti) and desperately tries to satisfy her craving for wealth. [A, B] A taste for the dark side of mental life is hardly surprising coming from the director of Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens. [Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror., 1922], shot less than a year before. Moreover, the fatalistic mood of Phantom was in tune with the most influential productions of German silent cinema, regardless of the safety-net of a conventional framing story that could reverse doom in a happy ending. On the other hand, the uncomplicated humour that pervades Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is a revelation coming from Murnau. Consider our introduction to the Grand Duke (Harry Liedtke), sitting on a rocky ledge overlooking the sea on a sun-drenched day, happily tossing lots of coins to young boys in the water below nothing about him suggests that he is losing his kingdom to debt. [C] More than a comedy, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is an anti-anguish film, laughing warmly (not mockingly) in the face of the Grand Duke s looming bankruptcy and A B C EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 29 23/06/ :43

16 providing him with multiple helpers to extract him from dangers that arise. Murnau is renowned today primarily for films that he made later, beginning with Der letzte Mann [The Last Man, aka The Last Laugh, 1924], his next production after Die Finanzen des Großherzogs. For many, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans [1927], Murnau s first American film, is the greatest silent film ever made, maybe the greatest film period. Faust, eine deutsche Volkssage. [Faust: A German Folktale., 1926], Tabu: A Story of the South Seas [1931] and Nosferatu have ardent defenders as well. Each of these films has been referred to as a point of reference ever since they were released. But it is not easy to know how Murnau developed his talent for mise en scène, his struggle to overcome the strait-jacket of complicated stories and capture his audience s attention with what he thought was the most essential aspect of cinema as an art form: its visual language. Murnau came to be a director who had the power and creative imagination to create his films as a series of shots, more than scenes (or story sections). If Murnau, writing and giving interviews later in the 1920s, insisted that films could do without intertitles (Der letzte Mann had only one), it was partly because of his experiences with title-heavy films earlier in his own career. Before delving into Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs more closely, we might ask: who was Murnau in 1922? Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (who chose Murnau as his professional name) was born December 28, 1888 in Bielefeld, Germany to a family that was able to encourage his love of literature, art and theater. He studied philology at the university in Berlin, then art history, languages and literature at the University of Heidelberg. In 1911, acting in a student play, he caught the attention of famed theater director Max Reinhardt, who offered him the opportunity to study with his school in Berlin. Two years later, Murnau was acting in Reinhardt s Deutsches Theater, but he was also studying Reinhardt s methods of direction, all in the midst of one of the most exciting intellectual and creative centers imaginable. In 1914 Murnau entered the army. He became a pilot, survived eight crashes and then made an emergency landing in war-neutral Switzerland, where he entered an internment camp and was able to stage plays. Following the war, he entered Berlin s film world as a director. Starting in mid-1919, with Der Knabe in Blau [The Boy in Blue, aka The Blue Boy], Murnau directed an astonishing eleven feature films by mid-1921 when he began shooting Phantom. Seven of them are considered lost films today. Because so many films are missing and so little documentation has come to light from this period of his career, it is difficult to understand Murnau s development as a director. We can only wonder about the degree to which he had decision-making authority for the films he made before his break-through to world fame with Der letzte Mann (1924/25), following Die Finanzen des Großherzogs. In Germany, the turning point for Murnau s career was his association with producer Erich Pommer in early 1921, when Pommer hired him to direct Schloß Vogelöd, die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses [Castle Vogelöd: The Exposure of a Secret, aka The Haunted Castle], although Nosferatu, one of the films that has assured Murnau s eternal fame, was not produced by Pommer but rather by Prana Film. Nor was Der brennende Acker [The Burning Acre, aka The Burning Earth, 1922], shot after Schloß Vogelöd. Pommer s association became regular with Phantom (which shows a step up in ambition), then Die Austreibung, die Macht der zweiten Frau [The Expulsion: The Power of the Second Wife, 1923], Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 31 23/06/ :43

17 Der letzte Mann, Herr Tartüff. [1925] and Faust. The last three, made one per year from , were all planned and financed with the luxury of Ufa super-productions. At that point, Fritz Lang and Murnau were at the top of the German film industry, and had helped make German film world famous. William Fox thought that Der letzte Mann was the best film ever made, and he succeeded in bringing Murnau to Fox Films where he was able to produce Sunrise under even more ideal conditions than Ufa offered. Murnau made 4 Devils [1928] (today a lost film ) and City Girl [1930] at Fox, but interference with City Girl caused Murnau to join forces with documentary director Robert Flaherty in the South Seas, resulting in Tabu (directed by Murnau, co-scripted by Flaherty). One week before Tabu s premiere in New York, Murnau died following a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Barbara, California. He was on his way to Monterey to meet with Gouvenor Morris about the novelisation of Tabu. He was only 42 years old. Phantom was based on a novel written by the Nobel prize-winning author Gerhart Hauptmann. After the opening credits, the writer walks toward us, stops and opens a book, as if giving the film his approval. [D] But the book in his hands cannot be Phantom, because it was not published in book form until 1923, a year after the film was released. The novel was first published in installments in the popular weekly, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, from February 5 through March 1, That was just two or three months before Murnau began work on the film. On November 13, 1922, an advance premiere of Phantom was held in one of Berlin s great picture palaces, the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, and on November 20 a second special screening before public release was held D in Breslau, where Hauptmann s novel takes place, as part of the official celebration of the author s sixtieth birthday. Actress Lil Dagover, who played the faithful Marie in the framing story, eventually marrying Lorenz, recalled in her memoirs: The news that the great poet Gerhart Hauptmann had approved the filming of his novel caused a lot of excitement... Readers devoured the novel, and the Berliner Illustrirte sold like hot-cakes. The story takes place in Breslau, with the framing story in a lower Silesian town. [But] in the film everything about the place and time was unspecified, absolutely fictional. Past, present and future were mixed together... Murnau created a magical atmosphere on the screen that blended characters and the setting together. 1 This, of course, was Murnau s objective. He was then on the road to greater control of his means of expression than was yet EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 33 23/06/ :43

18 possible in Phantom. Erich Pommer produced Phantom, but he was much more than a producer. He was a visionary film executive who worked internationally almost from the beginning of his career in He founded the Decla film company, then merged with Bioscop (as Decla-Bioscop), and during the period Phantom was being made, Pommer negotiated a merger with the giant film studio-conglomerate known as Ufa, where he became one of the most important executives and decision-makers. Uco-Film was a division of Decla-Bioscop created to film adaptations of novels that had been serialised in the Berliner Illustrirte. Schloß Vogelöd, the first of Murnau s films produced by Pommer, was an Uco-Film, Phantom was the second. Decla had produced the landmark Expressionist film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari., 1920] and Pommer had worked with top writer Thea von Harbou (who scripted Phantom) and her future husband Fritz Lang beginning with some of Lang s earliest films. He had a gift for recognising talent, and for giving his best directors what they needed to form a creative team, with the most talented cameramen, art directors and writers available. Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs were both scripted by Thea von Harbou, who at the time was probably Germany s top screenwriter. Von Harbou wrote the scripts for four of Murnau s films: Der brennende Acker (co-scripted with Willy Haas and Arthur Rosen), Phantom, Die Austreibung and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs. Between von Harbou s strengths in story structure and the dictates to conform to the Uco-Film adaptations of literary works, Murnau must have had a hard time preventing plot mechanisms from gaining the upper hand over what most interested him. Lang and von Harbou were a much better match in that regard. It might be imagined as two types of struggle: that among characters within the story, and the director s struggle to try to strip down the story as much as possible so as to convey a cinematic experience. In 1922 even Pommer had to rein in his ambitions. Runaway inflation was overtaking the German economy. Murnau began Phantom in May. In July he had an operation to remove a kidney stone and then went to a sanitarium near Baden-Baden to recover. Murnau sent a telegram to Pommer about resuming work: Arrive September 1 afternoon / first day of shooting September 4 / send Bing and Warm here for preparations / Regards Murnau. Hermann Bing was Murnau s production assistant, Hermann Warm was his production designer and architect. Pommer sent a cordial but unyielding response on August 21. He refused to send Bing and Warm a completely unnecessary waste of money. Let me take this opportunity to point out that circumstances have changed in the last few months. In the future, production will have to be very efficient and economical. Just as unnecessary travel needs to be avoided, we need to economise on everything in the future, on time to save actors salaries, and above all on material (these days, a metre of negative already costs more than 30 Marks). For better or worse, we all have to adapt to complete Phantom, and make adjustments on the next films too, because the funds necessary for film production in Germany cannot be secured at this time even with support from the major banks. In the future, calculations and planning will have to be done entirely EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 35 23/06/ :43

19 differently than before. This is my opinion not only regarding your work, but in general, and you will understand completely that this is true when I describe the current situation to you when you come back.2 Phantom has a framing story typical of German silent cinema. The prologue and epilogue take place in a spacious home outside the city. [E] The main story takes place in a city that becomes subjectivised from Lorenz s point of view after Veronika Harlan s carriage runs into him and he falls to the ground, unconscious. When he revives, obsession takes hold of him. As Lorenz awakes, Veronika stares into his eyes like a hypnotist. [F, G] Under this spell, he arises slowly, hesitates and then runs after her carriage. Finally he reaches her home, but he is not allowed to see her. Thereafter, his mind is dominated by this fantastic apparition, and by her double, Melitta, a gold-digger who drives him to ruin. True to Freudian logic, Lubota recreates this shattering experience again and again in mental images: he runs after the carriage as fast as he can, but he can never reach it. own... and the horrifying sensation when the man encounters his own double. Freud called this the uncanny. Phantom is organised around this structural theme, especially the destructiveness of the double, how it is internalised and breaks down an independent sense of self and stability. In Phantom, the double is a woman. Or else it is two women who become merged in Lorenz s mind: Veronika, the woman with the carriage, daughter of a wealthy family far beyond Lorenz s class position, and the gold-digger Melitta, who traps Lorenz with her remarkable resemblance to the idealised Veronika (they are played by the same actress, Lya de Putti). Murnau shows us this doubling in Lorenz s mind the first time he sees Melitta, through a series of inter-dissolving images, as if his mind might be dissolving at the same time. [H, I, J, K] H I E F G The double (Doppelgänger) is a persistent element in German silent cinema, following the tradition of German Romantic Literature: a man who loses his shadow, a man whose mirror image takes on a life of its J K EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 37 23/06/ :43

20 Lorenz hallucinates his fatal encounter three times each time Murnau s visualisation is different. Each marks a stage in Lorenz s deterioration, his increasing helplessness and dependence on the destructive double of his idealised woman. Soon after the incident in the street, Lorenz returns home, and in his mother s living room he experiences a mental flash-back to the scene as it remains in his mind. This first repetition is closest to the way that waking dreams of dread are externalised in the Expressionist style of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. [L] The city is a painted backdrop, not even faintly realistic flickering lights, exaggerated perspective. But nothing in Caligari is as cinematic as the carriage that appears out of a black void heading straight toward us. [M] L M The third and last replay of the scene with the carriage is the most brutal. This time, the carriage is a ghostly superimposition that comes upon Lorenz from behind and runs right over him. Nonetheless, he staggers to his feet and runs after it in vain. [N] Lorenz s experience unleashes other mental flashes. The most memorable and nightmarish is the image of his final mental collapse, when ghostly buildings tilt over in the street, about to crush him as he runs. [O] Murnau saw film as a visual art form. He said this in interviews as his fame grew, and he wrote articles to this effect. In Phantom, as in Nosferatu, each time he used a special effect, whether a model is involved or in-camera effects such as split-screen or superimpositions, he imagines a different way to represent the mental state of his character, or sometimes of the outside world. Murnau attempted to re-orient the melodrama of the story around these strong images, blending the fantastic (or, obviously subjective visions) with a close approximation of parts of the city of Breslau, recreated in the studio by Hermann Warm after the two men had studied Breslau together looking for possible locations. The passive man, the aggressive woman are staples of German cinema of the twenties and early thirties. Murnau, in Phantom, as he had done just before for Nosferatu, created mental images identified with specific characters such as Lorenz but they spill over into the outside world. The city becomes unstable, nature looks unnatural, and day-dream is hard to separate from hallucination or reality. The city N O EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 39 23/06/ :43

21 collapsing on Lorenz is one of the strongest moments in silent cinema. Only the framing story allows him to escape this world of images that has reduced him to a double no one recognises except for Marie and her father, steadfast characters who lack the wild beauty and intensity of Lorenz s mental visions. Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is another kind of movie. Neither Murnau nor von Harbou or, presumably, the source novel Storhertigens finanser [The Grand Duke s Finances, 1915] by Frank Heller (pseudonym for Martin Gunnar Serner) was aiming for the intensity of visualising repressed mental states so important to Phantom. (We do see several mental images, however, such as the Grand Duke s vision of his people being poisoned by sulfur fumes, that causes him to turn down an offer for millions to sell part of his property, money that could save his kingdom.) Although produced by Pommer on the Union-Film list, not Uco-Film, the same idea applied. Frank Heller had created a popular British gentleman thief, or detective, and a series of novels featuring that charming character, played in this film with uncharacteristically broad smiles and lack of anguish by Alfred Abel. Not only was Abel the tortured protagonist of Phantom, he was one of the best-known theatre and film actors of his day; his filmography begins in 1913 and counts nearly 140 films. He was not known for comic roles, so he must have enjoyed this opportunity. Among many others, he had already played leading roles in Murnau s Der brennende Acker, Lang s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler., 1922] (Count Told), Lubitsch s Die Flamme [The Flame, 1923] and would play the master in Metropolis [Fritz Lang, 1927]. Abel s character is called Philipp Collin, alias Professor Pelotard, blending the taste for British detective fiction serials (the Stuart Webb series, for instance) with perhaps a nod to Feuillade s Fantômas [ ] or Judex [ ]. Immediately, but even more so on repeated viewings, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is a study in pictorial composition (helped by architect / art directors Rochus Gliese and Erich Czerwonski) and strong cinematography (Karl Freund, Franz Planer). Unlike the static quality of Murnau s preceding films, there are several elegant camera movements in this one. In one of the most inventive scenes in the film, after we see Collin standing in front of an outdoor sports arena that turns out to be wallpaper, an ambitious back-tracking camera movement reveals a longer and longer diagonal row of dogs, each one held by a servant before its gate, as Philipp Collin is about to start the dog race inside his mansion. [P, Q] Once loosed, the dogs run down the stairs, race to doors that are held open for them by servants and then closed after them, through more doors with the same service, and eventually turning back to race in the other direction, complete with a Dachshund that is slower than the rest and needs special door service. Anyone who objected that the drunken pig scene in Sunrise was imposed on Murnau has not seen this film. A notable aspect of the production was the far-away locations that Murnau was allowed to travel to, which were advertised in the papers as advance publicity. From June to August, 1923 he was shooting in Yugoslavia Ragusa, Spalato, Catarro, Zara, Arbe Island and Adria were named. Interiors were shot in several Ufa studio locations. Murnau had grown up loving the sea and sailing; later, when he went to Tahiti to make Tabu, he bought a large sailboat from George O Brien and sailed there with his own crew and David Flaherty. Murnau shows us the sea very often in his German films. In this one, we can simply appreciate EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 41 23/06/ :43

22 the vantage points and the time of day (the light) chosen for looking at the sea, the boats docked, ships setting sail, the Russian ship full of royal sailors straight out of Potemkin [i.e., Bronyenosyets Potyemkin / The Battleship Potyemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 ed.] but well-fed and well-dressed. [R, S] Lotte Eisner, in her book on Murnau, recounted that contemporary reviews mentioned with appreciation that entire scenes were given over to the landscape or the sea and that they were missing from the print she had available to her. 3 That print was much shorter that the restored print we now have access to, but even our best print still lacks a good deal of footage, although the numbers can be misleading. (It does not feel to me that there can be a lot missing from this print.) However, I believe that there are shots not scenes that do exactly what Eisner reported particularly if the running speed is slowed down a bit and that are similar (if much shorter) than the beautiful scene in Potemkin outside the ships in the quiet waters of the early morning, when everyone is asleep. The cinematography is quite stunning, which must have more to do with the time Murnau was given for this film than the talent of his cinematographers. It is striking, looking through Murnau s early filmography, to see the uniformly high quality cinematographers he had beginning with his first film in 1919 Carl Hoffmann or Karl Freund or Fritz Arno Wagner repeatedly. Die Finanzen des Großherzogs repays repeated viewing for its considerable merits (and because it was impossible to see for so very long) and also to try to imagine it as a bridge to Murnau s next film, Der letzte Mann. Perhaps Murnau enjoyed this crazy-quilt of a story, which is definitely in no time and no place but explicitly described in the opening title cards as fantasy in every way except for the water, the harbor, the ships, their rigging, the light and the wind outdoors, a steam engine train leaving a station, closing one of the later chapters...very tactile images. The plot is full of people pretending to be someone they are not, or trying to take over something that is not theirs such as the Grand Duke s supposedly worthless kingdom. Money keeps resurfacing, again and again. One crooked character wants to buy the cove to mine its sulfur and is willing to pay any price. Another is trying to extort millions by blackmail through compromising letters. A Russian Princess is willing to pay off all the Grand Duke s debts and marry him (sight unseen) because he has performed an act of charity that has touched her. Harry Liedtke, as the Grand Duke, is unfazed throughout all this, suave, unruffled, a man who enjoys life and the outdoors even when his head is in a noose. Sure enough, someone comes to save him. In P R Q S EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 43 23/06/ :43

23 fact, lots of people come to save him! Alfred Abel, as Philipp Collin, is always ahead of everyone else, and brings people together with a broad smile who do not know the secret identity of the other. Thea von Harbou s script at times, as so often with her scripts for Lang, uses a question/ answer form: the title asks a question and the following image gives the answer. For instance, when the Grand Duke s loyal servant is agonising over what they will do to pay their creditors, a title appears: I see no salvation for Abacco, unless it falls from the sky! In the next shot, an airplane appears. [T] The pilot is carrying an important letter for the Grand Duke, the boys come running and cluster around, as they had in the water earlier, each one eager to be the one who catches the letter. Finally, a dog runs up in their midst, grabs it and brings it straight to the Grand Duke! Finally, for those on the watch for Max Schreck (who is heavily disguised in his role as Count Orlok in Nosferatu), he can be seen very clearly in Die Finanzen des Großherzogs. [U] Playing a wild brigand, Max Schreck seems to be having even more fun during his moments in the limelight than all the more famous actors are having throughout this zany yet very controlled, accomplished film. Bravo! T U ABOVE: Press photo of Alfred Abel, 1920s EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 45 23/06/ :43

24 46 47 EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

25 NOTES ON VIEWING Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs were both shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. When viewing on widescreen systems, the display mode should be doublechecked so that the film appears with its original dimensions intact, with black bars bordering the left and right of the image (pillarboxed). The film image as intended by the director when shown correctly on a widescreen display. SPECIAL NOTE: Any motion smoothing settings (such as PureMotion / MotionFlow, etc.) should be switched OFF so the film can be viewed as intended. Please calibrate your display settings in order to experience this film optimally (many factory default settings are neither suitable nor desirable). ABOVE: Press photo of Lil Dagover, c EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 49 23/06/ :43

26 Director Producer Screenplay Camera Camera Assistant Production Design Production Company Original Music (German version) Year of première Format Tartuffe Orgon Elmire Dorine The Grandson The Servant Girl The Old Man F. W. Murnau Erich Pommer Carl Mayer (after the play Tartuffe by Molière) Karl Freund Robert Baberske Robert Herlth & Walter Röhrig Ufa, Berlin. Production no. 617 Giuseppe Becce mm 1.33:1 Emil Jannings Werner Krauss Lil Dagover Lucie Höflich André Mattoni Rosa Valetti Hermann Picha LEFT AND BELOW: Production stills from Tartuffe EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 51 23/06/ :43

27 THE VANITY OF EARTHLY THINGS STYLE AS THE SERVANT OF MEANING IN F. W. MURNAU S TARTUFFE by R. DIXON SMITH R. Dixon Smith is the author of Ronald Colman, Gentleman of the Cinema: A Biography and Filmography (1991). He has written numerous essays and documentaries about silent cinema. F riedrich Wilhelm Murnau, master of light and shadow, composition, camera movement, and silken chiaroscuro his very name synonymous with film poetry. His sensuous pictorialism is among the most strongly personal, unique, and original the cinema has ever given us, in any country, in any period. In a medium in which only a small handful of directors has influenced the cinematography and lighting of motion pictures, the visual style the visual signature of a Murnau picture is demonstrably attributable to the director, no matter how gifted his scriptwriters, set designers, cameramen, or lighting technicians were. Lighting and camera movement are essentially the same in each of Murnau s pictures, despite the fact that they were occasionally shot by different cameramen. The sense of visuals remains a constant, no matter who operated the camera or lit the sets. The collaborative contributions of scriptwriters like Carl Mayer, set designers like Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, and cameramen like Karl Freund must not be underestimated, but what we see in a Murnau film we see through the imagination and the eyes of F. W. Murnau. Art authentic art is simple, he once said. But simplicity demands the maximum of artistry. The camera is the director s pencil. It should have the greatest possible mobility in order to record the most fleeting harmony of atmosphere. [1] The images Murnau created are overwhelming because they are poignant, because they have meaning; they are what they are because they are an integral part of the overall conception, telling in themselves some essential incident of the story. For most directors, a shot is appropriate because it is beautiful; for film poets, a shot is beautiful solely because it is appropriate. The substance of the cinema created by Murnau was images that have meaning, and it is these visual and intellectual subtleties that make watching his films a totally different and richer experience than watching the work of most EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 53 23/06/ :43

28 works of the silent era, a tragi-comedy rooted in both the Expressionist and Kammerspiel traditions. The poetic horror fantasy, Faust, with its hooded demons and satanic forces of evil, became the ultimate achievement of German Expressionism and chiaroscuro lighting, as well as the ultimate Ufa superproduction of The sombre, brooding romanticism of Sunrise, made in Hollywood in 1927, showed what was possible near the end of the silent period when German Expressionism was wedded to Hollywood s technology and millions. Tabu, shot in Tahiti and Bora-Bora and released in 1931 after Murnau s death, is a visual poem of star-crossed lovers stalked by fate. LEFT: F. W. Murnau. other directors. As German film historian Lotte Eisner put it, Murnau made photography into an art that conceals art, where every detail was so technically perfect that you didn t even notice it. Murnau was trained as an art historian, and as a film director he transformed memories of beloved paintings into uniquely personal, cinematic visions. His style from the very beginning was influenced not only by Expressionism but also by the Kammerspiel tradition the chamber play with its emphasis on intimate, psychological content, minimum of characters, sparse décor, and atmospheric lighting. Murnau s artistry has always been difficult to categorize, chiefly, perhaps, because he worked in many genres. The cold, grey shadows of the supernatural hover over the pestilential vampire classic, Nosferatu (1922). Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) is one of the great lyrical Where does Tartuffe, adapted from a standard work of French classicism, fit among these? An anomaly, an exception? As film critic Alexander Jacoby recently observed, Molière s polished cynicism seems a world away from Murnau s romanticism, and the film is at first sight atypical a fact which may explain its unjust neglect. [2] Tartuffe is presented as a film within a film. Carl Mayer s screenplay emphasizes and stigmatizes hypocrisy, as had Molière s 1664 play, in which the wealthy Orgon is duped by Tartuffe, a hypocritically pious imposter posing as a religious zealot. Mayer, however, also devised a framing device within which to showcase Molière s comedy. The style of this prologue and epilogue, he suggested, should be zeitlos (timeless, of no precise period). This framing action takes the form of a modern story in which a greedy housekeeper (Rosa Valetti), another Tartuffe-like hypocrite, conspires to swindle her employer (Hermann Picha) out of his wealth by convincing him to leave everything to her instead of his grandson (André Mattoni). The young man disguises himself as a touring-cinema projectionist and shows his grandfather a film of Molière s play a story of saints and sinners in EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 55 23/06/ :43

29 LEFT: Murnau during WWI. wish to pay the film greater attention than it generally has been accorded? Its cast and crew bear scrutiny. Erich Pommer produced Robert Wiene s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Fritz Lang s Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921), Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922), and Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungen, 1924), Murnau s The Last Laugh, and Carl Th. Dreyer s Michael (1924). Scenarist Carl Mayer co-scripted The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and wrote Murnau s Schloss Vogelöd (The Haunted Castle, 1921), The Last Laugh, and two of Murnau s Hollywood productions, Sunrise and Four Devils. Set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig designed Fritz Lang s Destiny and G. W. Pabst s Der Schatz (The Treasure, 1923), as well as Murnau s The Last Laugh. Röhrig was one of the co-designers of the smash hit, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Cinematographer Karl Freund, who shot Fritz Lang s Metropolis (1927), filmed most of Murnau s German films, including Der Januskopf (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1920), Der brennende Acker (The Burning an attempt to make the old man realise how he has been manipulated and very nearly poisoned by his humbug housekeeper. The prologue ends and Tartuffe commences. German reviews that greeted the film s release in 1926 dismissed the framing story as clumsy something unnecessarily tacked on despite the fact that its unmasking of a hypocrite neatly mirrors the Molière play. Many years later, even perceptive German film historian Lotte Eisner called it faintly ridiculous and utterly pointless. Tartuffe has lived for many decades in the shadows cast by its more famous siblings, Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, and Sunrise. Despite the fact that it has been acclaimed in recent years as a major work that rivals the stature of Nosferatu, it has always seemed a lesser work in comparison with its director s masterpieces. Shouldn t the very fact that Tartuffe was both preceded and followed by unquestioned masterworks suggest that we might EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 57 23/06/ :43

30 Earth, 1922), and The Last Laugh. Orgon was portrayed by Werner Krauss, another of Germany s best-loved character actors, who had starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The beautiful Elmire was played by Lil Dagover, the female lead in Fritz Lang s Die Spinnen (The Spiders, ) and Destiny, as well as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Emil Jannings was one of the preeminent German film and theatre actors of his generation. He starred in Murnau s The Last Laugh and soon thereafter played Mephisto in Murnau s Faust. He is best remembered today for the role of Professor Rath in Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930). Jannings, who specialised in grotesques, had been interested in Tartuffe for some time. One of the main reasons that Ufa producer Erich Pommer was determined to make the film was because Ufa, Germany s greatest studio, had Jannings under contract, and Jannings meant massive box-office appeal. His performance is towering. Throughout the film Jannings snorts and lumbers about a thoroughly alarming-looking fellow dressed in clerical black and clutching a tiny Bible as he paces back and forth, his face buried in the book. So thoroughly does Orgon fall under Tartuffe s sway that when Orgon greets his wife, Elmire, after a long journey, he refuses to kiss her, claiming, To kiss is a sin so teaches my friend Tartuffe. This saintly monster claims that he does not approve of luxuries or extravagance. Actually, of course, he lives for them and drunkenness and sexual debauchery as well. When he covets Orgon s costly ring, calling it sinful frivolity, Orgon gives it to him. Who sins in secret, does not sin! is Tartuffe s proud boast. Jannings only film roles that equal the sheer creepiness of his Tartuffe are his portrayals of Mephisto in Murnau s Faust; Czar Paul I in Ernst Lubitsch s The Patriot (1928); and Adam, the village judge, in Gustav Ucicky s adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist s play, Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug, 1937). He is said to have compared Tartuffe with another demonic figure, Rasputin, and invested the role with enough stealth, vulgarity, and leering menace to rival Max Schreck s vampire in Nosferatu. Following the worldwide sensation caused by The Last Laugh, a Kammerspielfilm with Expressionist overtones, Murnau began pre-production work on Faust. He set this work aside when producer Erich Pommer asked him to collaborate with Carl Mayer and direct Emil Jannings in Tartüff, planned from the start as an Ufa superproduction. Their adaptation of Molière s classic comedy would be another Kammerspielfilm with decidedly Expressionist overtones, marked as always by great fluidity of camera movement the entfesselte Kamera (unchained camera) remarkable chiaroscuro, and featuring another bravura performance by Emil Jannings. The film went into production in February The framing action was shot quickly, between 20 and 25 February, and the picture was completed EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 59 23/06/ :43

31 on 25 April. It was submitted to the censors as Herr Tartüff but never released under that title. The film received its world premiere in another country, under a different title. It opened at Vienna s Flieger-Kino on 20 November 1925, as Der Scheinheilige (The Hypocrite). Its Berlin premiere, as Tartüff, was on 25 January 1926, at the opening of the sumptuous Gloria-Palast. It was a major box-office hit, especially in America. What, then, makes Tartuffe worthy of closer study? The framing device, for one thing, the very addition to the story that led critics to dismiss the film in the first place; and the style in which the play itself was filmed. The framing story and the play were shot in completely different styles. Tartuffe, photographically, was quite interesting, remarked cinematographer Karl Freund in a 1929 interview. The beginning and the end I took in the modern style, allowing the artists no make-up, and using angles ; while the middle section is soft-focus, gauzed and artificial. [3] In 1947 Freund observed that Carl Mayer demanded a cruelly realistic and un-made-up style for the modern sequences, and an unreal, diffuse, Watteau-esque style for the Tartuffe sequences. [4] Critics have accused the framing story of moralizing. Of course it does. It is a contemporary morality tale, which underscores the hypocrisy and blind credulity inherent in Molière s original a play of all times and all realms. The German approach to this French comedy was indeed heavier in tone than Molière s satire on hypocrisy in French society had been. As Murnau scholar Luciano Berriatúa admits, Murnau s Tartuffe is not very French. [5] One might ask whether it needs to be. After all, a French film noir differs in tone from the American originals it openly emulates. Karl Freund once revealed. Murnau used false perspectives to create an appearance of great size in the city sequences of Sunrise, so that the set seemed to be much larger than it actually was, but he d been working on the technique as early as The Last Laugh and Tartuffe. When the young man is prevented by the housekeeper from even seeing his grandfather, he turns directly to the camera and cheerfully addresses the audience: You, who witnessed this scene, may rest assured that I shall not give in without a struggle! Projecting the film adaptation of Tartuffe quickly wins the day, allowing the grandson to proclaim, From this time forth, all hypocrites are called Tartuffe! or, as the film s first intertitle puts it, Great is the number of hypocrites on earth. Murnau used actors faces as landscapes, to be explored in minute detail by his restless camera. Every frown, lecherous gaze, sour grimace, and one-eyed It was in the modern sequence of Tartuffe that sets, for the first time, were lifted from the floor and ramped for the sake of the camera, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 61 23/06/ :43

32 leer reveals more about his characters than longer shots possibly could have. Just as important were the props. He never left the choice of properties to a studio manager; he gave detailed specifications in the script, recalled Lil Dagover. Not only had the sets to be executed down to the last detail under his eye and according to his plans, but he used to place each prop with his own hands, so keen was he on total creation. [6] Lotte Eisner described a perfectly executed sequence that does not appear in the American negative, from which modern prints derive: The encounter between Tartuffe and Orgon on the stairs is also striking. The camera places the two movements in opposition, and then lets them collide. The sequence starts with two parallel shots. Tartuffe spies on Orgon, who does not notice him. Then a close-up of Tartuffe s enormous face suddenly rears up before Orgon and the spectator. We see Orgon shrink back and then there is a cut to a back-view of Tartuffe moving towards Orgon, who backs gradually away. These two shots (the shot-and-reverseshot technique) constitute a remarkably powerful visual cue: the ascendancy that the hypocrite wields over the credulous Orgon becomes immediately clear, and is confirmed by the last closeup of the immense face of Tartuffe slanting across the screen and leaning over Orgon who, utterly submissive, is seen in profile, to one side. [7] through gauze, giving it a misty, delicate, ethereal look. It makes the picture decidedly more sumptuous and compelling the apogee of surfaces and tones, as Lotte Eisner put it. All of Murnau s experiments with light and camera mobility in The Last Laugh and Tartuffe reached full fruition in Faust and Sunrise. Although Tartuffe is in fact a lesser achievement than Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu, it is nevertheless a major work and is worthy of a fresh assessment. That appraisal is long overdue. ENDNOTES [1] Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p [2] [3] Eisner, The Haunted Screen, pp [4] Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p [5] Tartuffe: The Lost Film, video documentary, 2004, Luciano Berriatúa. [6] Eisner, Murnau, pp [7] Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p In a Murnau picture, there is always something to intrigue, excite, and bewitch the eye. The Germans call it Stimmung, which means mood or atmosphere. In all their silken glossiness and startling chiaroscuro, the films of Murnau are a reminder of that visual richness that has all but disappeared from modern cinema. Much of the central portion of Tartuffe was shot EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

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34 NOTES ON VIEWING Tartuffe was shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. When viewing on widescreen systems, the display mode should be doublechecked so that the film appears with its original dimensions intact, with black bars bordering the left and right of the image (pillarboxed). The film image as intended by the director when shown correctly on a widescreen display. SPECIAL NOTE: Any motion smoothing settings (such as PureMotion / MotionFlow, etc.) should be switched OFF so the film can be viewed as intended. Please calibrate your display settings in order to experience this film optimally (many factory default settings are neither suitable nor desirable). ABOVE: Production still EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

35 [ THE LAST MAN AKA THE LAST LAUGH ] Directed by Scenario Cinematography Art Direction Assistant Director Special Effects Musical Score Producer Year of première Format The Porter The Niece The Manager The Night Watchman F. W. Murnau Carl Meyer Karl Freund Robert Herlth Walter Röhrig Edgar G. Ulmer Ernst Kunstmann Giuseppe Becce Erich Pommer mm 1.33:1 Emil Janning Maly Delschaft Hans Unterkircher Georg John ABOVE: Production still from Der Letzte Mann EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 69 23/06/ :43

36 EXPRESSIONISM AND THE KAMMERSPIEL TRADITION IN F. W. MURNAU S DER LETZTE MANN by R. DIXON SMITH F. W. Murnau, Germany s leading exponent of camera movement and Expressionism, who obliterated the boundaries between the real and the unreal, produced his finest film in Hollywood, and gave the cinema some of its most enduring silent masterworks, was born in Bielefeld, Germany, on 28 December He studied art history at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg from 1905 to 1910, leaving to become a stage actor and director in Max Reinhardt s troupe in Murnau entered the film industry in 1919, making his first pictures with such notable stars of the German stage and screen as Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, and Lya de Putti. There are two classical traditions of cinematography: montage and camera movement. Murnau favoured the entfesselte Kamera the unchained camera in which the camera is no longer a passive observer of the action but an active participant, achieved by freeing the camera from the fixed base of its tripod and, by carrying it hand-held or placing it on wheels, allowing it to follow the characters ubiquitously. The director talked in the early 20s about what he hoped to achieve once he was able to employ a camera that could move freely in space: What I mean is one that at any moment can go anywhere, at any speed. A camera that outstrips present film technique and fulfils the cinema s artistic goal. Only with this essential instrument shall we be able to realize new possibilities, including one of the most promising, the architectural film. What I refer to is the fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins moving through mobile space; the interplay of lines rising, falling, disappearing... all this adds up to a symphony made up of the harmony of bodies and the rhythm of space; the play of pure EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 71 23/06/ :43

37 For Murnau the lighting became part of the actual directing of the film. He would never have shot a scene without first seeing the lighting and adapting it to his intentions... That was what Murnau gave to the cinema: this tireless perfectionism, this uncompromising determination to attain a unique visual intensity... And all that was done was done simply because he insisted on it, and because he stimulated us into being capable of it.2 Murnau, scenarist Carl Mayer, set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, cinematographer Karl Freund, and actor Emil Jannings collaborated to produce Der letzte Mann [The Last Man, aka The Last Laugh], one of the finest artistic triumphs of the silent era, the tragi-comedy of an elderly hotel doorman whose world crumbles when he is demoted, because of advancing age, to lavatory attendant. movement, vigorous and abundant. All this we shall be able to create when the camera has at last been de-materialized. [1] Murnau s style was influenced not only by Expressionism but also by the Kammerspiel or chamber-play tradition, with its emphasis on intimate, psychological content; minimum of characters; sparse décor; and atmospheric lighting. As a result of his interest in painting, his supreme talent lay in composition and lighting, thereby making his visual style closer to the world of painting than those of most other directors. His lifelong interest in painting led him to seek out newer and better technical and aesthetic means of isolating and intensifying both image and dramatic incident by purely visual methods. As Robert Herlth, Murnau s set designer, observed: So there were endless discussions over every effect of lighting... The old man had been the general of his own back yard, proud of his gold-braided uniform and admired by his neighbours. In these sequences, in which the doorman goes off to work in his braided splendour, he is photographed from a slightly low angle, creating the impression of his being somewhat taller and, psychologically, more important than his neighbours an Expressionist exaggeration for psychological emphasis. But soon, all he has is a simple, white lavatory jacket; his family feels dishonoured, his neighbours maliciously ridicule him. In these sequences, after his fall, he is photographed from a slightly high angle, making him appear to be somewhat smaller than everyone else and, psychologically, less important than he had been, crushed by his demotion. The ridicule to which he is subjected is also rendered Expressionistically, as exaggerated, gargantuan, gaping mouths scream with laughter and seem to engulf him. Another richly subtle detail is worth mentioning here: as the pathetic creature is stripped of his uniform, the camera follows the course of a button that is ripped from his coat and EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 73 23/06/ :43

38 exaggerated collisions between the real and the unreal. He littered the production with daring camera angles, pans, tilts, tracking shots, trolley shots, and dolly shots. He had Karl Freund strap the camera to his chest and follow Jannings step by step. He even had Freund shoot while riding a bicycle. This technical bravura and the Expressionistic pyrotechnics, however, do not intrude; they are never used merely decoratively. Every unchained movement, every distortion, has its precise function, its clearly defined aim, that being a pictorial narrative that is at once completely fluid and psychologically ubiquitous. For instance, the crushing terror of the Expressionistically distorted buildings that seemingly topple over onto the old man on the street serve to create the desired feeling of complete claustrophobia and emotional disintegration. Likewise, when the old man gets drunk, the camera does it for him and us drawing the audience into the sense of giddiness produced by too much wine. And after he becomes falls to the floor, subtly suggesting that, for the old man, the stripping is the equivalent of a military degradation. This triumph of both the Expressionist and Kammerspiel traditions, and one of the great lyrical and poetic works of the silent cinema, bases its reputation on the dazzlingly fluid cinematography of Karl Freund; the legendary performance of Emil Jannings; and the innovative, controlled direction of Murnau, all of which relentlessly explore the intensity of the psychological disintegration of this last of men. And although the film is essentially a Kammerspielfilm, it is, however, the Expressionist devices that make Der letzte Mann a highly imaginative masterpiece. So what Murnau did was to emphasise dramatic details through suggestive, atmospheric lighting and Expressionistically distorted, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 75 23/06/ :43

39 The film should end, of course, with the old man s pathetic death, but Ufa apparently requested that the ending be a happy one. After all, it was an Ufa studio executive who remarked to the director, Who s interested in films about old men, anyway? So Murnau gave them what they wanted: a tasteless, improbable, absurd, happy ending that consciously spoofs those happy endings without which few Hollywood productions were at that time made, giving the doorman the last laugh. LEFT: Karl Freund s mobile camera. intoxicated, he has a dream, a Wunschtraum or wish-fulfillment dream a pure Expressionist fantasy; in it, the doors that the old man once struggled to open are gigantic, the trunks that he used to stagger under the weight of are gargantuan; several doormen cannot even lift them, but he lifts them with one hand, and he s applauded for having done so all rendered through Expressionist distortion. The merry-go-round of the revolving doors in perpetual motion becomes, metaphorically, the chaotic whirlpool of life itself, a life that has become too fast and too heavy for an elderly man. Murnau once said that Screen art ought, through its unique properties, to tell a complete story by means of images alone; the ideal film does not need titles, and it is worth noting that the entire story of Der letzte Mann is told in purely visual terms, without recourse to intertitles. Der letzte Mann was premiered on 23 December 1924 at Berlin s opulent Ufa-Palast am Zoo and opened in America, as The Last Laugh, on 5 January Because of its critical acclaim and that of Faust (1926), in which Jannings again starred, both director and actor went to Hollywood. Murnau made Sunrise, 4 Devils, and City Girl for William Fox. Jannings went to work for Paramount and starred in The Way of All Flesh (Victor Fleming, 1927), The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928), Street of Sin (Mauritz Stiller, 1928), The Patriot (Ernst Lubitsch, 1928), and Sins of the Fathers (Ludwig Berger, 1928); he won the first Academy Award ever bestowed for Best Actor, for his performances in The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. After directing Tabu in the South Seas, Murnau died in an automobile accident in Santa Barbara on 11 March 1931, while Jannings returned to Germany to make the picture for which he is best remembered, Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). ENDNOTES [1] Quoted in Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 84. [2] Quoted in ibid., pp. 62, 67, EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

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41 DER LETZTE MANN by TONY RAYNS Tony Rayns is is a London-based filmmaker, critic and curator with special interest in the cinemas of East Asia. He is a regular contributor to The Masters of Cinema Series. The chief doorman of the Hotel Atlantic has reached the age where it is a strain for him to carry heavy trunks into the hotel. None the less, resplendent in his braided uniform, he still commands great respect from his neighbours in the dingy apartment block where he lives, and where his niece is making final preparations for her marriage to his housekeeper s nephew. On the morning of the wedding feast he arrives at the hotel to find a new doorman on duty; the manager informs him that he has been retired and must surrender his uniform, although in recognition of his years of service he has been awarded an alternative post as lavatory attendant. That evening the ex-doorman waits until he can sneak his old uniform out of the manager s office, in order to wear it to the feast and preserve his standing in the community. Suffering a terrible hangover the next morning, he hurries back to the hotel to resume his miserable duties, leaving the uniform in care at the railway station; but his housekeeper pays him a surprise visit and is shocked to discover his demotion. Gossips quickly spread the news, and when the ex-doorman arrives home in his uniform he faces the jeers of his neighbours, and rejection even from his own tearful daughter; he staggers back to the hotel to return the uniform, only to be caught in the act by the sympathetic old nightwatchman. Here (as a title explains) the story of the forlorn old man naturally ends, but in an improbable epilogue he is seen as the beneficiary of an eccentric American millionaire, who died in his arms in the men s room. He is now dining in style with his friend the ex-nightwatchman in the hotel restaurant, taking pleasure in tipping indiscriminately and sharing his carriage with a beggar off the streets. At this remove, there seems little doubt that scriptwriter Carl Mayer was the creative personality most responsible for Der letzte Mann. Both Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner in their different ways have traced the film s origins in Mayer s earlier Kammerspielfilm scripts: the ponderously EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 81 23/06/ :43

42 tragic narrative style, using nameless archetypes rather than individual characters and eschewing dialogue and other titles, the insistence on camera movement, and the overwhelming emphasis on atmosphere around the simple plot had already been evident in Scherben [Shards] (1921) and Sylvester (1923), whose director, Lupu Pick, was originally intended to film Der letzte Mann too; and the incessant intercutting between high life and low life, as well as a somewhat more elaborate version of the tenement slum set, can be found in Leopold Jessner s stage-bound Hintertreppe [Backstairs] (1921) also from a Mayer script. But for all Murnau s obvious readiness to follow Mayer s instructions, Der letzte Mann remains substantially superior to all such forerunners, and even if its qualities have very little in common with any other Murnau film before or after (including those scripted by Mayer) it isn t hard to identify the nature of the director s contribution. The conventions of the chamber film effectively summed up by the German title, which labels the demoted hotel porter the last of men inevitably throw a good deal of weight on to the imagery, through which the humble story s tragic stature must emerge, and it is here that Murnau achieves his most striking success. He has organised the imagery around twin motifs, circular and linear, expressed most forcefully in the contrast between the two hotel doors with which the Jannings figure is associated. The first, the huge revolving glass door in the hotel foyer, is calculated to suggest dispassionate fate itself, insensible of the individuality of those who pass through it it leads Jannings in to learn of his demotion; while the second, the heavy swing doors of the lavatory to which he is consigned, seems to relate to the futile to-ings and fro-ings of hapless men, whose destiny is beyond their grasp. The circular motif, echoed in such portentous details as the button which falls like a service medal from Jannings uniform as he is stripped of it, or the bowl of gruel into which he stares vacantly in the lavatory, dominates Jannings wish-fulfilment fantasy in the dream sequence, expressing his wish to shape his own life: taking its visual cue from the vortex shape of a horn blown in the yard outside by noisy revellers, the room starts to spin around Jannings (in the effect so beloved of Chabrol) and he imagines himself pre-eminent in a crowd of faceless lackeys, juggling with the very trunk that almost broke his back in the opening sequence, seen always through or in front of the revolving door. But the hopelessness of the dream is underlined by intrusions of the linear motif: the lavatory doors are superimposed over the revolving door, which is itself elongated into a tall abstracted vertical shape, robbing its motion of both meaning and effect. The linear motif is developed in the long, straight tracking shots that follow Jannings on his walks to and from the tenement, and in the oppressive, angular design of the tenement set, where it relates to a height motif: Jannings (who descends to the hotel s basement for his lavatory job) has to climb to the top floor of the block to confront the newly-weds after the news of his downfall has spread, so that when they too reject him his fall is all the greater. This kind of choreography of visual imagery and camera movement becomes characteristic of later Murnau films, albeit in very dissimilar forms. Whether or not he conceived the ironic happy ending, whose absurd fortuitousness merely underlines the misery of the real ending (everyone from Mayer to Jannings has claimed authorship here), there is no doubt that its effect springs chiefly from the conscious reversals of the motifs. The act of fate has occurred in the wrong place (the millionaire s death in the lavatory), and so when the camera circles the restaurant tables at which Jannings is dining in style, it does so only to reveal the waiters laughing behind his back, and when the nouveau-riche Jannings leaves the hotel by the grand revolving door, he faces a line of pageboys all waiting for tips. And these, rather than Mayer s grave pretensions, are the elements that have made the film so lasting and influential EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 83 23/06/ :43

43 WITH MURNAU ON THE SET by ROBERT HERLTH (as told to LOTTE H. EISNER) Robert Herlth ( ) was an Ufa Studios art director who worked on the productions of such directors as Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Joe May. We were making Der letzte Mann... Erich Pommer had told us to try to invent something mad! So far we hadn t succeeded, in spite of nights of brain racking. We were using the cloakroom set, and Murnau was making preparations for the scene in which the millionaire gets the poor cloakroom attendant (not yet cast as Jannings) to light his fat cigar. The millionaire goes out through the door, which swings to slowly; I had made it two metres high so that it would take a long time to close. The attendant was supposed to sniff the cigar smoke after the millionaire had already departed up the stairs. At this point Murnau said: No, that doesn t work. Why not? Karl Freund and I asked. Because you don t see anything it doesn t have any effect, answered Murnau emphatically. What are we to do then? We need something more intense, if only we could fly with the smoke. What?... The stairs... said Murnau. With the camera? asked Freund EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 85 23/06/ :43

44 Of course what else? We d need a fireman s ladder, I said timidly. LEFT: Murnau. Someone was sent for a ladder, the camera was fixed at the top, and the not insubstantial Freund took up his position. We removed half the set and moved the ladder slowly towards the stairs; the camera followed the smoke, rising with it up the stairs as the ladder was wound upwards. We ve got it! cried Murnau. After this there was no stopping us. Now at last we know why you built an open lift, Murnau said to me, smiling. The camera was attached to a bicycle and made to descend, focussed on the hotel vestibule; the bicycle went across the hall to the porter, and then, with a cut between shots, continued into the streets, which had been built on the lot. Sometimes the camera was fixed to Freund s stomach, sometimes it flew through the air attached to a scaffolding, or moved forward with Freund on a rubber-wheeled trolley I had built. [Lupu Pick and his cameraman, Guido Seeber, had already used a trolley for Sylvester. -Eisner] Everyone laughed at the idea of a ladder. I stuck to my guns. Freund looked at me, then tossed his head, which meant that he agreed. [See Karl Freund, in A Tribute to Carl Mayer, , Memorial Programme (Scala Theatre, London 1947) where all the inventive skill is attributed to Carl Mayer. -Eisner] We didn t realise that we were already assuming the existence of a mobile camera; for us it was the stairs that presented the difficulty. We had made the first step without knowing it. One day we had worked till ten in the evening, and Murnau, as he often did, took the whole team back to his apartment to discuss the plans for the next day s shooting. Of course we had dinner first, but as soon as the servant poured the wine for him to taste he cried, Oh no, this won t do!, and sent for another bottle. It wasn t until the fourth had been brought that he was satisfied. Yet he himself didn t touch a drop because of kidney trouble resulting from a plane crash in the First World War; it was just that he wanted his guests to be entertained as well as possible. We had our meeting in the room that the painter Walter Spiess had EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd 87 23/06/ :43

45 LEFT: Murnau. head. Jannings was supposed to feel extraordinarily strong in his dream, and to toss enormous cases about. In fact they were trick cases that were really as light as feathers: they were attached to wires that ran over pulleys, and as soon as Jannings touched them they were to fly up into the air and then fall down again into his hands. But Emil was no acrobat, and the huge cases made him nervous. He kept hanging on to the handles, and the wires kept snapping and having to be re-soldered. Hours went by like this, and a crowd of two hundred extras and a team of fifty technicians had to wait about until midnight. Everyone was moaning and groaning. Emil was ready to burst into tears. Four buses were waiting to take people home. Murnau alone sat there smiling on his little chair. There was no question, with him, of giving up. Finally, at two in the morning, it worked. decorated for him. The walls were black, and painted with enlargements of Persian miniatures. The only furniture was a huge divan with a Persian carpet over it in one corner, and in another a sort of seat to accommodate several people. Apart from that the room was completely empty. Everyone wandered about, talking. The last set for Der letzte Mann was Jannings s room. The longer we went on shooting the more completely the walls disappeared, until finally all that was left was the mirror in one corner and the ceiling. In front of the glass was Jannings, and the camera took a reverse angle-shot of him from behind, including just his head and the ceiling, on which shadows swirled and on which his dream vision was to be superimposed. We worked on this one shot the whole of one day, from morning till night. Then, on the set, we took the additional shots for the dream, to be superimposed later above Jannings s Right: Murnau EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

46 In such situations Murnau always remained completely calm. One never knew whether the difficulties got on his nerves or simply amused him. He stayed as unperturbed as if everything were perfectly normal; indeed, for him, difficulties that came up in the course of work were entirely natural. His attitude was the attitude of an artist. The only differences of opinion among us occurred while we were still at the planning stage, before the final shooting. Each day on the set was a fresh opportunity for us to surpass ourselves in inventiveness and ingenuity. At each shot we were anxious for the rest of the team s reactions; we were enthusiasts, although none of us could help feeling a twinge of jealousy when it was someone else who thought of the solution to some knotty problem. In short, we all of us felt we had invented new visual processes. And we had not unchained the camera for merely technical reasons. On the contrary, we had found a new and more exact way of isolating the image, and of intensifying dramatic incident. For instance, when we came to the scene before the porter s dream in Der letzte Mann, where Jannings hears the sound of a trumpet in the courtyard, we puzzled our brains about how to represent a sound travelling through space. The solution of the problem was as follows. The back yard set had been built on the lot at Babelsberg. We now fitted Jannings s house with a sort of hoist, with the camera in a basket on rails, so that it could slide downwards for about 20 metres, i.e. from Jannings s ear to the mouth of the trumpet: silent films demanded this kind of ingenuity. But it may be that the filmic effect was more striking than the real sound of the trumpet would be nowadays. [The outstanding example of a sequence representing crowding impressions is the drunken dream of the porter in Der letzte Mann, which certainly derived from the experiments made for the nightmare in Der Januskopf (Schrecken) [The Janus-Head (Terror)] (1920) or the fata morgana in Phantom (1922). Herlth tells us that Carl Mayer s suggestions for the dream in Der letzte Mann had to be modified. Thanks to [Robert] Baberske [assistant cameraman on many films made by Murnau and shot by Freund] we have a picture of them all at work: Jannings sitting on a sort of turntable, while Freund, with the camera fixed to his chest and counterbalanced by batteries hung on his back, flounders about like a drunken man. Murnau and his team intended the shot to have a double significance: was it the porter himself staggering, and his chair whirling about in space? or was it the room starting to spin around him? -Eisner] When we all took a curtain with Murnau after the first showing of Der letzte Mann, the filmmakers present, even men like Lang and Dupont who were his rivals, shouted bravo and applauded. There was a telegram from Hollywood addressed to Ufa, asking what camera we had used to shoot the film. It added that in the USA there was no such camera, and no town to compare with the one in our film. The Americans, used to a precise technic, didn t dream that we had discovered new methods with only the most primitive means at our disposal EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

47 THE IDEAL PICTURE NEEDS NO TITLES BY ITS VERY NATURE THE ART OF THE SCREEN SHOULD TELL A COMPLETE STORY PICTORIALLY by F. W. MURNAU It s another war picture. Of course it is! And there will be another, and another, and another. It is as natural for this country to be flooded with war pictures, and continue to be for the next few years, as it is for a soldier to want to display his Croix de Guerre. War is new to America. It is an heroic event. America entered, not because it was forced to but because it volunteered a demonstration of bravery, loyalty and martyrdom, each of these attributes a thread in the cloth called romance. Not so for Europe. Those countries are too full of it, too thoroughly immersed in the devastation of war any longer to see the romance of it. Don t you find that the man who has gone through the most horrible experiences is usually the one to say the least about them, and when asked whether he had suffered such and such a shock or witnessed such and such a catastrophe, will answer laconically: Yes or No and dismiss the subject. Such is the position of the European countries, and that is the reason war is too real for them to idealise and romanticise over it in pictures and plays. It was an event to America, not a horror. Men enlisted bravely, hysterically; many returned in the same spirit, only more exalted for the thrills and frills that they could talk about after it was over. I have become the most extreme pacifist because I have lived through the most lurid realities of its destructive force. It is my aim to do a war picture soon, but not the kind that would treat of the glorification of gore and wholesale slaughter, but rather disclosing its perniciousness and convincing people of the utter futility of physical combat. What can the effect of the picture be that for two or two and one EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

48 half hours shows two nations at war, working up to its dramatic climaxes by bombing, blasting, shooting or wiping out armies of men, the helpless puppets of quarreling nations? And then waving the victorious country s flag and playing all the brasses of the orchestra fortissimo? At every showing of the picture, in every theatre where it is featured, at its two, three or four performances a day, there are from 2,000 to 3,000 susceptible people being stimulated into a bellicose attitude. And the women, incredible as it may sound, play the most important part in battle. Just so long as they dub as a coward the man who refuses or hesitates to fight, regardless of his ideals, just so long as they are proud to cling to the arm of a uniform, and they glory in the sacrifice of their sons, sweethearts, brothers and husbands for the cause, just so long shall we continue to have war and continue to show pictures apotheosising war. As to the general future of motion pictures I can say nothing definite; one can merely conjecture. The only point on which I would assert myself is that the ordinary picture, without movietone accompaniment, without colour, without prismatic effects and without three dimensions, but with as few subtitles as possible, will continue as a permanent form of the art. Future developments may give birth to other forms, but the original form will continue with an identity of its own. I hope to make the next picture after this without any titles whatever. The Last Laugh had only one. One way of eliminating titles is by showing two antagonistic thoughts as parallels; for example, by wishing to convey the wealth of a certain person as being extreme, I would show alongside of him a greatly impoverished character. Symbolism would obviate titles. I like the reality of things, but not without fantasy; they must dovetail. Is that not so with life, with human reactions and emotions? We have our thoughts and also our deeds. James Joyce, the English novelist [sic Joyce was an Irish novelist, and citizen of the world], demonstrates this very well in his works. He first picturises the mind and then balances it with action. After all, the mind is the motive behind the deed. I believe that in the future various theatres will be known for special grades of production. Just as the different publishing houses are each identified with certain types of books, running from trash to the classics, so there will be cinema houses identified with certain grades of pictures. A time will come when the moving-picture patron will become addicted to one grade of picture and will not patronise a theatre that shows cheap comedies one week and classic productions another week. Real art is simple, but simplicity requires the greatest art. The camera is the director s sketching pencil. It should be as mobile as possible to catch every passing mood, and it is important that the mechanics of the cinema should not be interposed between the spectator and the picture. The film director must divorce himself from every tradition, theatrical or literary, to make the best possible use of his new medium. I find it preferable to work with actors and actresses who have had just enough experience to keep them from being great, but not enough to keep them from being pliable. Everything is subordinated to my picture, and just as I do not permit myself to be influenced away from what I think is the right thing to do and the right person to use, I will not do a picture that is based on a theme not to my liking or conviction EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

49 A NOTE ON THE TITLE NOTES ON VIEWING On 4 December 1924, nearly three weeks before the official première of Der letzte Mann at the Ufa Palast am Zoo in Berlin, F. W. Murnau presented the film at The Criterion Theatre in New York for a group of American studio executives. Der letzte Mann was shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. When viewing on widescreen systems, the display mode should be doublechecked so that the film appears with its original dimensions intact, with black bars bordering the left and right of the image (pillarboxed). The cut of the film previewed on that evening ran 68 minutes in length, and carried neither the title The Last Laugh, nor The Last of Men but The Last Man, a precise translation of the German original. When the picture was picked up for American release in January 1925 by Carl Laemmle of Universal, the title was changed to The Last Laugh, in order to avoid confusion with Frederick Reel, Jr. s picture of the previous year, also named The Last Man. The film image as intended by the director when shown correctly on a widescreen display. SPECIAL NOTE: Any motion smoothing settings (such as PureMotion / MotionFlow, etc.) should be switched OFF so the film can be viewed as intended. Please calibrate your display settings in order to experience this film optimally (many factory default settings are neither suitable nor desirable) EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43

50 BLU-RAY CREDITS BLU-RAY PRODUCERS Kevin Lambert Jon Robertson ORIGINAL DVD EDITION PRODUCERS Craig Keller Soraya Lemsatef Andrew Utterson Nick Wrigley ARTWORK DESIGN Kevin Lambert BLU-RAY & DVD AUTHORING IBF-HD: James Agnew Ian Froggatt Sigrid Larsen Luke Louca, Leroy Moore SUBTITLING IBF Subtitling: Natalie Botello Eamonn Lee Haydn Kirnon Deborah Miranda Ian Streule SPECIAL THANKS Ron Benson Janet Bergstrom Luciano Berriatúa Jan Bielawski Mark Bonnici (Deluxe) Ruth Brukarz-Schofield Doug Cummings Beate Dannhorn Mark Grünthal (Transit Film) Patricia Heckert (FWMS) Steve Hills Graham Jones (Deluxe) David Kalat Jeffery Masino Robert Münkel Fabio Quade (FWMS) Tony Rayns Ian Sadler R. Dixon Smith Ernst Szebedits (FWMS) Trond S. Trondsen Anke Wilkening (FWMS) Nick Wrigley (MoC Founder) EARLY MURNAU FIVE FILMS, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung. The Masters of Cinema Series # For sale in U.K. and Ireland only. This product is licensed for private home use only. Any other use including copying, reproduction, or performance in public, in whole or in part, is expressly prohibited by applicable laws. This entire edition 2016 Eureka Entertainment Ltd EKA70222_EARLY_MURNAU_BD_book_press.indd /06/ :43