In his February 19, 1925 review of The Last Laugh for Life magazine, Robert E. Greenwood generally suggests that “German directors, actors, and technicians have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for 80 percent of the progress that films have made in the past five years.” He then goes on to argue that the simplicity and expressiveness of the German cinema elevate it to a true art form. Yet this “simplicity” of German cinematic tradition is born of a variety of often conflicting innovations that have their roots in German cultural ideology, the unique personal experiences of the innovators, and even seemingly disparate influences such as Freudian psychoanalytic theory. No director better represents the synthesis of these elements than F. W. Murnau.
German Expressionist film is often defined by its external representations of the chiaroscuro of the human soul–the duality of light and dark, of spiritual, moral, and psychological conflict. This external representation of the internal states of both mind and soul is often displayed as distorted external reality, chiefly in the form of complex, abstract sets and elaborate lighting designs illustrating the fractured self. The resulting atmosphere of landschaft mit seele, or “landscape with soul,” not only represents the soulish nature of the individual, but in so doing, becomes an entity in itself. Add to these elements the necessity of a tightly controlled narrative, and for the first time, the cinematic experience moves the viewer into a psychic reality; in essence, without actually moving, the camera suggests mobility, and this “static movement” penetrates the outer layers of human form and substance, allowing the audience to approximate the inner life of the characters. Murnau uses all of these elements, but only as the soil into which he plants the roots of a new rhetoric to describe the landscape of the human soul.

murnau

Beginning with his first film in 1919, Der Knabe in Blau, Murnau made nine films before the world finally began to awaken to this new film language in 1922 with Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens, based on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” but without the luxury of copyright approval. It had been two years since American audiences were first exposed to German Expressionist cinema with Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which highlighted the essential elements of Expressionism as the camera allowed audiences to enter the turmoil of the human soul through elaborate sets and lighting. While audiences panned it, critics hailed Caligari as a breakthrough.
In Nosferatu, Murnau takes his first bold steps beyond the Expressionism of Caligari. Instead of relying on intricate and abstract studio sets to create the landscape of moral turmoil, he, with the help of his art director Albin Grau, places the characters in ordinary locations, actual towns and locales surrounded by ordinary people. Against this background of the ordinary, the unearthliness of Count Orlock (Murnau’s Count Dracula) is that much more sinister. The focus is still on the chiaroscuro of self, but the duality is a result of the ordinary juxtaposed against the extraordinary, making the extraordinary that much more real and, therefore, that much more frightening; the contrast of the ordinary landscape and people not only deepens the focus on the twisted and tortured soul of Orlock, but makes that experience even more accessible to audiences who recognize the landscapes and, thus, recognize the aberration of Orlock within that landscape.
Two years and three films later, Murnau entered into an extraordinary collaboration with writer Carl Mayer (Caligari and Sunrise), photographer Karl Freund (Metropolis and Variety), and actor Emil Jannings (Passion, Faust, Variety, and The Good Earth). The result was The Last Laugh (1924), which takes yet another bold step away from his Expressionist roots. In The Last Laugh (originally titled Der letzte Mann [The Last Man]), Murnau again turns his camera on the human soul and watches as an older man who works as a doorman for a luxurious downtown Berlin hotel is arbitrarily terminated from his position of prestige and demoted to the humiliating position of washroom attendant. When he is demoted, he is stripped of the very thing that gives him pride and a reason to live: his great doorman’s uniform overcoat. Murnau is not concerned about the darker side of the individual soul as he was in Nosferatu, but in the torment that is inflicted on an individual by a dark social soul--in the form of the hotel manager and the doorman’s friends who seem to delight in his humiliation--and how that individual survives. He accomplishes his goal by doing something new; instead of simply allowing the atmosphere to passively represent the condition of the soul, he slings us toward it, moving the camera and using it to invade that most sacred of places that heretofore had been only externally represented. With the camera now in motion, the audience has no choice but to delve, to invade, to experience the chiaroscuro of the soul.

nosferatu

Murnau believed passionately that “The camera is the director’s pencil. It should have the greatest possible mobility in order to record the most fleeting harmony of atmosphere.” However, in The Last Laugh, the camera becomes more than a recorder; it becomes a source of narration as it interacts with the characters and their surroundings — it becomes a voice. Here is where Murnau takes a step past Caligari, transcending Expressionismaltogether. Maintaining his Expressionist focus on human duality, using the natural surroundings that he manipulated so successfully in Nosferatu, and moving the camera within those surroundings, Murnau literally draws us into the soul of the character. The “realness” of the external landscape of Nosferatu becomes the realness of the soul’s landscape in The Last Laugh. With the additional use of the revolutionary long tracking shot, we experience the reality of time, place, and motion as we move between the external and the internal. Murnau would further refine these groundbreaking techniques three years later in what has been termed the greatest silent film of all time, Sunrise (1927).
Murnau’s first film under his new contract with Fox, Sunrise has often been described as a tale of love lost and regained. However, Carl Mayer’s script, based on a short story by Hermann Superman, gives Murnau the freedom to examine a more subtle aspect of human duality--the darkening of the human soul as a result of deliberate personal choices and actions, and how those choices and actions continue to affect us long after the incidents they engendered are over.
In Sunrise, Murnau continues to experiment with the camera as “pencil.” Having exploded the “static movement” of the Expressionist camera in The Last Laugh, Murnau now seems thoroughly ecstatic with this new ability, like a father seeing his child walk for the first time; the long take as well as the long tracking shot are no longer a whim but firm, effective cinematic elements. The most famous of the many long tracking shots occurs toward the beginning of the film as the camera follows a man on the way to a clandestine meeting with his lover in the fens near his home. Murnau’s cinematographers, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (possibly inspired by Karl Freund’s work the year before on Variety, where, among other things, he strapped a camera to a trapeze and controlled it electronically from a remote location), rigged an overhead track and motor system which took the camera off the dolly and suspended it above the set. With the camera now free to follow the man into the marshy landscape unencumbered, we are able to follow him deeper into his own immorality. Then, at the end of his journey, the camera makes a subtle shift; the camera moves ahead and we are suddenly seeing him through the perspective of his lover, waiting anxiously as he slowly enters from the left edge of the frame. The ironic aspect of this mobile camera is that it both contracts and expands our perspective. At the same time that we are invading the character’s soul, we are experiencing a world that exists entirely outside the frame--a world that Murnau has opened up to us as he has destroyed the restricting artifice of the frame.
Tragically, just after finishing Tabu in 1931 and signing with Paramount, Murnau was killed in a car accident on his way to Monterey from Los Angeles. Murnau’s contributions to cinematic form and style are measureless. By inventing a new rhetoric for Expressionistic interpretation, which included the juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary, the long take, and profound camera movements, including the long tracking shot, Murnau gave us a new vehicle by which we could explore the landscape of the human soul, and thus, helped create the foundation for the modern cinema.


Directing is a combination of the instinctive and the learned. Instinct comes from inspiration and talent; learning comes from history. The basic grammar of film language was laid down long ago by the first men to put stories onto film. Since then, that language has been modified, updated and expanded, but every movie that comes out today, regardless of how fresh or innovative it may be, is essentially post-modern in its use of the medium to express meaning. Film makers such as Murnau were more than simple pioneers; they explored alternative venues of story-telling in movies even as they laid out the groundwork for how stories could be told at all. In FLASHBACK, we hope to briefly feature other directors or films whose impact has stood the test of time, and whose innovations in craft have profoundly influenced the movies we see today. — Ed.