It wasn’t until nearly the end of the silent era that equipment, film stock, and such evolved to the point where the occasional movie that still “looks right” to the modern eye would come out. The Soviets, led by Eisenstein, pioneered most of the advances that make up what we now know as film editing, but still, many of the compositions were static; most directors either had to or thought they had to plunk their camera down on sticks and shoot whatever happened to be in front of the lens. That is, until a six-foot-eleven German maniac named Fredrich Wilhelm Murnau decided to put his camera in motion. With his “Unchained Camera Technique,” flashy camerawork was born.
Coming out of 1920’s Berlin’s prolific and enormously influential UFA studios, Murnau honed his craft working in the dominant Expressionist mode of the era. His first breakthrough was 1922’s Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel Dracula; Stoker’s estate sued Murnau, won, and ordered every print of the film destroyed. Were it not for some quick-thinking cineastes, who protected as many prints as they could, Nosferatu would have been lost forever (and we never would have gotten the chance to see John Malkovich play Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire, one of the great underrated classics of the last 15 years).Following the artistic—if not commercial—success of Nosferatu, Murnau began work on Der Letzte Mann (1924), a story about a hotel doorman who, upon losing his job, loses his sense of meaning in life. In many ways, Der Letzte Mann was the first truly modern movie; it was one of the only silent movies to have no title cards, but more importantly, instead of the camera sitting and observing action as though it was taking place on a stage, Murnau used the medium of cinema as his primary tool for advancing the narrative. He introduced the idea of subjective camera, where the audience sees through a character’s eyes. He put his director of photography, Karl Freund, in a wheelchair and wheeled him back and forth, in so doing inventing the tracking shot. He employed tilts, pans, and zooms, which were rare if even extant.
These stylistic innovations are the primary point of interest in the movie. The narrative, following a series of setbacks suffered by Emil Jannings’ prideful doorman, starting with his beloved, brass-buttoned uniform being taken away when he is demoted to the position of washroom attendant due to his age, is simple, and by the end incredibly bleak and depressing. In a controversial move, Der Letzte Mann’s American distributor asked Murnau to reshoot the ending to appeal to American audiences (in the process giving it the English title The Last Laugh, where the original German title translates to “the last man.” Slight difference . . .) Murnau, pissed, shot what he thought was the stupidest, cheesiest ending he could in an attempt to sabotage the distributor’s commercially-minded thinking, and, his contempt rising from the screen like steam, inserted the movie’s only title card:
“Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would
have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has
provided a quite improbable epilogue.”
The American ending sees Jannings inheriting a shitload of money from a random, convenient death of a heretofore unknown rich uncle (or something). He goes back to his hotel and his old neighborhood and everyone’s happy to see him. For some reason. In spite of the ending’s (deliberately) jarring tonal shift from the rest of the movie, American audiences liked it, and the movie was enough of a hit that 20th Century Fox brought Murnau to California to make a movie, which ended up being Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
Sunrise, with Murnau having few limits on budget and enjoying almost complete creative control, ended up being one of the last great masterpieces of the silent cinema (along with von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York), and so visually stunning that it would be almost 20 years before the industry adjusted enough to sound to catch up to Murnau’s camera mastery.
A deceptively simple narrative about a Woman From the City who seduces a Man from the country and compels him to attempt to murder the Woman he’s married to—these names are the only ones they’re given in the credits—Sunrise manages to make a fairly eloquent statement on the uneasy shift from a rural to an urban world (still a big deal in 1927, whereas 80+ years later, the shift long since complete, we regard it as a given). It is also a deeply moving love story, made such by its brilliant cast. Maybe it’s because, having grown up with talkies, I think of acting without talking as being prohibitively difficult, but I’m blown away by the performances George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, and Margaret Livingston give. The ending, thanks to the early sound-on-film technique Murnau used—score and limited sound effects only—is one of the first on record where the hero kisses the heroine as the music swells, but dissolving into the rising sun instead of to black lifts the audience up into the heavens, feeling more like an ascension than an ending.
Murnau died far too young, at 42 in a car crash. One wonders what kind of work he still had in him; though one of the great geniuses of the silent era, Murnau hated talkies, considering them impure as cinema, and we’ll never know whether he would have eventually made one, embracing sound as a new artistic challenge, or stubbornly remained thinking of cinema as a purely visual medium.
What we do know is that every time you’re watching a movie, and you see a shot with a moving camera—any type of camera movement at all—F.W. Murnau gets a couple bucks in karmic residuals. Yes, he’s that important. And, best of all, his films don’t feel to a modern audience like you’re eating vegetables, either, they feel like movies. In the silent era, pretty much only Keaton and Chaplin aged as well, and Murnau was the only one of the three who managed to be entertaining without comedy. Long may he reign.
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